How incredible is modern-day sea piracy? A sampling of reports from Somalia makes the pattern desolatingly familiar. Heavily-armed gunmen typically approach on small speedboats, opening fire on the bridge until the ship?s captain relents and allows them on board, usually using the simplest of rope-and-hook techniques. The average reaction time between spotting the pirates and being boarded is just 15 minutes. Commercial shipping regulations bound crews not to resist attack once lethal arms have been employed.
A far cry from the unvarnished depiction of maritime banditry in The Ballad of Long Ben inspired by the 17th century megapirate Henry Every: ?We turned the Fancy from the wind and ran out 40 guns/And soon the sky was filled with smoke that hid us from the sun/Then up and down the ship we fought, until the decks ran red?.
And, how grotesque is the ransom demanded? Piracy is big business and almost certainly the biggest single business in the dysfunctional state of Somalia. In fact, it has descended to a condition that piracy is no longer the product of a lawless state; it fuels the lawless state. The typical ransom paid is between $1 million and $2 million, and the shipowners, lacking any other means of safeguarding their crews, ships and cargoes, have consistently been willing to pay. Most estimates put the total ransoms paid so far this year at more than $30 million. Mind you, the above estimate of ransom money excludes the $25 million demanded for the pirates? biggest catch of them all: the Saudi-owned supertanker the Sirirus Star, with a crew of 25, captured on November 15.
The eyepopping booty might yet shame another gleeful description in The Ballad of Long Ben: ?For thirteen days aboard the Ganj, we made a merry sport/A thousand pounds of Mughal gold, and whisky, rum and port?.
And also, don?t expect the 21th century pirates to be sloppy with their money ? they can ?mechanically count the money and have machines that can detect fake money?, as one of them impishly said in a message to negotiators.
Welcome to the world of Somali pirates. Equipped with modern weapons like RPGs and high-tech gadgets such as GPS trackers and satellite phones, they needed two things above all: impunity for their crimes and a cloak of silence around those crimes. Lack of anti-piracy enforcement in that part of the world seems to have given them both. It is in this backdrop that the Indian Navy?s courageous action on Tuesday of destroying of a pirate ?mother ship??a floating base for small raiding boats?off Somalia is an encouraging turn of events.
The scale and sweep of piracy in the Horn of Africa in recent times are stunning. The Sirius Star, hijacked about 830 km southeast of Kenyan coast, was the largest ship ever seized. Its cargo of two million barrels of Saudi crude is worth about $100 million. The seizure floored even chairman of US Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm Mike Mullen who said the ship?s distance from the coast was ?the longest distance I?ve seen for any of these incidents?. That is far to the south of most recent attacks, suggesting that the pirates may be expanding their range in an effort to avoid the multinational naval patrols now plying the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea.
The hijacking follows a string of increasingly brazen attacks by Somali pirates in recent months. According to International Maritime Bureau, which says piracy in Somalia is now ?out of control?, 38 ships were hijacked so far this year while 17 ships with more than 250 crew are still being held by pirates, including an Ukrainian ship with military cargo held since September.
A busy commercial waterway like the Gulf of Aden is awash with big and small sitting ducks. No doubt, Al-Qaeda would have taken notice of the hijacking of a 3,18,000-tonne monster like the Saudi VLCC and may even be astonished by the ease and swiftness with which pirates overpowered it.
It?s very clear that Combined Task Force 150, the international maritime venture that police seas around Somalia, has proved to be unequal to the onerous task it is assigned to. The Force itself is frank enough to admit it because of the patrolling area?s size. An effective and durable solution would be capacity-building of regional navies and coastguards so that they can conduct anti-piracy patrols. The template for an enforcement and legal framework is already available in the shape of the Malacca Strait Patrol ? which, conducted by the navies of Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand with help from the US, resulted in a 75% decline of piracy in the 2002-07 period.
The humanitarian catastrophe followed by the collapse of the last stable central government in Somalia in 1991 precipitated the Operation Restore Hope. It was an operation gone awry in its closing stages. Flustered by the famed ?Black Hawk Down? incident, it ended with the betrayal of the lofty rhetoric of humanitarian assistance and restoration of order. As pirates proliferate and the state slides into further anarchy, the chaos in Somalia spilling outside its territory should make dangerlights flashing around the world capitals. Clearly, the immediate mission for the international community is to contain Somalia?s anarchy inside its borders. To that end, it has to take the war into every ?mother ship?, like the Indian Navy did heroically, ?until the decks ran red?.
rajiv.jayaram@expressindia.com