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Piracy: Real menace or red
herring?
By Stefan Eklof
(Republished with permission from Japan Focus)
Counting piracy
Over the past
25 years piracy and armed robbery against vessels
have become growing concerns for the shipping
industry and the international community. Since
1984, when the International Maritime Organization
(IMO) of the United Nations started to collect
information about acts of piracy and armed robbery
against vessels, close to 4,000 such acts have
been reported to the organization. The problem,
moreover, has grown worse since the turn of the
millennium. In 2004 alone, 330 cases were recorded
a notable decline from the previous year's 452
cases, but still a substantially higher figure
than any year of the 20th century.
Over
half of the attacks worldwide, 169 cases in 2004,
occurred in Southeast Asia, and a map of the
region included in the IMO's annual Report on
Piracy and Armed Robbery against Ships shows much
of Indonesia's coastline dotted with black spots,
each representing an attack [1].
With most
of the attacks in or around Indonesian waters, the
country has earned a reputation as a haven for
pirates, and a couple of years ago a well-known
correspondent and author on organized crime in
Asia even dubbed the country the "pirate
republic". [2]
But to what extent do these
figures represent the actual situation? On the one
hand, the reported attacks are often said to be no
more than the tip of an iceberg since many
shipping companies for different reasons
including fears of expensive delays in connection
with police investigations and harmful publicity
choose not to report attacks against its vessels,
neither to the authorities nor to any
international organization. Nor do governments
generally report incidents to the IMO in spite of
a resolution, passed in 1983, requesting member
states to report all attacks against vessels
flying the flag of their country to the
organization. [3]
The main source of
information about pirate attacks is instead the
International Maritime Bureau (IMB), a unit of the
International Chamber of Commerce, which since
1992 operates a piracy reporting center in Kuala
Lumpur. The center is mainly financed through
voluntary contributions from the shipping and
insurance industry. One of its main tasks in
addition to assisting the victims of pirate
attacks and assisting the authorities in
investigations is to receive and collate
information about piratical activity and to issue
consolidated reports on piracy and armed robbery
against ships to, among others, the IMO. In 2004,
all but five of the 330 attacks listed in the
IMO's annual report were reported by the center of
the IMB. [4]
Compared with the general
understanding of the word "piracy", however, the
IMB's definition is very broad. For statistical
purposes, the bureau defines piracy and armed
robbery as an "act of boarding or attempting to
board any ship with the apparent intent to commit
theft or any other crime and with the apparent
intent or capability to use force in the
furtherance of that act". [5] This definition not
only covers actual and attempted attacks in
international as well as territorial waters, it
also includes all types of attacks regardless of
whether the ship is berthed, at anchor or at sea.
This definition is unfortunate even if
only for statistical purposes because it blurs
any attempt to gain a more comprehensive
understanding of the problem of "piracy" in
Southeast Asia as well as in other parts of the
world. Many of the so-called armed robberies in
port areas are in fact more readily describable as
"theft in port", typically involving some three to
five perpetrators boarding a ship in order to
steal supplies, such as engine spare parts, cans
of paint or ropes. These so-called "pirates" in
port are not likely to be identical with the more
audacious and often more violent pirates who
board steaming vessels at sea, with both their
methods and objectives differing.
From the
point of view of protection and law enforcement,
moreover, it does not seem very helpful to
conflate the two types of incidents as they
require very different counter-measures. Combating
the first type of incidents mainly involves
improving security onboard ships when in port and
in port areas, whereas combating the second type
of incidents requires international coordination
and intelligence sharing between the authorities
of several nations, the shipping industry and
international organizations.
