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Pirates mock Malacca Strait
security
By Ioannis Gatsiounis
 KUALA LUMPUR - Pirates are making a
mockery of the half-hearted efforts of Malaysia,
Indonesia and Singapore to make the Malacca Strait
safe for shipping.
When the three littoral
states launched a plan last July to coordinate
patrols of the strait, they were determined to
make two points. One, the waterway through which a
third of the world's trade and half its oil passes
was not vulnerable to terrorist and pirate
attacks. And two, the littoral states themselves
were up to the task of securing the strait and
assistance by foreign militaries was unnecessary.
But four brazen pirate attacks in the
strait in the past month alone have put paid to
the littoral states' pretensions.
One saw
35 armed pirates hijack a gas tanker, something
that it has long been feared might be converted by
terrorists into a floating bomb and spearheaded
into a port, severely disrupting world trade.
Another attack saw three crewmen of a Japanese
tugboat kidnapped, marking an incident in which a
non-littoral state became a victim of a pirate
attack.
In a race to allay fears and
defend its sovereignty, the Malaysian government
announced on April 1 that it would place armed
police officers on board selected tugboats and
barges traversing the strait. Singaporean
officials say they are setting up a 24-hour
information center that will begin operations next
year.
"The [littoral state] authorities
realize the importance of beefing up patrol," said
Noel Choong, head of the Piracy Reporting Center
of the International Maritime Bureau (IMB).
"Indonesia and Malaysia don't want foreign
intervention, but if this keeps going on, they
will have a harder time resisting it."
Those two states are betting that better
coordinating patrols will do the trick - such
patrols, in Choong's words, being in essence a
matter of "you control your waters, we control
ours". But many observers have their doubts as to
the effectiveness of this method.
Iskandar
Sazlan of the IMB said the question is no longer
whether the coordinated patrols are working -
"clearly they're not" - but whether it is safe to
sustain them. It is widely contended that the only
way for coordinated patrols to be effective is if
all parties involved are pulling their weight.
Indonesia, even by its leadership's
admittance, is not. Of 325 reported pirate attacks
worldwide in 2004, 93 occurred in Indonesian
waters (compared with nine in Malaysia and eight
in Singapore). The country's defense capacity is
spread thin, with the government trying to quell
separatist movements in Aceh and maintain
stability elsewhere across the sprawling
archipelago.
Complicating matters is an
ongoing border row between Indonesia and Malaysia
over two reputably oil-rich islands. Leaders on
both sides play down the possibility this might
impair joint efforts to monitor the strait, but
both nations have become pronouncedly less
hospitable toward one another of late. On Tuesday,
Indonesia asked that all Malaysian troops involved
in aid work in Aceh leave the region - this after
the Malaysian government threatened to jail, cane
and fine the estimated 1 million Indonesians
working illegally in Malaysia. After the
illegal-worker crackdown began last month, the
Malaysian government announced that it would
import 100,000 Pakistanis and nationals of several
other Asian countries to help fill the labor
shortage (see Malaysia's enduring labor
pains, March 16).
Suspicion and
indignation that the two countries traditionally
have reserved for non-regional "imperialists" are
increasingly being directed at each other. This,
said Iskandar, may hinder security efforts. If,
for instance, one side were to deploy dozens of
warships to patrol its waters, "it will raise
questions about whether it's an act of
aggression", Iskandar noted. "Perceptions have
very quickly changed."
The tensions are
likely to stymie any calls to elevate coordinated
patrols to a joint-patrol arrangement. Joint
patrols would allow for "hot pursuit", whereby any
littoral state chasing a pirate could cross over
into the territorial waters of another littoral
state. Some say hot-pursuit rights are vital to
fight piracy effectively in the strait. Others say
patching gaps in the current arrangement would
help, and that this is something Malaysia and
Indonesia could do without feeding suspicion or
sacrificing sovereignty.
Part of the
current problem, according to an official with the
Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore, is the
extent and timeliness of information sharing
between the littoral states; often by the time
information is transferred, it's of little use.
That, he said, should be helped by the information
center, which several countries inside and outside
the region are expected to sign on to soon.
Another helpful measure, he said, is a
Japanese-sponsored regional cooperation agreement,
which is "a first-of-its-kind legal framework to
combat piracy". This agreement was endorsed in
November by the 10 member countries of the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN),
along with China, Japan, South Korea, Bangladesh,
India and Sri Lanka, the maritime official said.
But a legal framework hardly addresses
what others see as an unraveling situation.
Indeed, reported pirate attacks worldwide dropped
from 445 in 2003 to 325 last year, and from 121 to
93 in Indonesia over that same period. But the
numbers don't reflect the nature of recent
attacks.
According to the IMB's annual
piracy report, of the 37 incidents in the Malacca
Strait in 2004, "Many of these attacks were
serious and involved crew being fired upon and
crew kidnapped for ransom." The 35 pirates who
attacked the gas tanker were said to have been
carrying machine-guns and rocket launchers. Those
who boarded a Malaysian tugboat in February
reportedly shot an engineer in the leg and
kidnapped the captain and chief officer. Both were
later released.
Malaysian Defense Minister
Najib Razak has openly acknowledged the severity
of the situation, as well as its implications. "We
have requested ... more cooperation from the
Indonesian government in this matter," Najib
recently told the state-monitored New Straits
Times newspaper.
Echoing Choong from the
IMB, he said, "If we fail to act, then I believe
the international community will have more reasons
to pressure us on the issue of security in the
Malacca Strait."
Some of that pressure is
coming from within the littoral triangle itself.
Unlike Indonesia and Malaysia, Singapore has long
been an advocate of greater international support,
as its port is the busiest in the world and the
city-state may stand to lose the most from a
terrorist incident. This stance was reiterated in
March when Singapore's defense minister, Teo Chee
Hean, told a conference on maritime security that
collective cooperation should include states
outside the region. The city-state got a boost two
weeks later when the Japanese crewman were
kidnapped, given that the victims were not of the
littoral states.
According to the
Singaporean Maritime and Port Authority official
quoted earlier, international intervention need
not jeopardize national sovereignty. He pointed
out that Japan, highly dependent on the strait,
has been helping Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore
secure the strait for the last 30 years. "But we
haven't had a problem yet. Japan knows how to work
well with local authorities. First, they recognize
that they have a responsibility to the region.
Secondly, they haven't stepped on anyone's toes."
The same could not be said last April,
when US Admiral Thomas Fargo announced that the
United States was considering deploying special
forces on high-speed vessels along the Malacca
Strait to compensate for some of the littoral
states' seeming nonchalance toward safeguarding
against a terrorist incident. The Malaysian
government vociferously rejected the offer.
In light of the recent attacks, a Western
diplomat treaded carefully on the question of
whether the US government would make a stronger
push to assist in strait security. "Ideally [the
littoral states] will begin to cooperate more
closely with each other," said the diplomat, who
claimed the surge in attacks was not necessarily
cause to sound alarm bells: "Pirate attacks are
kind of cyclical in nature."
But clearly
the international community is watching the
developments in the strait very closely, if only
from a different angle than the littoral states.
Ioannis Gatsiounis, a New York
native, has worked as a freelance foreign
correspondent and previously co-hosted a weekly
political/cultural radio call-in show in the US.
He has been living in Malaysia since late 2002.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd.
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