Pirates? What Pirates?
A growing problem the shipping industry would like to ignore
After they were set adrift in a lifeboat, the crew members of the tanker Suci caught one last glimpse of their ship steaming away--only it was no longer the Suci. Its funnel had been repainted black, and it bore a new name, Glory II. Still aboard were a cargo of 2,611 metric tons of diesel fuel, two of the ship's engineers, and a band of masked, knife-wielding pirates who had boarded the ship just six hours out of Singapore. A fishing boat rescued the crew 16 hours later, and the pirates freed the engineers 3 1/2 weeks into their ordeal. As for the Suci, its whereabouts remain unknown.
Every year, modern-day buccaneers plunder the cargoes of hundreds of oceangoing merchant vessels. Their booty can be just about anything: commodities such as sugar and paint, consumer goods such as cars and cameras, cash--or the ships themselves. Last year in Guayaquil, Ecuador, two men pretending to be port officials were served drinks by a hospitable shipmaster in his cabin; the two guests returned the favor by pilfering $2,710 from a safe after drugging the master. That was small change compared with the take of six bandits last year in Hong Kong waters. After storming a barge carrier, they transferred five containers of frozen food onto another boat. The cold cuisine may have netted the thieves more than $300,000.
Typically, thieves board at night while the ships are in port. Most are small-time pilferers, but organized criminal gangs, some equipped with high-speed boats to overtake vessels at sea, are staging increasingly sophisticated--and sometimes violent--attacks.
Audacious. "There is no doubt that attacks on vessels have become more audacious, more violent," concludes a recent report from the International Maritime Bureau, a London-based agency affiliated with the International Chamber of Commerce. In late April, pirates boarded a tanker in Santos, Brazil, held the crew at gunpoint, and threatened to blow up the vessel if the crew resisted. The pirates got away with $18,000 in cash and valuables. Owners generally advise crews not to risk their lives by resisting pirates, but in several recent incidents crew members have been wounded or killed. One of the most violent attacks occurred in February 1996 when pirates shot nine crew members to death aboard a fishing boat near Basilan Island in the Philippines.
Indonesia is one current piracy hot spot: Merchant ships have to slow down to navigate its narrow channels, and thousands of islands offer a haven for escaping bandits. Other hot spots include Brazil, notorious for its lax port security, and Africa, especially from Mauritania to Angola.
The IMB estimates that losses from piracy reach $200 million a year. That is still substantially less than the toll taken by other forms of maritime theft. One increasingly popular scam involves so-called phantom ships. A syndicate will buy an old freighter, set up a network of dummy offices, and forge documents. When an unwitting shipper consigns a cargo to the fake company, the ship sails off, changes its name, and unloads the goods on the black market. The IMB informally estimates that these and other scams cost at least $1 billion a year.
Captains uncourageous. Yet over the past two years, piracy incidents counted by the IMB have more than doubled, to 224 last year, and experts believe that half or more of attacks go unreported because shipowners worry that the costs of disclosure outweigh the benefits. "I've talked to sea captains who had guns put to their mouths and were physically threatened; some have been traumatized and never want to go back to sea," says IMB Director Eric Ellen. "The problem is that the industry does not want incidents reported. They don't want their reputation scarred." Shippers fear that official investigations will delay shipments, increase insurance premiums, prompt demands for higher pay by nervous crews, and raise questions about their credibility among clients who can switch carriers at a moment's notice. Some have even lobbied the IMB to lower its official tally of incidents; the Asian Shipowners' Forum complained that the IMB's catchall definition of piracy--which lumps together violent acts on vessels in transit with the usually less costly, though more common, thefts aboard ships moored in ports--exaggerates the picture.
The shipowners' attitude in part reflects an understandable fatalism. On most of the world's 28,500 merchant vessels, sailors are not armed. In several recent encounters, crews successfully repelled armed pirates by training their fire hoses on them as they attempted to board. But for the most part, the only defense merchant ships have is to steer clear of the worst areas. The Baltic and International Maritime Council, an industry group that represents more than 55 percent of the global merchant fleet, acts as a clearinghouse for information on piracy incidents and sends warnings about hot spots to port authorities and shippers. An advisory from the council warning its members to keep 50 nautical miles from the coast of Somalia--where pirates were known to board merchant ships by pretending to be members of the Somali Coast Guard--contributed to the recent dramatic drop in piracy incidents in that region.
That most governments show little enthusiasm for apprehending well-armed pirates or enforcing piracy laws when they do only adds to the fatalistic outlook. U.S. piracy laws have not been revised since 1847, notes Samuel Menefee of the Center for Oceans Law and Policy at the University of Virginia; the very word piracy "conjures up images of Treasure Island," he says, making it hard to get law enforcers to take today's growing problem seriously.
All too typical is the case of the 30 pirates who took over the Cypriot-registered Anna Sierra as it sailed through the Gulf of Thailand on Sept. 13, 1995. They set the ship's 23 crewmen adrift on tiny rafts without food or water. The thieves renamed the ship the Artic Sea (clumsily misspelling it), painted its hatch covers gray, and sailed the vessel unhindered, along with its $4 million in sugar, to Beihai in southern China. Though officials there detained the ship for five days after it arrived, the case quickly became ensnared in legal wrangles. Chinese authorities are about to auction off its cargo. The pirates (whose passports identified them as "entrepreneurs") were allowed to stay in a hostel, and some of them even posed for a group photo before they were finally released earlier this year, escaping prosecution. Blackbeard, wherever he is, must be smiling.
[Map is not available.] Hot spots for pirates Reported piracy attacks more than doubled from 90 in 1994 to 224 last year. [Map labels]: Brazil: 16 attacks; Indian Subcontinent: 26 attacks; Thailand: 15 attacks; Indonesia: 57 attacks; China, Hong Kong, Macao: 9 attacks Source: International Maritime Bureau
This story appears in the June 23, 1997 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.