Mapping
piracy
Separating the IMO/IMB statistics
from the 75 incidents that in 2004 were reported
to have occurred in port areas in Southeast Asia
mainly in Indonesia results in a somewhat
different and much-clearer picture. What is left
are 92 cases of actual and attempted attacks at
sea (in addition to two cases of spotted
suspicious craft), heavily concentrated to three
adjacent regions along the east coast of Sumatra:
The northern parts of the Malacca Strait (34
cases), the southern parts of the Malacca Strait
including Singapore Strait and Indonesia's
Riau-Lingga archipelago (23 cases), and the waters
east of southern Sumatra (11 cases). Together
these areas accounted for close to 74% of all
reported attacks at sea in Southeast Asia. Other
areas where several cases were reported were the
southern parts of the South China Sea (six cases),
the Makassar Strait east of Indonesian Borneo (six
cases) and the Sulu region of the southern
Philippines and eastern Sabah (four cases).
The figures stand out as high in
international comparison, but they hardly justify
descriptions of Southeast Asia or the Malacca
Strait as "piracy prone" or "pirate-infested".
With about 200 ships transiting the strait daily,
the risk for an individual ship of being attacked
was less than .2% in 2004. [6] In the southern
Malacca Strait area, as well as in the waters off
southern Sumatra, most of the attacks about 80%
of actual attacks were what may be called
Low-Level Armed Robberies (LLAR), or "petty
piracy", involving a group of pirates, generally
armed with knives and non-automatic firearms,
boarding the victim ship in the aft from a small,
open craft with the objective of stealing cash and
portable valuables such as watches, jewelry and
electronics. These pirates generally avoid
violence unless resisted and leave the ship with
their loot within 15 to 20 minutes.
Traumatic as these attacks may be for the
crews and passengers of the victim ships, they do
not seem to constitute a big problem for the
shipping industry. The IMB has estimated the
average value of property lost in each such attack
to about US$5,000 [7] and this has probably
declined over the past few years as the
development of more efficient and safer ways to
transfer money electronically worldwide has made
it less necessary for ships to carry large sums of
cash. In the southern parts of the Malacca Strait,
the petty piracy attacks have been going on more
or less incessantly for the past 25 years and have
led to the development of a range of relatively
easy and inexpensive measures that can be
implemented on board ships in order to avert an
attack.
Aside from arming merchant vessels
which most shipping companies, trade unions and
international organizations do not recommend for
fear of escalating the violence thereby
endangering the safety of the crew and vessel
these include alert anti-piracy watches, deck
illumination at night (when most attacks take
place), locking all doors and hatches of the
ship's superstructure and rigging fire hoses in
the aft to prevent pirates from boarding. One of
the most efficient preventive measures is
Secure-Ship, an easily collapsible electric fence
which is mounted around the ship and uses a
9,000-volt, non-lethal, electric shock to deter
intruders and sets off an alarm if tampered with.
[8]
Of greater concern to the
international community and the crews of
international vessels are the more violent
attacks, which mainly occur in the northern parts
of the Malacca Strait. Of the 18 actual attacks
that were reported there in 2004, 15 (83%) may be
called High-Level Armed Robberies (HLAR),
involving heavily armed pirates not hesitant to
use lethal violence. In addition to these 15
attacks,there were eight attempted attacks in
which ships were fired at. Several of the
robberies involved the shooting and killing or
wounding of crew members, the taking of hostages
and hijackings of whole vessels, especially tugs
and barges. The most serious incident took place
January 5, 2004, when armed pirates boarded the
Indonesian tanker Cherry 201 and took 13 crew
members hostage. The pirates later released the
captain so that he could convey their demand for
ransom, but as the shipping company failed to pay
the ransom initially set for $47,616 but
eventually negotiated down to a quarter of that
the pirates one month later shot dead four crew
members. The remaining eight jumped overboard and
escaped. [9]
The IMB suspects that the
perpetrators of the kidnap-for-ransom attacks in
the northern Malacca Strait are members of the
Free Aceh Movement, GAM, which since 1976 has
waged a guerilla war for Acehnese independence
from Indonesia. However, even though GAM members
have been known to engage in kidnappings on land,
particularly of Indonesian businessmen, it seems
unlikely the organization on a central level would
endorse piratical activity. The strategy of the
GAM leaders, most of whom live in exile in Sweden,
has been to try to gain the sympathy of the
international community for Acehnese independence,
and engaging in piracy would be clearly
detrimental to this objective, especially against
the background of much speculation about a
possible connection between piracy and the threat
of maritime terrorism in the wake of the September
11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States.
