The New Pirates

Modern Global Piracy from Somalia to the South China Sea

Andrew Palmer

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781848856332
• eBook ISBN: 9780857734938
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Piracy is a significant global threat to international sea-borne trade - the life-blood of modern industrial economies and vital for world economic survival. The pirates of today are constantly in the world's news media, preying on private and merchant shipping from small, high-speed vessels. Andrew Palmer here provides the historical background to the new piracy, its impact on the shipping and insurance industries and also considers the role of international bodies like the UN and the International Maritime Bureau, international law and the development of advanced naval and military measures. He shows how this 'new' piracy is rooted in the geopolitics and socio-economic conditions of the late-20th century where populations live on the margins and where weak or 'failed states' can encourage criminal activity and even international terrorism. Somalia is considered to be the nest of piracy, but hotspots include not only the Red Sea region, but also the whole Indian Ocean, West Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia and the South China Seas.

CHAPTER 1

PIRACY: THE BACKGROUND

OUR PERCEPTIONS OF PIRACY

For most of us, children’s stories and films made us believe that pirates are mythical and romantic figures from a more dangerous age, exciting to look at from the safety of our world, an escape from the boredom of a predictable and secure environment. One can question whether humans naturally seek adventure, but our historical experience has been of danger and threat, and we are in many ways adapted to cope with such stresses; thrills and danger have an attraction for most of us; if this were not the case, then roller-coasters would close and horror filmmakers would go out of business. As a species we like to imagine how we can deal with hazards, a trait that has obviously had beneficial survival value.

Piracy is no longer about a romantic vision of the past, or of rare events in far-flung parts of the world, but is now a reality of life in the twenty-first century, and something that no amount of high-tech armament can effectively banish. In my opinion it is one of the symptoms of our changing world. In fact it is not only a symptom of change, but it also serves to illuminate emergent economic and political realities.

It is important to make comparisons with piracy in the past, which highlight the connections between past events and current developments. It is likely that places like Madagascar, and the islands of the South China Sea, which have been pirate centres in the past, will see piracy re-established in the twenty-first century.

THE RE-EMERGENCE OF PIRACY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

In the great sweep of history piracy is best understood if it is seen as a normal state of affairs at sea, and the relative peace of the past 150 years as an intermission. Relative is perhaps the operative word; the world has never been entirely free of piracy. A friend recalled to me a story told to him by his father, a Royal Navy officer in the 1930s, who saw the pirates he had just captured beheaded, on the beach, by the Chinese authorities. Such attacks continued to be a problem in the South China Sea, and in the coastal waters of the Philippines and Indonesia, throughout the twentieth century.

It is important to remember that the oceans, away from territorial waters, are essentially lawless; the sea is the territory of no country. The strict definition of piracy refers to hijacking and kidnapping on the high seas, outside the jurisdiction of any state. While it is true that some international treaties and conventions govern the high seas, and some states claim extraterritorial powers, in the main piracy takes place in a lawless environment. For those used to the idea that laws govern every aspect of their lives this represents a strange and unsettling concept. There is also an interesting juxtaposition of the ideas of human rights and international law, and the reality of dealing with the inhabitants of territories like southern Somalia, whose judicial system is now very basic, where it operates at all. This is a dilemma that lacks any obvious solution, given that summary execution has gone out of fashion. Logically the nations of the world should agree to extend the jurisdiction of the International Court to deal with piracy, but this would give greater power to that body and many governments, including the US administration, which would undoubtedly resist such a development.

CAUSES AND FACTORS

The reasons for the growth of piracy are fivefold.

(1) In territories (that may be parts of otherwise effective states) that lack effective governance, or where the governing state and its apparatus (the military, judiciary, police, bureaucracy and political structure) is itself controlled by the corrupt, or criminal, i.e. the state is predatory, then there is no effective restraint on the activities of those wishing to engage in crime, whether that crime is drug smuggling, arms running, slavery, human trafficking, or piracy. However, it is rarely the case that there is a state of total anarchy; even criminals need some structure. Many states exercise only partial, or spasmodic, control of areas of their territory. This is obvious in the case of Colombia and Peru, but it is also the case in most of Africa, and in countries like Yemen and Pakistan.

(2) Such territories have access to the sea, and to major shipping lanes.

(3) The inhabitants of such territories are desperate enough, and have the necessary sea-going and military skills to undertake such a hazardous venture. Poverty alone is not a sufficient cause.

(4) Piracy on the grand scale requires management and the existence of effective criminal organizations. Piracy is a crime, and needs to be considered on the same level as the drug trade and human trafficking.

(5) Finally, in order to be truly effective, piracy requires strong backers, links to international criminal organizations and to members of a national diaspora. These factors have been especially important in the case of Somali piracy.

