by Ross Kemp
Uncle Tom never talked to me about his time as a POW, but I subsequently heard stories. If a group of prisoners failed to lay their allotted length of track on any particular day, they’d be woken up the next morning at an irregular time. Their guards would then force them to dig a grave. When it was done, they would, at random, shoot one of the POWs dead and leave his mates to fill in the hole. After the Japanese surrender, the POWs were so emaciated that the British government did not want the public to see them in that state. Uncle Tom was sent to Canada to recover, and so he didn’t see Olive until a year after he was rescued. For someone who had undergone such terrors, Uncle Tom was a lovely man. Sensitive. During his time as a POW he used to write poetry on the back of the few cardboard Red Cross boxes that got through, using blood or flower stamens as ink. But I have a childhood memory of seeing the skin on his stomach, marked and scarred from where he had been beaten with split bamboo sticks.
So it was that, as a child, this part of the world held a horrific mystery for me and I felt strange about making my first journey there. My first port of call, however, would not be Singapore but Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia. It very much feels like a city plonked in the middle of the jungle. All the time I was there I had the weird sensation that the jungle was only just being kept at bay, that given half a chance its tendrils would wrap themselves around the buildings and reclaim the land taken by the city. It was hot, cloudy and humid when I was there, with intermittent rain. And when it rained, it rained – some of the biggest thunderstorms I’d ever seen. You wouldn’t want to be at sea in some of those. I liked the Malaysian people: my impression of them was that they were tough, hard-working and intelligent. Their capital city came across as a place that was thriving.
Kuala Lumpur is home to the Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency. The MMEA had been in existence for about four years. Its main role is to combat piracy and it has been surprisingly successful against massive odds. It comprises members of the Malaysian armed forces, and they had offered us the chance to meet one of their admirals, then join them on their patrols and training exercises.
We met the admiral on a boat patrolling the straits. He explained to me that their jurisdiction covered the eastern, Malaysian, side of the straits, which comprises about 640,000 square miles of water. Not as big as the Gulf of Aden, but still a sizeable stretch and one which includes 1,400 miles of coastline. Every month, he told me, 70,000 vessels pass through it. One of the most dangerous areas for piracy, he explained, is the southern mouth of the channel, near Singapore. This was for two reasons. First, because the channel gets narrower here, ships have to slow down to avoid collisions. And second, any vessel heading into the port of Singapore has to wait its turn. It wasn’t as bad as the quarantine anchorage in Lagos, but it did mean sitting still for a while. And as I’d already learned, if a ship’s sitting still, it’s much easier to hit.
When it came to piracy in the Malacca Straits, the admiral knew his onions. ‘There are three types of activity normally,’ he told me. The first was straightforward petty theft. Opportunism. The pirates board a ship, steal whatever they can get their hands on and then disappear. The sort of thing that was happening in Lagos on a daily basis. A second, less common, pirating technique was a variation on the kidnapping theme. The pirates would commandeer the ship, then nab the captain or some of the crew and disappear with them. The ship itself would be allowed to sail free, but the hostages would be held to ransom.
The third type of piracy the admiral described to me was rather more elaborate. The pirates commandeer the ship and let the crew go. They then repaint the whole vessel, change its name and use it for their own ends. ‘It becomes,’ the admiral told me, ‘what we call a phantom ship.’ This might sound like an unwieldy operation, but there’s plenty of ocean in which to hide these vessels, and it seems to be the case that they are sometimes pirated to order. Chosen like food off a menu. Indeed, according to the admiral, some of the piracy in the Malacca Straits is highly organized. Pirates have people within the harbours who have access to all sorts of crucial information – the nature of the ships’ cargos, where they’re going and where and when they have to slow down – so they can choose the best place to intercept them.
Sometimes shipowners fail to report piracy attacks to the authorities. This is because they don’t want their insurance premiums to increase – a bit like you or I not claiming when we bump our car to avoid losing our no-claims bonus. But I had also learned from other sources that there are unscrupulous owners who are more than happy to get into bed with the pirates and take the insurance companies for a ride. In such a case, the shipowner might let the pirates know where and when to hijack his ship. He will take the insurance money, and let the pirates sell the vessel, at which point he also takes a cut of the sale. Everyone’s a winner – except the insurance companies, and of course the traumatized crew…
The admiral also told me that he believed certain ship-owners were willing to pay pirate organizations a fee to ensure their safe passage. I was reminded of the trawler owner who admitted that he paid MEND in order to sail safely round the coast of Nigeria – from what the admiral was saying, this was a fairly common practice.
