For pirates, jail's okay

By Jane Switzer - Thursday, July 1, 2010 at 10:20 AM - 0 Comments

REUTERS

A Dutch court sentenced five Somali men to five years in prison last week for attacking a Dutch Antilles-flagged cargo ship, in Europe’s first piracy at sea trial in modern times. Ahmed Yusuf Farah, 25, Jama Mohamed Samatar, 45, Abdirisaq Abdulahi Hirsi, 33, Sayid Ali Garaar, 39, and Osman Musse Farah, 32, were convicted of assaulting the Samanyulo in the Gulf of Aden in January 2009. The attack was thwarted by the Danish navy and the ship’s Turkish crew, who destroyed the Somali boat with flares.

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It’s pirate season on the high seas

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 2:00 PM - 0 Comments

Last week, in a brazen attack, a gang of Somali pirates took on a U.S. Navy frigate. The caper predictably backfired, but it’s another episode in the long-running narrative of piracy in the anarchic waters off the African country’s shore—and it won’t be the last. U.S. officials warn that piracy attacks are expected to increase as the Indian Ocean enters a period of relatively calm weather.

The April 1 incident took place off the western coast of the Seychelles. The USS Nicholas, working in support of U.S. Africa Command, exchanged fire with a skiff before chasing it down. Finding ammunition and cans of fuel onboard, officials arrested three suspected pirates (along with two more on the mothership, which was also confiscated) before sinking the vessel. It was just one of a spate of attacks; according to the European Union’s naval force, the rate of pirate activity in March was double that of September to November. Earlier this week there was another major attack, as pirates hijacked a South Korean oil tanker.

Last week, the U.S. Maritime Administration warned of increased piracy off the Horn of Africa and in the Indian Ocean: “Mariners must be vigilant and prepare for potential attacks,” warned David T. Matsuda, acting maritime administrator, attributing this to the end of monsoon season and the increased range of recent incidents. What to do with captured pirates is another problem. Naval officials said those captured by the USS Nicholas would remain on board until officials determined how to deal with them. The EU is also in search of a solution. Kenya agreed to try those captured by the EU naval force, but the country now holds over 100 pirates and says it can’t take any more. The bulk of the problem will likely have to be handled on shore: until Somalia, whose government collapsed in 1991, achieves stability, stopping the marine criminals will be difficult.

Beating up on Somali pirates

By Patricia Treble - Thursday, September 3, 2009 at 5:20 PM - 1 Comment

Thirty-four members of two Egyptian fishing boats returned to a hero’s welcome in Suez on Sunday after being held captive by Somali pirates for four months. Their arrival came nine days after they overpowered their captives and regained control of the boats, captured while in the dangerous waters of the Gulf of Aden.

Precisely how the Egyptians accomplished the feat is something of a mystery. Almost all of the fishermen told reporters a different story. Adel Abdel-Atti said there was a 35-minute fistfight before the Egyptians overwhelmed their captors. Osama Watan said they attacked while the pirates were resting. “One of us who delivered their lunch signalled to us when they had laid down their weapons,” he told AP. “That’s when we knew it was time to either attack or be killed.” But perhaps the best explanation cames from one of the ship’s owners, Mohammad Nasr, who said that the other owner, Hassan Khalil, hired his own gang of Somali gunmen. Nasr went on to state that after paying a US$200,000 down payment, Khalil conned his way onto his own ship and got the fishermen to distract the pirates while his mercenaries boarded and retook the vessels. Continue…

This cabbie hunts pirates

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Monday, January 12, 2009 at 8:00 AM - 8 Comments

To hear Abdiweli Ali Taar tell it, the pirates’ days of hijacking and plunder off the Somali coast are coming to an end. Early in the new year, vows the former Toronto cab driver and Le Château sales clerk, he will lead his men into battle. And the world’s media, should they choose to ignore the obvious risks, are welcome to bear witness. “We are going to where the pirates are holding the ships. I’m going to attack them,” Taar says via a crackling cellphone connection.

