How Somali piracy became big business
BLOOD RANSOM
Stories from the Front Line in the War against Somali Piracy
John Boyle
Bloomsbury
298 pages; Rs 499
In March 2009, a Somali pirate named Abduwali Muse and his cohorts boarded the US-flagged Maersk Alabama, a 500-foot container ship headed from Djibouti to Kenya with a cargo of food aid. Captain Richard Phillips sent most of the crew to a secure room deep within the vessel, and when Muse got separated from the other brigands, the ship’s first engineer captured him. Meanwhile, three US warships arrived on the scene in response to the Maersk Alabama‘s distress call and navy SEAL snipers who parachuted on to it killed all the pirates except their leader. Captain Phillips is back at sea, Muse is serving a 34-year prison term in the US, and the incident inspired the Hollywood movie Captain Phillips, starring Tom Hanks.
“It was one of the most publicised and dramatic ship rescues”, writes John Boyle in Blood Ransom, a detailed, well-rounded and absorbing account of the scourge of piracy that has bedevilled shipping in the Indian Ocean over the past 10 years, and whose annual cost to the global economy is estimated at several billion dollars a year. The story is told through interviews with Somali pirates lodged in Seychelles jails, Seychelles government officials, former hostages and officials at the London headquarters of the European Union’s anti-piracy operations.
Mr Boyle – who ran a criminal law firm in the UK before turning to documentary film-making – writes that the root cause of piracy is Somalia’s descent into anarchy and lawlessness over two decades ago. With no functioning government to protect its waters, the seas off Somalia began to be pillaged of fish stocks by foreign fleets fishing illegally in the country’s waters, and polluted by the uncontrolled dumping of toxic waste. Small bands of Somali fishermen – calling themselves the “Somali Volunteer Coastguard”- then began “approaching the foreign vessels and hijacking them, to extract compensation.” Mr Boyle adds: “Nobody seems to dispute that this is how piracy started in Somalia.” But soon it had become big business, and “pirates now have financial backing from businessmen and investors outside Somalia”.
Not all cases of piracy end as cleanly as that involving the Maersk Alabama. Somali pirates generally aim to capture a ship with minimum casualties, then hold the vessel, its crew and cargo to ransom for millions of dollars, with average times between capture and release running into many months, sometimes years. They typically put out to sea in a “mother ship” carrying drums of fuel, water and food, together with AK-47 assault rifles, RPGs, and boarding ladders, with two attack skiffs in tow, which are launched once a potential victim is sighted. The pirates then board it, hold the crew and the ship hostage and set sail for the Somali coast. Once there, they hold all the advantages.
One of the pirates Mr Boyle meets – who is referred to simply as “the Captain” – describes how a hijacking is carried out. The interview reveals that Somali piracy does indeed amount to organised crime, and that the foot soldiers are well-briefed about what to expect once they board a ship. The other, a man named Maalin Daud Olat, tells the author that pirate gangs are recruited by “companies”, are told exactly what they will be paid if they capture a ship, and have to sign for everything with which they are provided – fuel, boats, food, guns and ammunition.
The extent of the scourge is staggering. The average ransom paid per ship sky-rocketed from $150,000 in 2005 to $5.4 million in 2010. In the years 2010 to 2012, between 2,000 and 3,000 Somali pirates extracted ransoms of nearly $430 million from the world shipping community. Between 2005 and 2011, the outlaws captured well over 200 vessels and nearly 4,000 sailors. At the peak of their dominance in January 2011, they simultaneously held 32 ships and 736 crewmen hostage. And though the cost to the world economy has declined dramatically from $12 billion in 2010 to $3.2 billion in 2013, this still worked out to $139 million per pirate attack.
Mr Boyle does not focus only on high-value targets from the developed countries. He also writes about crews (including Indians) captured on uninsured and ageing vessels of little value, who are abandoned by the ship-owner, with no hope of the ransom being raised, and who have spent up to four years in captivity. These hostages have John Steed, a retired British Army colonel who has taken up their cause over the last few years, to thank for their release.
The decline in Somali piracy is the result of a concerted policing effort by the world’s navies, including India’s. Cargo ships and oil tankers also began carrying armed security teams, and these have helped foil some attempts at hijacking. But there is unanimous agreement among the book’s dramatis personae that the real solution lies in Somalia itself and not on the high seas: the international community needs to do whatever it can to ensure that the rule of law and economic development return to Somalia, so that its young men can make an honest living. Or else, Mr Boyle warns, it is only a matter of time before the modern-day buccaneers return.