The Pirates of Somalia

by Jay Bahadur

  Of course, not every hijacked ship is a multi-million-dollar lottery ticket; many are dhows or small fishing trawlers manned by poor Yemeni or South Asian crews. Lacking the defence of being worth ransoming, the fishermen are often set adrift or even killed, their vessels converted for use as pirate motherships. Beginning in 2009, the proportion of fishing dhows as a percentage of total hijackings increased, probably to meet the soaring demand for motherships required by the pirates’ Indian Ocean expansion. Exactly how many poor fishermen have fallen victim to Somali pirates will likely never be known; often neglected or abandoned by their parent companies, attacks against fishing vessels frequently go unreported to the International Maritime Bureau or other authorities. The untold brunt of brutality borne by Yemeni fishermen has prompted Puntland expert Stig Hansen to call these attacks “the hidden tragedy of piracy.”3

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  Unlike rival street gangs, pirate groups do not have formally demarcated “turfs” that they jealously guard from their enemies. Yet the geographical locations of hijackings have correlated with remarkable accuracy to the geographical origins of the hijackers. All ships known to have been seized in the Gulf of Aden, for instance, have ended up in Puntland ports, while the vast majority of those hijacked in the far south, near the Seychelles and Madagascar, have been taken to Harardheere. Thus, as the choice pirate hunting ground shifted from the Gulf of Aden to the Indian Ocean, Puntland’s strategic importance waned. Many pirate groups continued to operate out of the region, but they mostly used the southern port of Garacad, which had the dual advantages of being more remote and isolated than Eyl, as well as closer to the Indian Ocean shipping lanes.

  Perversely, the constant naval pressure may also have bred a higher class of pirate, because the groups operating upwards of 1,500 kilometres into the Indian Ocean required a much higher level of sophistication—in terms of boats, supply logistics, navigational skills and equipment, and perhaps intelligence networks—than those who had previously floated in the Gulf of Aden, waiting for any target of opportunity to come along. The forces of artificial selection meant that only the most advanced pirate gangs were likely to survive in the new reality created by the Gulf of Aden safety corridor.

  The pirates’ Indian Ocean expansion did not go unnoticed by the international naval forces. In April 2010 I spoke to Commander John Harbour, the media spokesman for EUNAVFOR, via telephone from his London office. According to Harbour, the upper echelons of EU leadership had vigorously debated how to respond to the pirates’ change in tactics. Some voices, he said, had argued for a complete blockade of pirate ports along the entire length of the Somali coast, an approach that he viewed as unrealistic: “The Somali coast is over a thousand miles long, and although it’s got maybe six or seven main [pirate] ports, we haven’t even got enough ships to cover those. What we can do, with good intelligence, is find the pirate camps and sit off of them. These camps can be anything from a mothership, a couple of skiffs, and a few barrels on the shore covered by a tarpaulin, to ten motherships and thirty skiffs.”

  Locating and blockading these floating bases, often through information gathered by maritime patrol aircraft, formed the first pillar of the EU’s latest counter-piracy strategy; by interdicting suspicious craft before they reached the international shipping lanes, NAVFOR hoped to contain the problem at its source. In many ways, NAVFOR’s vessels had begun to operate like the defensive line of a football team, concentrating their forces at the line of scrimmage but positioning safeties further afield to intercept any opponent slipping through the perimeter. “The new strategy was basically to take the fight to the pirates,” Harbour explained. “First, interdict them off their bases. Then, have ships available in a second layer, maybe one to two hundred miles off the coast, who can respond to attacks. Finally, have maritime patrol aircraft and ships in the deeper Indian Ocean, who can visit the scene after an attack has occurred.”

  Over the previous month, he estimated, NAVFOR had disrupted twenty-five pirate “attack groups”—each consisting of a mothership towing two skiffs—half of which had been intercepted before reaching open ocean, and half captured in the wake of attempted hijackings. The success of their shift in strategy, said Harbour, had provoked yet another tactical adaptation by the pirates. “They’ve discovered that we’re sitting off the shore,” he said, “so therefore they’ve started to throw their skiffs behind their 4×4s and go find a bit of deserted beach where they can launch the operation. We’ve also seen far more launches done from southern Somalia.”