David Anderson makes the important point, when writing about Somalia, that:

Piracy is not a function of the failure of the Somali state – and this assumption has perhaps been the most pervasive yet the most misleading of all. The reinvigoration of Somali piracy is connected to the reconstruction of the state in what was Somalia, not its collapse, and its consequences are therefore very serious for the future. Strengthening the state will not necessarily lessen piracy, though changing the character of the transactions conducted by state actors probably will.¹

Piracy in Somalia is not the result of state failure: that simple conclusion is far too readily reached by people who examine the chaotic mess that is Somalia, without adequate consideration of the situation. The reality is that the failure of the original Somali administration has caused a phase transition to another state of being, a period of virtually continual internal conflict and chaos. Marten Scheffer, writing about complex systems, refers to ‘critical transitions’ in dynamic systems, including societies that can transit between alternative stable states.² Stable government is therefore not inevitable, but is merely an alternative state. Scheffer argues that the loss of resilience increases the fragility of a system (including a state) and that ‘it can be easily tipped into a contrasting state by stochastic events’.³ He adds that when such a change occurs the cause is often sought, incorrectly, in the stochastic, or chance, events, rather than in the fundamental issues that have given rise to a loss of resilience within the system.⁴

Piracy is enabled by a lack of effective governance, and weakly, or ineffectively, governed areas are ideal for its operation, whereas total chaos would not permit the criminal ‘business’ of piracy. As Anderson says, it was the attempts by local strongmen and clan forces to recreate new forms of governance, particularly in Puntland, that have enabled piracy to develop, because piracy needs basic structures and communications. The proto-state of Puntland in the past provided an ideal support system for piracy.

In the language of complexity theory, Somali society moved from one attractor to another and has stabilized in its current state; therefore, a move back to a ‘national state’ with a central government is not inevitable. Much of the failure of international policy towards Somalia in recent years has been due to the failure to understand the nature of control exercised by ‘proto-states’ within Somalia and the resultant inability to acknowledge the relative stability of the present system. There has been an overwhelming desire to ‘restore’ the Somali state, which frequently leads individuals and organizations to ignore the facts on the ground; particularly the importance of developments in Puntland and Somaliland.

Piracy, on the scale now practised in Somalia, requires a number of structural support systems. First, the captives have to be housed and fed in protected areas, where there is little risk that they will be captured, killed or injured by violent gangs. Local people are employed to feed and guard captives and their ships. The equipment and supplies needed by the pirates have to be provided, though securing arms is not a huge problem. The government of the United States has generously donated large quantities of weapons from time to time to groups it supports, and these have then been freely sold in Mogadishu’s arms souk. Saudi Arabia, Eritrea and other countries in the region have also supplied weapons from time to time; all in contravention of the long-standing UN arms embargo. Money has to be transferred, not only to the men who man the skiffs and motherships, but also to the backers, local and foreign, and to those supplying intelligence from around the world on the movement of shipping and the cargoes carried.

There was even a basic form of stock market in Somalia where people could buy shares in pirate operations. Reuters reported in December 2009 that in Haradheere pirates set up a cooperative in August 2009 to fund their hijackings offshore, and this operated like a type of stock exchange. A local pirate, called Mohammed, told Reuters:

Four months ago, during the monsoon rains, we decided to set up this stock exchange. We started with 15 ‘maritime companies’ and now we are hosting 72. Ten of them have so far been successful at hijacking.⁵

Piracy actually paid for the social infrastructure of Haradheere, until the Islamists moved in 2010. According to a local official, ‘the district gets a percentage of every ransom from ships that have been released, and that goes on public infrastructure, including our hospital and our public schools’.⁶

Like any successful business, piracy in the region has meant increased imports of goods, including 4 × 4 cars and the employment of many in selling and supporting local customers.

Euromonitor said in 2010: ‘Surprisingly, air travel is actually enjoying positive performance in Somalia: Damal Airways, Daallo Airlines and Jubba Airways are all performing well.’⁷ Damal Airlines operate to Sharjah and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates from a number of airports in Somalia, including Bender Qassim International Airport, Bosaso and the reopened Mogadishu Airport, and there are regular flights from Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, Nairobi and also ‘khat’ flights out of Nairobi’s Wilson Airport, delivering khat from Kenya to a number of destinations in Somalia. The available evidence is that piracy, far from being a threat to Somalia, is transforming the economy of central Somalia. Kenya is also enjoying a property boom, as Somalis have invested their ransom money, and their profits from other enterprises, criminal and legitimate. In the period 2005–10 property prices in Nairobi increased between two- and three-fold.⁸ Far from being isolated from the rest of the world, successful Somali businessmen (including those making money from piracy) are able to travel freely and invest their money abroad. The same air routes also deliver the navigation and communications equipment needed by the growing pirate ‘companies’.

