Pirates of Somalia (21 page)

* * *

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.
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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 security 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

And while sailing via the Cape of Good Hope virtually eliminates the chance of running into pirates, the marine navigation hazards are amplified. “If you go around South Africa, you’re facing a much more exposed sea route,” explained Smith. Thus, while shippers could save money on war risk insurance—which often subsumes acts of piracy—they would face increased premiums on hull insurance, which covers loss due to marine perils, such as running aground and hazardous weather.

The fact is, piracy just is not enough of a bother to cause most shipowners to change their plans. As we saw in
Chapter 3
, in 2008 the average vessel passing through the Gulf of Aden faced only a 0.17 per cent, or 1 in 550, chance of being hijacked. In the unlikely event that a ship is captured, the owner (or, as is more likely, the owner’s insurance provider) is forced to pay a ransom generally not exceeding 2–5 per cent of the worth of the vessel and her cargo—an annoyance, to be sure, but not a particularly uneconomical one. Most owners, in the end, are content to string up some barbed wire, buy an insurance policy, and pray.

* * *

One defensive option that was considered in the early days of Somali piracy was the long-range acoustic device, or LRAD, a non-lethal sonic weapon described as a “bullhorn on steroids” that is capable of inflicting excruciating pain on its targets. Alas, the arguments for the LRAD turned out to be nothing more than a lot of noise. On November 28, 2008, the chemical tanker
Biscaglia—
equipped with an LRAD operated by three unarmed guards provided by the British private security firm Anti-Piracy Maritime Security Solutions (APMSS)—was assaulted by six pirates wielding the standard AK-47s and RPGs. After forty minutes of ineffectual resistance using the LRAD and high-pressure water cannons, the guards abandoned their posts and jumped overboard.

It is hard to fault the
Biscaglia
’s guards for choosing to save their own lives rather than dying in a senseless last stand—they were, after all, involved in a gunfight armed with nothing more than a glorified bullhorn. LRADs, it turns out, are far more suited to crowd control than repelling armed sea bandits; they have an effective range of less than three hundred metres—inferior to that of an AK-47—and the fact that they can be trained on only one target at a time is a serious limitation when the standard pirate attack pattern involves a two-skiff team. Luckily, the three guards were eventually rescued by a German naval helicopter. The crew of the
Biscaglia
were not so fortunate; they spent the next two months in the company of their Somali captors.

The
Biscaglia
spelled the death of the LRAD as a valid counter-piracy defence, as
Lloyd’s List
, the world’s forefront maritime trade journal, published an article blasting the device’s effectiveness.
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It was also the end for APMSS; after the embarrassing incident, owner Nick Davis dissolved the company.

* * *

Individual crews have occasionally come up with their own creative methods of dealing with pirate attacks. When seven pirates armed with heavy machine guns and RPGs boarded the Chinese fishing ship
Zhenhua 4
on December 17, 2008, they probably thought that the difficult part was over. Instead, the
Zhenhua
’s thirty-member crew unleashed a ragtag assault, blasting the invaders with water cannons, improvised Molotov cocktails, and even beer bottles.
⁹
After half an hour, the cowed pirates signalled for a ceasefire, barely making it back to their skiffs before a Malaysian warship appeared on the scene and opened fire. No members of the
Zhenhua
’s crew were injured during the battle.

The
Zhenhua
’s crew were likely aware that only their own reckless courage would save their ship from becoming the latest addition to the pirates’ fleet of motherships, and themselves from indentured servitude or worse. Most shipping companies, however, would expressly forbid their sailors to escalate the situation through active resistance. Passive measures, on the other hand, such as barbed wire, electric fences, blocking stairwells, and barring windows, have all been employed at various times, with differing degrees of success. But two defensive techniques have stood out above these others, owing to their relatively low cost, simplicity, and high degree of effectiveness.

The first is merely the stationing of extra watches on deck. On most commercial vessels, it is standard to have the officer of the watch on the bridge, and perhaps one additional lookout to assist the watchkeeper. This status quo puts crews transiting through pirateinfested waters at unacceptable risk, according to Andrew Linington, a UK spokesman for the international maritime union Nautilus. Due to the intense cost competitiveness of the international maritime shipping industry, he says, crew sizes have been significantly reduced over the last thirty years; in the 1970s, medium to large container ships commonly had crews of twenty-five or more, but recent years have seen many vessels reduced to running on skeleton crews of eleven to fifteen. “Manning levels have been reduced so much, and workloads have been increased so much, that people struggle to do their jobs as it is,” he told me. “One of the biggest problems we have at sea today is simply fatigue.”

Linington was adamant that early detection is the single best method of deterring pirate attacks. “Talk to any naval officer,” he said, “and they will all tell you the same thing: the ships that are most successful at resisting attacks are the ones who spot the pirates coming early … Often if the pirates recognize that they’ve been detected early on, and they see the ship taking evasive action, they will not even bother to attack. And the key to early detection, we believe, is having enough people on board the ship. All the best management practices recommend an increase in watches and patrols, but the shipping companies don’t add any additional crew members to carry out those duties.”

The second successful measure is a tactic that I call the “turtle defence,” which involves the crew barricading themselves in a secure area of the vessel—typically the engine room—in the event that pirates manage to get on board. With foreign warships bearing down on their position, pirate boarding groups often have only a short window to seize control of the ship (and more importantly, the crew). With the crew safely out of the line of fire, international forces would be free to retake the vessel with less risk of civilian casualties. Deprived of access to their human shields, most pirates would flee back to their skiffs before the cavalry arrives.

The turtle defence has been successful on multiple occasions. In February 2010 the Danish warship
Absalon
became the first vessel to stop a hijacking once it was already in progress, its appearance causing such a panic in one automatic-weapon-wielding pirate on the deck of the MV
Ariella
(an Antigua and Barbuda–flagged cargo ship) that he jumped into the sea. A more noteworthy incident occurred two months later, when Dutch marines abseiled onto the German cargo ship
Taipan
and arrested ten pirates, whom they subsequently extradited to Germany to face trial.

The turtle defence, according to International Maritime Bureau manager Cyrus Mody, is not without its drawbacks. First, the threatened vessel must be in prior contact with a warship with the resources to launch a commando assault—a capability that many in the international fleet do not possess. “If a crew in the middle of the Indian Ocean broadcasts that they’re going into lockdown,” Mody told me, “and there is no naval asset in a hundred-mile-or-so radius—which is basically VHF [high-frequency radio] range—then no one’s going to hear them.”