  The pirates also responded to the NAVFOR crackdown by pushing ever deeper into the Indian Ocean. With attacks occurring over 1,500 kilometres from the Somali coast, they had struck as far south as Madagascar and almost as far east as the Maldives—closer to India than Africa. Six months to one year previously, said Harbour, things had been different. “The pirates tended to get out with enough fuel to take them maybe a hundred miles offshore, then they would switch off their engines and drift with the currents for days and days until they found a target of opportunity. And of course their plan was to find a target, take it out, and use it to get themselves back to the coast. But inevitably we would find small skiffs, adrift with no food, no fuel, and no water, and people dead in the bottom of the boat. They were probably pirates, but at that point it’s a humanitarian mission to rescue these guys.”

  In more recent days, the pirates’ deep-sea missions had stepped up the demand for more far-ranging and sophisticated motherships. Over the previous month alone, said Harbour, NAVFOR had documented ten cases of fishing dhows or small coastal traders commandeered for this purpose, compared with a total of twelve to fifteen cases during the previous twelve months. “The advantage of that is that they’ve already got a hijacked crew on board, and that makes it a lot more difficult for us to find them and take them out,” he said.

  As an example of the pirates’ recent ship-hopping proclivity, Harbour launched into the story of the ML Arzoo, a small transport seized after developing engine problems off the Somali coast while en route to Mogadishu. Realizing that the Arzoo was damaged and low on fuel, the nine hijackers called in reinforcements from Somalia, who duly arrived in a commandeered Indian trading dhow. After taking the captors aboard and leaving the Arzoo and her crew dead in the water, the group proceeded to hijack a third vessel, the Seychellois fishing boat Galate, which they in turn used to hijack an Iranian merchant ship, Al Abi, transferring the Galate’s six crew members aboard and abandoning the vessel. At this point, the Seychellois coast guard caught up to the pirates and brought their joy ride to an end; believing the hostages’ lives to be in danger, the coast guard opened up on the vessel with its machine guns.

  “They started firing at the Al Abi’s waterline, to such an extent that they hit the engine and it caught fire,” said Harbour. “There was a fireball, and eventually the damn thing sank, leaving twenty-seven people in the water, plus nine pirates, who were duly picked up. The incident showed the pirates that we won’t always stop because there are hostages on board.”

  Despite Harbour’s attempt to claim collective credit for the Seychellois coast guard’s action, NAVFOR’s rules of engagement have so far prevented its members from launching a comparably audacious rescue operation. During the one commando mission conducted by EU forces—the rescue of the German-flagged MV Taipan by the Dutch warship Tromp—the Tromp was forced to circumvent EU rules by temporarily removing itself from the Atalanta fleet, striking its NAVFOR colours and raising the Dutch flag.

  Understandably, NAVFOR has drawn criticism for its perceived softness, which is underscored by its consistent practice of freeing captured pirates after confiscating their weapons and paraphernalia. One of the reasons behind this “catch and release” policy is that the EU, NATO, and CTF fleets have been operating under procedures more befitting a civilian police force than a military. Just as it is unacceptable for police officers to make arrests based on shades and hooded sweatshirts, naval personnel are not allowed t
o detain any AK-47-toting “fishermen” they happen to find floating in the Indian Ocean. But Harbour was quick to dismiss the notion that NAVFOR was hamstrung by its procedural rules.

