The Jolly Roger business
By Raja M

MUMBAI - Piracy on the seas of the 21st century, already high, has suddenly turned much worse - so much worse that the Indian navy has proposed joint patrols of the Strait of Malacca with the Chinese navy. These are not the Pirates of Penzance. Pirates in speedboats pounce on cargo ships slowing in narrow waters, boarding them using grappling hooks, ropes or poles, and then flee with the loot to nearby small islands. Cutlasses and cannonballs have given way to machineguns, mortars and Molotov cocktails.

Pirate attacks on world shipping have risen by 37 percent year-on-year in the first half of 2003. The ICC International Maritime Bureau (IMB) says that it has catalogued 234 attacks compared with 171 in the same period in 2002. The recent IMB "Piracy and Armed Robbery Against Ships" report marked 26 ports and anchorages as happy hunting grounds for pirates: from Chittagong in Bangladesh, Chennai and Cochin in India, Pulau Pangkor in Malaysia, the Gulf of Aden, and Cuba, Cartagena, Buena Ventura in Columbia to Kingston, Jamaica.

The Malacca Strait off Indonesia - home to the infamous Bugis pirates that gave the world the name Bogeyman when British colonial mums in Singapore invoked the term to frighten their mischievous children - is one of the top piracy hot spots. Ships are warned against anchoring along the Indonesian coast, particularly near Aceh. Crime syndicates are targeting vessels carrying palm oil and gas oil. More than 600 ships pass the area daily, making it the busiest shipping lane in the world.

The coast of Africa is more dangerous yet. Ships are told to keep 100 miles off the Somali coast. "The risk of attack from Somali armed militias has now increased from one of possibility to certainty," the IMB said. "Any vessel not making a scheduled call in a Somali port, which slows down, or stops close to the Somali coast, will be boarded by these gangs."

The IMB, formed to protect shipping from these pirate gangs, is an offshoot of the Commercial Crime Services, a division of the International Chamber of Commerce. Since 1992, the IMB, with a base in Essex, England runs a much-appreciated piracy reporting center in Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital.

Funded by 21 organizations - mostly shipowners and insurers - the center leads the global anti-piracy warfare and reports pirate attacks and voluntarily assists ships that have been attacked.

Manoj Joy, seafarer, maritime law consultant and publisher of Waves, a free magazine circulated at sea, says that piracy cannot thrive without the connivance of local coast guard and port authorities. Joy was twice on ships attacked by pirates, once when he was on duty aboard an Iranian ship attacked off the Chittagong coast. "The pirates climbed aboard through the anchor line, tied up the ship watchman and looted the ship. They were very quick in their work."

On another occasion off Chittagong, Joy and his shipmates saw pirates boarding a ship and radioed the Bangladesh coast guard for help. "They simply ignored us, " Joy says. "The Chittagong port authorities were not helpful either when we wanted to hospitalize a sailor injured in a pirate attack."

The IMB publishes a weekly summary of pirate attacks worldwide. Eight incidents were reported in the first week of August. An Indonesian tug and a Singaporean barge disappeared; alert crews foiled two attacks in the Gulf of Aden; four pirates in two speedboats tried boarding a tanker in the Malacca Strait. The crew yelled and turned the tanker's fire hoses on the pirates, who scuttled away.

The IMB says that pirates mostly attack ships at anchor. "In some parts of the world it is all too easy to board a merchant vessel unlawfully," says IMB director Pottengal Mukundan. Unless coastal states patrol their waters more effectively, he warned, "we do not foresee a reduction in these incidents".

Not everyone is impressed with the IMB reading on piracy. Deputy commander VS Kothari of the Indian Coast Guard, eastern region, told Asia Times Online that the issue is being hyped. The IMB listed his base Chennai as one of the high piracy-risk areas. "Our problem is that even the theft of a one-meter rope aboard a ship is termed as piracy," Kothari says. "In fact, our headquarters in New Delhi has taken up the issue of how to define piracy: do we include petty thefts aboard ships or stick to only the serious incidents? We keep records and there is no serious piracy incident reported off the Chennai coast."

But the grim facts of violent pirate attacks are undeniable. The IMB says that 16 sailors have been killed and 52 injured so far in 2003, up from six killed and 21 injured the previous year. Some 165 ships have been boarded and nine hijacked. The IMB is worried that pirates are becoming better organized.

A headache since ancient Rome and the days of Pompey, piracy boomed in the 16th century. English privateers attacked Spanish shipping, North African pirates looted English ships and Madagascar pirates of the 18th century carried booty to French kings.

The Barbary Coast in North Africa became a Mecca for pirates. From the 16th to 19th century, Islamic states under the Ottoman empire occupied the Barbary Coast, backing pirates in the early 16th century. Barbary pirates were helped by wealthy sponsors who received 10 percent of the booty.

Less famous but powerful pirates thrived in the Far East. Pinyin Zheng Zhilong was a 17th century Chinese pirate king who dominated the period between the Ming and Ching dynasties. As a boy, Cheng was hired for work by Europeans in Portuguese Macau, was baptized and given the Christian name of Nicholas Gaspard.

Most Asian pirates were snuffed out by end of the 17th century. Strong navies in Japan under the Tokugawa Shogunate and in China under the Ching dynasty slaughtered them. The decline continued in the 19th and 20th centuries. Larger merchant vessels, communications technology and naval patrolling of most ocean highways dropped the Jolly Roger to half-mast.

But piracy revived in the late 20th century as crew sizes fell on larger, technologically advanced ships and lax security due to touchy international relations. Difficulties with jurisdiction, diplomacy and politics affected united anti-piracy governmental action. During a joint naval exercise planned this July, the Chinese navy demurred to an Indian navy proposal for conducting anti-piracy exercises in the Malacca Straits. Instead, the two most powerful Asian navies agreed to spend three days in search and rescue drills.

Maritime experts divide pirates into two types: petty thieves who rob the ship and sailors, leaving the crews alone and the ships adrift. Occasionally they hijack ships, set the crews adrift, repaint, rename and reregister and sell the ship.

Other pirates are often linked to organized crime. They change the identity of the ship with forged registration documents, sell cargo space to commodity traders, sail the paid-for cargo to a different port other than the one listed in the bill of lading, and sell the cargo. They again change the ship registration and continue the fraud.

Weary of lobbying for more governmental vigilance worldwide, the IMB has taken to promoting anti-piracy technology. Its Secure-Ship, a non-lethal, electrified fence surrounding the ship, uses a 9,000 volt pulse to deter pirates. An intruder gets an unpleasant non-lethal shock. Simultaneously, the alarm goes off, activating floodlights and a loud siren.

ShipLoc, an inexpensive satellite tracking system, lets shipping companies monitor the location of their vessels using only a personal computer with Internet access. Self-help, it appears, is the best help against 21st century pirates.

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