This said, however, it is possible that some local
bands of GAM sympathizers may use piracy as a
means of fundraising though it is equally
possible that it is the work of politically
non-committed bandits in the region.
In
the wake of the devastating tsunami that hit the
region, particularly Aceh, on December 26, all
piratical activity seemed to cease in the Malacca
Strait, and there were no reported attacks in
January. As regards the northern parts of the
strait, this is quite understandable, as the
pirates are likely to have been hard hit by the
disaster with many of them probably killed and
much of their equipment, including boats, engines
and weapons, destroyed. The lull in piracy in the
southern parts of the strait is more difficult to
explain, as the tsunami had no significant
physical impact there, and as the pirates' land
bases, mainly located in Indonesia's Riau
archipelago, were left intact. The lull was in any
case temporary, and from February attacks again
began to be reported, both from the northern and
southern parts of the Malacca Strait, with the
same recognizable pattern of mainly High-Level
Armed Robberies in the northern parts and mainly
Low-Level Armed Robberies in the southern parts.
[10]
Combating piracy
Piracy in
Southeast Asia is often explained by a combination
of poverty and weak law enforcement. The
explanations generally explicitly or implicitly
pinpoint Indonesia, the poorest country in the
Malacca Strait region with the weakest marine law
enforcement capacity, as the source of the
problem. To some extent the explanation is
relevant. There is little doubt that most, if not
all, pirates currently operating in the Malacca
and Singapore Straits are Indonesians based in
Indonesia mainly, it seems, on the north coast
of Aceh and possibly the east coast of the
province of North Sumatra, and on the scattered
small islands of Indonesia's Riau archipelago just
south of Singapore Strait. It is also obvious that
the Indonesian navy, which has the main
responsibility for policing the country's
territorial waters, is overstretched and lacks the
capacity to patrol the vast archipelago not only
against pirates, but also against smugglers of
drugs, arms, contraband and humans and against
large fleets of foreign fish trawlers operating
illegally in Indonesia's Exclusive Economic Zone.
From that perspective it should perhaps come as no
surprise if combating piracy is not a main
priority for the Indonesian navy and other
authorities.
The attacks in the Malacca
Strait region mainly (although not exclusively)
befall non-Indonesian vessels, and most attacks
82% in 2004 take place outside Indonesian
territorial waters, mainly in international
waters. With the Malacca Strait being one of the
world's most important international commercial
shipping lanes, it might seem reasonable at
least from the point of view of the coastal states
in the region if the cost of policing the strait
was shared by all its users. However, when the
Indonesian government, supported by Malaysia, in
the early 1990s suggested that a toll system be
introduced to pay for the cost of policing the
strait and protecting the environment, the
suggestion won little support from the shipping
industry or the international community. Saying
that the ship owners seemed "ungrateful" that they
were allowed to use the Malacca Strait for free,
Malaysia's Deputy Prime Minister Abdul Ghafar Baba
bluntly summarized the Indonesian and Malaysian
viewpoint: "These people seem to have come out
with a theory that they make the profit and we
come out with the money to keep the straits clean
of pollution and pirates." [11]
Since
then, the number of reported pirate attacks in
Southeast Asia has multiplied, but the shipping
industry and the international community in
general have shown little willingness to share the
cost of policing the Malacca Strait. The main
exception has been Japan, which over the past
years has taken the initiative to, and provided
funding for, a number of efforts to suppress
Southeast Asian piracy, including the provision of
training programs and equipment to the law
enforcement authorities in the region. The most
recent of these initiatives is the Regional
Cooperation Agreement on Combating Piracy and
Armed Robbery against Ships in Asia (ReCAAP),
concluded among 16 Asian countries in Tokyo in
November 2004. The most important provision of the
agreement which so far has only been signed by
four states - Cambodia, Japan, Laos and Singapore
is the projected setting up of an information
sharing center in Singapore in order to facilitate
international cooperation in the suppression of
piracy. The weakness of the agreement, however, is
that it only obligates governments to share
information they deem pertinent to immediate
pirate attacks and that center's operation will
depend on voluntary contributions. [12]
Even though ReCAAP may be a significant
development, it will not be enough to eradicate
piracy in Southeast Asia. Doing so will probably
require more far-reaching arrangements for
international cooperation, including joint or
coordinated patrols and the right of so-called
"hot pursuit" into the territorial waters of a
neighboring country. At the moment, however, such
arrangements seem unlikely to come about. Piracy
remains a comparatively minor problem for most
Southeast Asian countries, and strong
sensitivities over issues of national sovereignty
are a major obstacle to the forging of any binding
agreements among the countries of the region.