  “It’s not true that we have to catch pirates in the process of an attack. We can catch them well afterwards, as long as there’s clear link of evidence,” he explained, proceeding to describe an incident where EU maritime patrol aircraft had tracked a pirate attack group from the scene of an attempted hijacking for twelve hours before a warship caught up and took them into custody. “Of course, if we catch them in the act, that’s great, because we’d be killing them … we’d shoot them down,” he said. “Normally, they’re not that stupid; they usually try to break off, and even scatter.” Indeed, when catching pirates in the midst of an attack, NAVFOR has not hesitated to respond with deadly force. From August 2008 to May 2010, the combined international naval forces killed at least sixty-four pirates and wounded twenty-four.4

  The blame for the typically lenient treatment of arrested pirates, according to Harbour, lay squarely with the domestic legal systems of the nearby countries—such as Kenya—to which the pirates are sent for prosecution. “EUNAVFOR forces are the policemen of the seas; our job is to gather the evidence to present to the court, but it’s up to the judge to decide whether to prosecute,” he said. “What we’d like to see is countries develop laws on conspiring to piracy. To use the police corollary: if a policeman catches some bloke walking down the road with an unlicensed gun in his pocket, then he is conspiring to commit a criminal act. He should be taken to court and given a very long sentence just for carrying the gun.”

  The metaphor was not entirely apt; unlike the streets of London, on the high seas it is not a crime under international law to carry firearms, even when they consist of a rather suspicious assortment of Kalashnikovs and rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) launchers. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) permits the seizure of “pirate ship[s] or aircraft” without actually catching the occupants in an act of piracy but also without clarifying what constitutes adequate grounds to do so. This omission is especially problematic given that a Somali fishing boat with a few Kalashnikovs stashed in the bottom could as easily contain legitimate fishermen as pirates. The danger is that by prosecuting suspects for “conspiracy to commit piracy,” countries would be giving an unprecedented interpretation to UNCLOS, one that unfairly targets all seafaring Somalis. So far, the Seychelles has been the only country to pass such a law.

  The international naval effort, Harbour conceded, represented only part of the solution to the piracy crisis, which in the end had to be resolved on the ground. “It’s important to remember that we are the military arm of the European Union, which is spending $250 million on trying to stabilize that country by supporting the Transitional Federal Government (TFG),” he said, referring to money pledged at an April 2009 donor conference in Brussels. “We look upon ourselves as part of that political grouping, and that is why we differ from NATO and [CTF-151], which are purely military forces conducting a particular job, i.e., anti-piracy or anti-terrorism.”

  But with the TFG currently in control of only a half-dozen neighbourhoods in Mogadishu, I asked Harbour whether funnelling money to such a “government” could realistically make any difference to the anti-piracy effort. “A bit of optimism is required there,” he conceded. “But by stabilizing the TFG, by supporting it, that’s going to defeat piracy … The fact that you’ve currently got eight huge cargo or oil ships sitting at anchor off the coast of a country controlled by a bunch of criminals, who are demanding huge ransoms from the international community, is just appalling. Can you imagine that happening off Brighton, or Portsmouth? It’s just unthinkable. We’re trying to approach the problem from the other side, to explore the issue politically and help build a legitimate country, which will eventually bring Somalia’s own forces to bear to defeat this utter scourge of criminality.”

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  While pirate gangs have proven remarkably adept at outmanoeuvring the international naval armada, they have no monopoly on the ability to adapt tactics. The Panamanian-flagged cargo ship Almezaan had been hijacked twice, most notably in November 2009 while transporting a consignment of small arms—in contravention of the UN embargo on Somalia—intended for a Mogadishu businessman.5 In the early morning of March 23, 2010, as the Almezaan steamed once more towards Mogadishu, the pirates struck again. On this occasion, however, she was ready to meet them on their own terms, with armed private security personnel stationed on her deck.

  When the pirates opened fire, the guards responded in kind, spraying the attackers with their automatic weapons. Initially repulsed, the pirates came about for a second assault and were repelled in the same manner, following which they fled towards the open sea. When a helicopter from the Spanish warship Navarra caught up with them, the two skiffs were riddled with bullet holes and a pirate was shot dead in the bottom of one. It marked the first time that a pirate had been killed by private security guards.

