World Piracy Threat Down but Not Out
0Good news on the piracy epidemic in the Indian Ocean has come too late for some sailors, eager to get home after years cruising the world’s oceans. European yachts in particular have been stranded in South East Asia as the year on year prospect of running the Somali pirate gauntlet down the Gulf of Aden has been a very unattractive prospect. The alternative – to sail right around the Cape of Storms – at the bottom of South Africa, and then along trek over to Brazil through the Caribbean and back via the Azores seemed equally uninviting.
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For the wealthier, there has been the option of putting their yacht on to a giant yacht transport ship in Thailand which carries the yachts on board in relative safety all the way through to Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, minus anything upward of thirty thousand euros for the priviledge.
The International Maritime Bureau has reported that the piracy problem off the east African coast and the Horn Of Africa has eased this years with fewer hijackings and fewer seamen being taken as hostage. The IMB has its own Piracy Monitoring Centre which keeps a track on any pirate attempts anywhere in the world.
The Somali piracy issue has become of very serious significance to shipping passing through from the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea or vice versa over the last few years as the ever present pirate attacks became more numerous. The reduction in piracy has been credited to coordinated action by naval forces from several nations, especially the EU, USA, Australia and Malaysia. Some merchant shipping companies have resorted to spending many millions of dollars on hiring private armed security escorts to protect them as they transit the most dangerous area.
The IMB has, however, reported that while the situation off the East Coast of Africa has eased, the opposite has happened in the Gulf of Guinea. The number of ships attacked and hijacked off the coasts of Togo, Nigeria and Guinea has gone up as also has the number of similar incidents in Indonesia.
The number of ships hijacked by pirates in the Indian Ocean was down to 13 this year, and the number of incidents reduced from 163 to 69. The Somali pirate gangs are still holding 11 ships with 218 hostages in isolated and remote communities on the Somali coast.
Piracy itself includes both actual hijackings as well as armed robberies and hold ups. For most ordinary seafarers the prospect of one’s ship or yacht being hijacked and one’s life put up for ransom is a far worse prospect than an armed robbery. There were only 25 actual hijackings last year, but many more armed robberies involving attacks by armed gunmen boarding substantial sized ships. Most commercial ships these days have only very few crew on board and they are certainly not normally trained to defend the ship against an armed attack.
The IMB says that the Indian Ocean piracy threat, although less than in previous years, was still very serious and would require coordinated action by naval warships for years to come. Part of the problem is that the area in which the pirates have been operating is vast, stretching from inside the Red Sea to the coasts of Yemen and Oman to India, the Maldives, the Seychelles through to the coasts of Kenya and Tanzania. The pirates had become faster and more effective as they had accumulated millions of dollars paid out in ransom demands and the marine electronics and technology they had looted off the ships they had attacked.