The MMEA don’t just patrol the Malacca Straits by ship; they also use helicopters, looking out for suspicious vessels from the air. They have their work cut out. I’d learned in Nigeria that, as a pirate, you’re at a huge advantage if you have an easy waterside hideout. In the Niger Delta the massive complex of waterways provided just that. Here, the geography wasn’t much different. As I joined an MMEA helicopter and we rose high above the water, I immediately got a fix on the maze of mangrove swamps that line the coast. It was a marbled landscape of thin waterways and green trees. You could hide a boat in there and never be found, no matter how many helicopters were swarming above you. The admiral had explained to me that pirates in these waters always make sure they operate relatively close to the coastline. That way, if they are observed, they can quickly get into the mangroves before the authorities have the opportunity to catch up with them. The MMEA were looking into new imaging technologies to help them see pirates in the dark and when they’re under cover, but even I could tell that the most sophisticated thermal imagery would be no good in these mangrove swamps. There would be all sorts of life hidden in that foliage. Only some of it would be pirates…
As we flew over a fishing village called Crab Island, I asked the MMEA officers who were escorting us what sort of boats the pirates favoured. What, exactly, were the officers looking for?
‘Normally they use a fast boat, a small boat that is more manoeuvrable than a ship, because you need to catch up with a big ship in order to close in and do your activity.’
Down below, I noticed such a boat and asked if we could follow it. We did so. The owners were clearly just fishing, but from that height I could see how easy it would be for them to slip into the mangrove and immediately out of sight.
‘So, Ross,’ the pilot said. ‘You tell me. How are you going to prevent them from coming in and out? There’s so many places where they can hide.’
It was impossible, I agreed. Even if you had another hundred helicopters.
The channel between Malaysia and Indonesia is particularly narrow – about ten miles at its tightest point – and this makes it even tougher to police because pirates can slip from the Indonesian coast to the Malaysian side with ease. And if I thought the Gulf of Aden was busy, I was about to have my eyes opened. The Malacca Straits were non-stop. It was obvious how pirates would be attracted to this area like bees to flowers. From the helicopter I saw one of the nine radar stations positioned on small islands the length of the straits, which constantly scan the area looking for suspicious activity. But despite this surveillance, and the military presence of the MMEA in the skies above, ships are still advised to travel through these waters at high speed in order to make them that bit less susceptible to piracy. I saw one such vessel moving at above the magic figure of 12 knots. The
ship itself had a fairly low freeboard and four enormous cranes on its deck. These cranes meant that it could load and unload itself without being reliant on the infrastructure of whatever port at which it might dock. That in itself made it a very valuable piece of equipment, regardless of what sort of cargo it was carrying. If you were a pirate and came across one of these vessels, you’d see dollar signs. No wonder it was shifting.
If a ship does get pirated in these waters, the Malaysian government has the facility to react in the form of the MMEA’s own elite force, who are specially trained to retake ships. I was invited to go along with this special unit on a training exercise to see just how sharp they were, and what they were capable of. These guys were well armed, carrying Heckler & Koch MP7 submachine guns, and in their black gear and balaclavas they looked impressive.
It may only have been a training exercise, but it was enough to give me an insight into just what a dangerous job these guys have. We congregated on an operations ship in the middle of the straits. This ship had been supplied to the Malaysian government by the Japanese. The Malacca Straits are particularly important to Japan. It’s politically too sensitive for them to send their own navy into these waters, however, so instead they supply the Malaysians with equipment such as this. A kind of insurance premium to ensure that their shipping doesn’t get hit. The Japanese, after all, for all their wealth and success, are an island race, utterly reliant on shipping for their prosperity. If Japan’s shipping lines were cut off or seriously compromised, the country would soon crumble. Eighty per cent of its oil comes through these waters, and Japan lives or dies by its trade.
From the Japanese boat, along with this heavily armed task force, the camera crew and I boarded a couple of RIBs, which sped – and I mean sped – towards a target vessel, a tugboat which had been hijacked by ‘pirates’ holding the crew. As the tug came into view, I couldn’t help thinking that if this were a real-life operation, if the pirates we were apprehending were real-life pirates, I’d be feeling pretty damn vulnerable. It’s true that by the time this special forces unit is on its way, with a sniper in the helicopter hovering overhead for air support, the game would be up. Any right-thinking pirate would put his hands up and do the time. But there are always a few loose cannons, and if the pirates did decide to put up a fight and open fire on the SF unit, there’s no doubt who’d be more vulnerable – and it wouldn’t be the boys in the tug. A few GPMG rounds into the hull of that RIB and it would sink, and you’d have a pretty good chance of killing everyone on board. The sea offered the commandos no protection, and they were dangerously exposed.
We travelled at motorbike speed, covering the half-mile or so to the tug immensely quickly, our bow wave spraying into our eyes. The two RIBs took up positions on either side of the tug and the commandos boarded with a lot more speed and expertise than I did. Instantly they were swarming over the tug, shouting at each other in the international language of special forces: ‘Go go go!’ Within minutes they had swept the ship, handcuffed everyone and had them all laid out on the deck, face down with their legs crossed so that they could easily see if anyone was preparing to stand up. Uncross your legs and you’re a threat: in a real-life situation, that would mean the commandos might get to use those MP7s. One of the crew pointed out which of the captives were pirates – as far as the guys were concerned, everyone was a potential threat until proved otherwise. Finally, red smoke was sent up to indicate that the ship had been secured.