  Within the international shipping community, the Almezaan shooting stirred up an already ongoing debate over the use of armed guards on commercial vessels. The standard concerns surrounding private military contractors—their accountability and the rules of engagement under which they operate—are considerably magnified when they are engaged on the high seas. Complicated questions arise over which country has jurisdiction over the contractors: the flag state (in the case of the Almezaan, Panama), the owners (United Arab Emirates), or the nationality of the contractors themselves (undisclosed). These issues are especially worrisome when the victims are Somali citizens, who lack a functioning state to defend their rights. In addition to the legal and moral concerns is the more pragmatic fear that arming the merchant marine will provoke the pirates into increasingly violent behaviour.

  “While we understand that owners want to protect their ships, we don’t agree in principle with putting armed security on ships,” International Maritime Bureau director Captain Pottengal Mukundan told the BBC following the Almezaan incident. “Ships are not an ideal place for a gun battle.”6

  For a high-risk target like the Almezaan, running guns into Somalia, armed guards were perhaps a prudent choice. But for most shippers, the risk of escalating an incident typically makes hiring private security a poor business decision. No shipping company wants to make headlines because of the body count on the deck of one of its vessels. The added possibility of a firefight resulting in a serious financial or environmental disaster—in the case of expensive or sensitive cargo, such as crude oil or volatile chemicals—makes the potential cost of violence extremely high. Indeed, the risk assessments carried out by marine insurers are as likely to judge the presence of armed guards as a net liability rather than a reason to reduce premiums. “From our point of view, unless you can really guarantee the quality of the armed guards put on board, you’re probably increasing the risk of the total loss of a vessel,” said Neil Smith, head of underwriting at Lloyd’s Market Association, which provides member support to Lloyd’s of London, the largest marine insurance market in the world. “In fact, it could cause the shipowner’s premiums to go up.”

  Low-cost measures, such as barbed wire and high-pressure water hoses, Smith argued, are usually the wiser course. “At the moment, the pirates can still be dissuaded relatively easily,” he said. “They’re opportunistic, and if there’s a vessel they can get onto with reasonable ease, they’ll go after it, as opposed to a vessel that shows any signs of defending itself against attack—even using relatively low-tech measures. It’s always about not wanting to escalate things,” he added.

  More basic, however, is the fact that maritime shipping is an extraordinarily competitive global business, and hiring private security is simply not in the average shipowner’s budget. Engaging a team of armed guards costs in the range of $10,000 per day ($30,000–$60,000 for an escort vessel), and given that it takes three to five days to pass through “pirate waters,” the added securi
ty bill would destroy the profit margins of all but the most lucrative consignments.

  Similar reasoning explains why shipping companies do not simply arm their own employees. Neither shipowners nor their insurers wish to risk escalating a piracy incident, especially as a result of inexperienced sailors-cum-mercenaries, fresh out of a crash course in marine combat. Second, shippers already grant hazard pay ranging from 25 per cent to 100 per cent for crew members serving in high-risk piracy areas, and would likely have to offer an even greater pay hike in order to convince their employees to double as armed guards. More significantly, shipowners mutually insure one another for liabilities not covered under standard marine insurance, such as loss of life and injury to crew members, through associations known as protection and indemnity clubs. In the event of a pirate encounter, the shipping industry itself would be responsible for paying compensation for any crew members injured or killed—a far more likely occurrence if they are engaged in combat.

  Rerouting their vessels around the Cape of Good Hope, the southern tip of Africa—thereby bypassing the Suez Canal as well as the Somali pirates—is another alternative open to shipowners. Few, however, have exercised this option; as well as additional crewing and fuel costs, the delays inherent in the detour may result in ships arriving late to port—extremely problematic in the case of time-sensitive cargos, such as high-value consumer goods (for example, the latest car models) or just-in-time manufacturing inputs. According to a report by the US Department of Transportation, routing an oil tanker from Saudi Arabia to the United States around the Cape of Good Hope adds 4,300 kilometres to the trip, and reduces the tanker’s round-trip annual voyages from six to five, at an additional yearly fuel cost of $3.5 million.7