By Miren Gutierrez*
ROME, Nov 19 (IPS) – The oil tanker Sirius Star may be the largest ship to have been hijacked so far, but piracy is far from rare. In all 251 such incidents worldwide have been reported this year to the Piracy Reporting Centre (PRC) of the International Maritime Bureau.For ship crew, sailing can often be a matter of life and death.
In the first six months of 2008, 71 vessels were boarded, 12 vessels were hijacked, and 11 vessels were fired upon. A total of 190 crew were taken hostage. Seven were killed, and another seven are missing, presumed dead, according to the International Maritime Bureau (IMB). The IMB is a non-profit organisation established in 1981 as a focal point in the fight against maritime crimes and malpractices.
“The overall number (of incidents) is slightly higher than last year…but in the Gulf of Aden and the east coast of Somalia there has been an increase of hijacking incidents with hostages, of incidents with guns and rocket-propelled grenades, of fire aboard the ships. The level of violence associated is a lot higher,” says IMB Manager Cyrus Mody in a telephone interview from London.
Sailors have been advised by Commercial Crime Services (CCS), the anti-crime arm of the IMB’s International Chamber of Commerce, to “be extra cautious and to take necessary precautionary measures” around Bangladesh, Indonesia, India, the Malacca Straits, the Philippines, the Singapore Straits, Lagos and the Bonny River (Nigeria), Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, Somalian waters, Brazil, Peru and the Arabian Sea. “But the waters around Somalia, including further south off Kenya, are very high risk areas, the most dangerous,” says Mody.
“Somali-based piracy in and beyond the Gulf of Aden is the most dangerous at the moment, with significant numbers of attacks on oil workers off Nigeria also taking place, and similar incidents happening off Indonesia. And to that you also have to add the less well publicised acts of theft by gangs in ports and inshore waters on several continents and in many nations,” says David Cockroft, general secretary of the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), in an emailed interview from London. The ITF includes 654 unions representing about 4.5 million transport workers in 148 countries.
Although a very old trade, piracy grabbed headlines around the globe when the ‘very large crude carrier’ (VLCC) Sirius Star — owned by Vela International Marine, a subsidiary of the company Saudi Aramco, was captured by Somali pirates this week. The ship was carrying two million barrels of oil (a quarter of Saudi Arabia’s daily production), worth 100 million dollars. Its crew of 25 includes 19 Filipinos, two British nationals, two Poles, a Croatian and a Saudi.
The pirates have captured other ships, including a cargo ship with grain from Hong Kong, with 25 sailors, and a fishing vessel with a crew of 12 registered in Kiribati, a tiny island nation in the Pacific. Hijackers in the area now hold dozens of vessels, the IMB says. The waters between Somalia and Yemen are a major artery used by nearly 20,000 vessels a year heading to and from the Suez Canal.