It was a slick operation. It might only have been an exercise, but it was a crucial one for the unit if they were to keep their skills honed. This particular unit had already been called upon to intervene in genuine piracy situations 15 times, and they knew that number 16 could happen at any moment.
We returned to the Japanese ship and headed back to port, sharing snakefruit – an indigenous fruit so named because of its scaly skin – with the MMEA maritime police. As we were entering the harbour, they clocked a boat coming in from Indonesia, which they pulled over. It was a fairly big boat, about half the length of a football pitch, and shaped a bit like a junk. The unit searched the vessel and it became clear that it was totally brimful of contraband. There wasn’t a single bit of unused space. All sorts of things that you or I wouldn’t think of smuggling were on board: chickens, pigs, ducks and, most valuable of all, Viagra, or a version of it – a growth industry, I’m told. (There’s a massive business in fake pharmaceuticals in this part of the world, and while a few fake Viagra tablets might just render someone a bit floppy, there’s a much more serious side to this racket. Imagine someone with HIV taking what they think are antiretroviral drugs to keep themselves alive, when in fact it’s just salt and water…) Smuggling between Indonesia and Malaysia is commonplace – the maritime police could have stopped any one of the ships making that short journey and had a good chance of finding someone up to no good. The crew seemed pretty matter-of-fact about being nicked; the contraband was confiscated and the skipper knew he could face a penalty of some description. I don’t know what that would be, but even he looked rather as if it was all in a day’s work.
13. Lightning Storm Across the Sea
The job of policing the Malacca Straits is difficult, but the actions taken by the MMEA and the Malaysian government have had an effect. Some people think that Lloyds declaring it a war zone was the catalyst that made the Malaysian authorities wake up and smell the coffee; others that they would have had to do something about it at some stage. Whatever the truth, while it is undoubtedly the case that piracy remains a problem, it has decreased in certain parts of the straits as a result of the authorities’ efforts.
When I had spoken to Muhammad Hamid, however, the brave young man who had thwarted the pirate attack on the Nepline Delima, he had given me an interesting nugget of information. The pirates who had taken his ship came from a place called Batam, a small Indonesian island (one of the 17,500 that make up that disparate country) situated just 12 miles off the coast of Singapore. This coincided with other information we had been given. The MMEA admiral had indicated that many of the pirates had moved their field of operations further to the south-east. It struck me when he said this that the MMEA’s operations had not so much stopped piracy, but forced the pirates to work somewhere else. There’s a lot of sea out there, and there’s no way you can police it all.
It made sense that Batam, positioned right at the mouth of the Malacca Straits, would be a pirate hangout. So if I wanted to get close to Indonesian pirates, that small island sounded like the place to go. On the map it looks like just a quick hop, but with 20-odd bags and all the administration that goes with taking camera equipment from one country to another, it’s not like that. Flying to Singapore from Malaysia is, of course, entering a different country, as was the boat journey from Singapore to Batam. Malaysia to Singapore to Indonesia is not a straightforward trip, especially for a camera crew.
Batam is the same size as Singapore – about 275 square miles. But that’s where the similarities end. Singapore is rich and bustling, thriving from its position as a major international hub and financial centre. Batam, separated from Singapore by just a few miles of water, couldn’t be more different. It’s a poor place, with about a fifth of the population of Singapore. Those people that have jobs work in traditional industries such as fishing and manufacturing, but the gulf between the haves of Singapore and the have-nots of Batam couldn’t be more stark. The shores were lined with rickety wooden dwellings supported on stilts; across the water you could see the gleaming skyscrapers of Singapore. The poverty here wasn’t as bad as that which I’d seen in, say, Ajegunle, or maybe it was just the case that there was less desperation here. In Ajegunle rubbish lined the streets; here you had the impression that people might be poor, but they were more aware of their own environment. Parts of the island have even tried to establish themselves as tourist destinations. Away from the shanties there are a few beach resorts, and of course you get a great deal more for your money than you would if you were holid
aying on Singapore island.
Still, poverty is poverty. Batam might have a small holiday industry, but it also has the problems that often accompany economic deprivation. It is, for example, a well-known destination for sex tourists, especially popular with the rich of Singapore in search of a dirty weekend. There are also known to be at least ten groups of pirates operating off the island. Batam is dominated by the shipping lanes. Look out to sea and you can’t help but be impressed by the massive number of enormous merchant vessels that fill the skyline. I could well believe that if you were of a piratical frame of mind, the sight of all that wealth might be too much to resist, especially if you didn’t have the means of making a living any other way. Or even, to be honest, if you did…
My hope was that by heading to Batam we could finally come face to face with modern-day pirates. Once again we knew that our best chance of achieving our ends was by staying inconspicuous; once again we looked like being thwarted. When we arrived at our hotel there was an electronic display in the foyer with rolling news and stock market prices. I was bleary-eyed and jet-lagged, but my eyes soon opened when I saw something flash across the screen. ‘Welcome to celebrity ROSS KEMP!’