Meanwhile, for all the talk of piracy as a
menace to international maritime commerce, most
ship owners do not seem terribly concerned. The
risk of an attack is still very small, and the
economic losses incurred are generally bearable
usually below the deductible level of the
insurance policy. Consequently, and in accordance
with the laws of market economy, piracy is likely
to persist as long as the cost of protection is
higher than the incurred losses.
Stefan
Eklof (Stefan.Eklof@ace.lu.se), Ph.D., Research
Fellow, Center for East and Southeast Asian
Studies, Lund University, is the author of
Pirates in Paradise: A Modern History of
Southeast Asia's Maritime Marauders,
Copenhagen: NIAS Press (due in December 2005).
Notes
[1]
International Maritime Organization, "Reports on
Piracy and Armed Robbery against Ships Annual
Report 2004", MSC.4/Circ 64, May 5, 2005,
available at the Internet web page
http://www.imo.org/includes/blastDataOnly.asp/data_id%3D12132/64.pdf,
accessed on July 26 2005. The IMO report does not
use the term "Southeast Asia", but the more
inexact "Far East" (further divided into "Malacca
Strait" and "South China Sea"). All but four of
the 173 cases recorded in the "Far East", however,
occurred in Southeast Asia (ie in or around the
waters of ASEAN countries). The IMO distinguishes
between "piracy" which, in accordance with the
1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the
Sea, is defined as incidents occurring on the high
seas or outside the jurisdiction of any state, and
"armed robbery", which is defined as incidents
occurring within a state's jurisdiction.
[2] Lintner, Bertil, Blood Brothers:
The Criminal Underworld of Asia, New York and
Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2003.
[3] Resolution A 545(13) on "Measures to
Prevent Acts of Piracy and Armed Robbery against
Ships", adopted by the IMO Assembly, 13th session,
November 17, 1983. In 2004, only three states,
Colombia, Liberia and the United Arab Emirates
reported attacks to the organization.
[4]
The IMB also publishes annual (as well as
bi-annual) piracy reports; see ICC International
Maritime Bureau, "Piracy and Armed Robbery against
Ships. Annual Report, January 1 December 31,
2004", Barking, Essex: ICC International Maritime
Bureau 2005. In addition, the IMB posts weekly
piracy reports.
[5] Ibid, p 2; italics in
original.
[6] It is assumed that the real
number of attacks were twice the reported number,
giving a total of 114 for the year in the northern
and southern parts of the Malacca Strait.
[7] Gottshalk, Jack A and Brian P
Flanagan, Jolly Roger with an Uzi: The Rise and
Threat of Modern Piracy, Annapolis, MD: Naval
Institute Press 2000, p 90.
[8] See
further the manufacturer's Internet web page,
accessed on July 28, 2005.
[9] Gunawan,
Apriadi, "Pirates kill four aboard ship in North
Aceh", Jakarta Post, February 6, 2004, and ICC
International Maritime Bureau, 2005, p 17.
[10] See the IMO's monthly reports for
January-March 2005: MSC.4/Circ 65, available at
the Internet web page accessed on July 28, 2005.
[11] Wong Sai Wan, "M'sia willing to
provide security in the Straits", The Star,
September 7, 1992.
[12] John F Bradford,
"The Growing Prospects for Maritime Security
Cooperation in Southeast Asia", Naval War College
Review, 58:3.
(Republished with permission
from Japan Focus) |
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