This may sound counter-intuitive, but in fact we have been fed so much non-reflective analysis by the media that we all too frequently accept such conclusions. Typical of this is a comment by David Randall in The Independent:

Western security agencies say that Somalia has become a safe haven for militants, including foreign jihadists, who are using it to plot attacks across the impoverished region and beyond. As many have pointed out, the only lasting solution to the problem of piracy on the high seas is a political solution to anarchy on dry land. Until then, the capture of ships and crews will continue.⁹

A more balanced view is that Somalia is a territory in which a number of groups are violently competing for control of the resources of the country, and that the conflict at a local level is still fundamentally tribal, whereas foreign elements, and those Somalis allied to them, including the agents of states, often express their desire for influence and control by the use of ideological language, including support for and opposition to Islamic extremist philosophies. A political solution to the many problems of Somalia will not be possible until the inhabitants of the former Italian colony of Somalia decide that they wish to renounce violent conflict, something that Somaliland (the former British colony) did in the period up to 2010. Given the strength of the competing parties, which are variously supported by agents from the United States, Ethiopia, Egypt, France, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Kenya, in addition to criminal elements from Italy and elsewhere, and individuals espousing ‘terrorism’, and the current commitment of the UN, and other international bodies, to an imposed political solution, it is extremely unlikely that any lasting political solution for Somalia will be forthcoming in the near future; that is, one that is acceptable to the Somali people and the various international powers. However, one can only hope that the process initiated by the Garowe Principles can bring greater stability to Somalia.

It is difficult not to agree with David Anderson when he says that ‘Fundamentalism and terrorism are explicitly not the causes of piracy.’¹⁰ Somalia is a tribal society, in which conflict for scarce resources has deep historical roots. This is not in itself unusual; the history of the Scottish Highlands, of the Scottish Borders, and of Afghanistan, all give examples of such cultural predispositions. Modern Yemen and the southern provinces of Saudi Arabia also exhibit such behaviour.

A COALITION OF INTEREST GROUPS

Piracy in the twenty-first century is, in the main, the work of organized criminal gangs. The gangs may be small and opportunistic – groups of fishermen, off-duty policemen, or customs officers – but increasingly the threat has been from sophisticated professional pirate groups, well organized and with adequate funding. Somalia is currently the epicentre of these developments, but the lessons learnt there are being applied by criminals elsewhere in the world. That is not to say that piracy in Southeast Asia and the west coast of Africa will precisely mirror the Somali experience – there are different influences and traditions in each area – but the size of the multi-million dollar rewards realized by the Somalis will inevitably result in copycat behaviour.

Piracy, as it has developed in Somalia, involves a complex network of interest groups. The hierarchy of control involves local politicians and businessmen, tribal leaders and warlords, foreign investors, including members of elites living in the Arabian Peninsula, foreign criminals, expatriate Somalis, corrupt lawyers, bankers and officials. Like other forms of transnational criminal organizations (TCOs), modern piracy has seized the opportunities presented by globalism and new technology to become more effective. Furthermore, it has exploited the lack of restrictions placed on its activities in Somalia and Yemen. Like any other form of criminal activity, it is normally impossible to prove the involvement of individual players in piracy – piracy is like an iceberg; most of the information is hidden below the water-line. Only the operatives at sea, the actual pirates, are likely to be identified.

The driver of all such criminal activity is predation. Predation, in the human context, means the act of preying on others, taking material wealth from them and threatening them with the loss of life or injury. Such criminals can be compared to natural parasites, or species, like lions, that kill other animals in order to survive. The term has become popular as a description of the behaviour of political elites in African and Middle Eastern countries, in taking large shares of national wealth by the use of corruption and bribery, as well as the straightforward seizure of the wealth of others; as when politicians, generals and princes take the land of ordinary people without adequate (or any) compensation. In all societies that are not governed by the rule of law, and where despotic power is exercised, the individual lives a Hobbesian existence, ‘the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short’.

It is important to understand the concept of predation, because it underpins not only the behaviour of criminal gangs, including Somali pirates, but also the behaviour of elites in regions like the Horn of Africa and Arabia. Jane Novak refers to ‘Yemen’s pervasively corrupt environment’, and says that ‘officials are determined to retain the cash flows derived from corrupt practices and criminal enterprises’.¹¹ She could have been writing about any number of countries.

THE GROWTH OF PIRACY

For a long time the growth of piracy off Somalia was inexorable, doubling year on year. In 2009 the International Maritime Bureau (IMB) recorded 217 attacks on vessels by Somali pirates, nearly twice the 2008 figure, which in turn was over twice the 2007 figure of 44, and was over twice the 2006 figure of 20 attacks. In 2010, to early April, the IMB reported 36 attacks by Somali pirates, of which seven ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acronyms
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Piracy: The Background
• 2 The Political Development of Somalia
• 3 Stateless Territories and Clandestine Networks
• 4 The Pirate Coast
• 5 The Geography of Piracy
• 6 Pirate Operations
• 7 The Impact on the Shipping Industry
• 8 Legal and Insurance Issues
• 9 Vessel Defence
• 10 Are There Answers?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Back Cover