The Puntland Coast Guard—or as they are known for business purposes, the SomCan (short for Somali-Canadian) Coast Guard—will face long odds. Taar’s armada consists of one armed 30-m patrol vessel and three rusting hulks with anti-aircraft guns mounted on the decks, captured from his adversaries in a previous skirmish. He has 210 militiamen in his employ. The pirate gangs—10 at last count—are said to have as many as 1,000. And then there is the question of motivation. The ransom demand for the Saudi supertanker Sirius Star, one of close to two dozen vessels currently being held off the coast, is US$25 million. The asking price for the MV Faina, a Ukrainian ship laden with Russian tanks, ammo and rocket-propelled grenades, is a cool $20 million. Taar’s men earn $400 a month.

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Useful advice for Canadians who might end up jailed in Somalia: pretend to be British

By Michael Petrou - Wednesday, November 19, 2008 at 9:59 AM - 3 Comments

A New York Times photo essay about Somalia’s pirates identifies an inmate jailed in the Somali port city of Boosaaso as Canadian Gure Ahmed. 

The World Desk called Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade to ask if they had any information on the man. After two days of research, they replied that they have never heard of him, which, among other disturbing implications, suggests no one at DFAIT is familiar with Google.

The topic of Canadians jailed abroad is one I will be exploring in more depth in an upcoming article in the print edition of Maclean’s.

Blackbeard still lives

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Thursday, October 9, 2008 at 12:00 AM - 0 Comments

Fred Parle has some mementoes of the 47 days he was held hostage on a boat off the coast of Somalia this past winter: a fishing hat and an autographed 1,000-shilling note (current value 78 cents Canadian) that a senior pirate gave him as going-away presents. A file of notes, drawings and doodles from the lesser thugs that the 68-year-old Irishman hopes might someday form part of a book. Occasional nightmares. And the sure knowledge that even life’s most terrifying experiences eventually become quotidian. “They always had a Kalashnikov pointed at your back,” he says from his home in County Sligo. “But after a while you become rather blasé.”

Last Feb. 1, Parle, a marine engineer, was one of six crewmen aboard the 35-m Danish tugboat Svitzer Korsakov when it was set upon by two small boats filled with men brandishing machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, 130 km off the Somali coast. The two dozen pirates, mostly young, khat-chewing militiamen, had the drill down pat. First, they directed the boat to their home port of Eyl, where 20 more of their fellows came aboard to share guard duty and discourage any rescue attempt. Then they stripped the ship of everything that wasn’t related to the engines or navigation. Finally, they fired off their US$2.5-million ransom demand to the tug’s owners, and settled in for the long weeks of negotiation. “There was no politics, or religion,” says Parle. “Just a straight focus on the money.”

With the exception of their two English-speaking leaders, the pirates were uneducated and seemed to know little about life at sea, afraid even to approach the controls on the bridge. But they had a shared commitment to keeping their meal tickets—the hostages—safe from harm. When the negotiations, conducted every afternoon by satellite phone, bogged down, there were threats, but no violence. And even after Parle and the boat’s captain, Colin Darch, an Englishman, hatched a plan, sending off a coded message to Copenhagen, dousing the boat’s lights, and barricading themselves in the engine room while they waited (fruitlessly) for a rescue mission from a nearby U.S. warship, there were no recriminations. “They broke down 13 watertight doors with hammers and chisels. It took them 19 hours,” recalls Parle. “But they seemed more relieved that we were okay than angry. We were precious cargo.”

As the weeks of captivity stretched into months, the pirates’ biggest concern became the fiscal drain of guarding the Svitzer Korsakov and its tiny crew. Their leaders kvetched endlessly about the expense of the daily rations of chapatis, goat and camel’s milk, and their inability to redeploy their resources toward the capture of other, potentially more lucrative vessels. In the end, Parle took it upon himself to broker a deal between his captors and the private security firm handling negotiations for the ship’s owners. He won’t discuss the terms of the agreement, but Capt. Darch recently told a British researcher that the pirates dropped their asking price to $900,000, and finally settled for $678,000—hand-delivered in cash.

It’s been a good year for one of the world’s oldest professions. With three months to go in 2008, global piracy is on pace for a record year, with just short of 200 attacks reported so far. The majority of incidents remain what some term “sea muggings”—opportunistic robberies of yachts and smaller ships travelling through long-time hot spots like the Niger Delta, the Bangladeshi coast, and the heavily travelled Strait of Malacca between Indonesia and Malaysia. But it is the more spectacular hostage takings off the lawless Somali coast that have captured the public imagination. Right now, 10 gangs with an estimated 1,000 members are plying the waters off the Horn of Africa, one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes. Sixty ships have been attacked—more than 20 of them captured—and 12 vessels with a combined 259 seafarers are currently being held hostage. In a report released last week, Chatham House, a U.K. think tank, estimated shipping companies and governments have paid US$18 million to $30 million in ransoms since the beginning of January. And the Somali pirates are growing bolder. The demand for the release of the Ukrainian freighter MV Faina, its 21-member crew, and cargo of 33 Russian-built T-72 tanks, ammo and rocket-propelled grenades, is a cool $20 million.

Such brazen hijackings have left the world community scrambling to formulate a response. Off the Somali coast, more than 20,000 ships a year travel through the Gulf of Aden—the gateway to the Red Sea and Suez Canal—including tankers ferrying 30 per cent of the world’s oil. The United States and its war-on-terror allies already have 10 warships in the region, including the Canadian frigate HMCS Ville de Québec, currently escorting World Food Program (WFP) shipments to Somalia. Russia and Malaysia have now dispatched additional patrol vessels to the Gulf, and this past week, the European Union announced plans to launch its own anti-piracy patrols. But the chances of stamping out the problem by simply increasing vigilance seem slim. With a safe haven ashore, no domestic authority willing, or able, to take them on, and more than four million square kilometres of water to hunt upon, the pirates retain the upper hand.

“It’s a very dynamic business,” says Hans Tino Hansen, the head of Risk Intelligence, a Danish security intelligence firm. A year ago, there was only one significant pirate gang—the Somali Marines, who date back to 2005—and a handful of part-timers. Now, “the success rate and relatively high ransoms are fuelling a rapid expansion,” Hansen says. And as shipping companies and governments change their tactics, so do the pirates. Attacks close to shore, especially off south-central Somalia, have dropped dramatically since foreign warships began escorting WFP boats into Mogadishu’s harbour. Now the pirates are focusing their energy on the Gulf of Aden, and, with the use of “mother ships,” staging raids on far distant seas. On Sept. 13, a French fishing trawler, Le Drennec, came under fire 790 km off the coast, but eventually managed to outrun its attackers.

Night vision technology vs. the eye-patch — harrrrrrrrr!

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, September 12, 2008 at 8:43 AM - 2 Comments

This year Toronto’s festival-goers have developed a curious ritual. At the beginning of every film, before the string of sponsorship trailers, there’s a stern panel of black-and-white text warning the audience about penalties for video piracy, preceded by an announcement that “night vision technology” may be used during the screening to detect anyone trying to pirate a film with a camera. Which brings on a chorus of mock pirate yells from the audience — “Aaaaaaargh!”

Once something like this gets established, it’s like virus that just keeps replicating. In the vast press screenings at the Cannes Film Festival, as the lights go down and the hushes, inevitably someone yells, “Raoul!” The joke dates back to a screening where someone looking for his friend, Raoul, in the darkness of the theatre simply yelled his name. Years later, Raoul! still gets a laugh every time.

Caribbean Queens

By Andrew Potter - Thursday, June 19, 2008 at 8:05 AM - 0 Comments

Gay marriage, it turns out, is a lot older than people think: In Phillip Bobbit’s Terror and Consent there’s a discussion of the practice, common amongst 17th century pirates, called matelotage,

“a formal, often contractual permanent union between two consenting adult men. These men, known as each other’s matelot jointly owned land and possessions, fought side by side, and nursed each other when ill. Matelots often drew up contracts stipulating that if one were to die, the other would inherit all his property, but even when contracts were not made, matelotage was such a prevalent practice that the surviving matelot was often awarded the property anyway.”

(thanks to the Handcaper for the pointer)