Wednesday, 10.01.08

The Chilling Innocence of Piracy

Photo by Jason Zalasky/U.S. Navy via Getty Images

Somali pirates hijacked a Ukrainian vessel carrying tanks and other military hardware in the Gulf of Aden. U.S. Navy warships have surrounded them.

This year alone, pirates have attacked 61 ships in the region. They have held 14 oil tankers, cargo vessels, and other ships with a total of over 300 crew members, and have demanded ransoms of over $1 million per ship.

The word "pirate" summons all sorts of romantic images from the great age of piracy in the 17th century Caribbean: a ship flying the Jolly Roger and manned by cutthroats with black eyepatches and sashes around their heads. The Indian Ocean pirate of the early 21st century -- in his flip-flops, tank-top, and light jacket -- is different in some ways but similar in others. Only through the distance of time can we find anything charming or romantic about Caribbean pirates, who were murderous thugs just like their modern-day Indian Ocean counterparts.

Piracy is the maritime ripple effect of anarchy on land. Somalia is a failed state with a long coastline, so piracy flourishes nearby, as it does offshore from other weakly governed states like Indonesia and Nigeria. But it is particularly prevalent off the Somali coast because the anarchy is far more severe than in the other two countries. The Somali civil war began in the early 1990s, but the country had, in effect, been broken up since a decade earlier. I was in Somalia in 1986; there was essentially no government at that time, and the country was a virtual ward of the United Nations. Then, Somali pirates were often unemployed male youth who hung around the docks, and whom the local warlord dispatched to the seas to bring back income for him. Piracy is organized crime. Like roving gangs, each group of pirates patrols a part of the sea. The waters in the Gulf of Aden might as well be a street in Mogadishu.

I spoke recently with several U.S. Navy officers who had been involved in anti-piracy operations off Somalia, and who had interviewed captured pirates. The officers told me that Somali pirate confederations consist of cells of ten men, with each cell distributed among three skiffs. The skiffs are usually old, ratty, and roach-infested, and made of unpainted, decaying wood or fiberglass. A typical pirate cell goes into the open ocean for three weeks at a time, navigating by the stars. The pirates come equipped with drinking water, gasoline for their single-engine outboards, grappling hooks, short ladders, knives, AK-47 assault rifles, and rocket-propelled grenades. They bring millet and qat (the local narcotic of choice), and they use lines and nets to catch fish, which they eat raw. One captured pirate skiff held a hunk of shark meat so tough it had teeth marks all over it. With no shade and only a limited amount of water, their existence on the high seas is painfully rugged.

The classic tactic of Somali pirates is to take over a slightly larger dhow, often a fishing boat manned by Indians, Taiwanese, or South Koreans, and then live on it, with the skiff attached. Once in possession of a dhow, they can seize an even bigger ship. As they leapfrog to yet bigger ships, they let the smaller ships go free. Because the sea is vast, only when a large ship issues a distress call do foreign navies even know where to look for pirates. If Somali pirates hunted only small boats, no warship in the international coalition would know about the piracy.

Off-hand cruelty is the pirates' signature behavior. In one instance, they had beaten, bullied, and semi-starved an Indian merchant crew for a week, and thrown overboard a live monkey that the crew was transporting to Dubai. "Forget the Johnny Depp charm," one Navy officer told me. "Theirs is a savage brutality not born of malice or evil, like a lion killing an antelope. There is almost a natural innocence about what they do."

The one upside of piracy is that it creates incentives for cooperation among navies of countries who often have tense relations with each other. The U.S. and the Russians cooperate off the Gulf of Aden, and we might begin to work with the Chinese and other navies off the coast of Indonesia, too. As a transnational threat tied to anarchy, piracy brings nations together, helping to form the new coalitions of the 21st century.

— Robert D. Kaplan

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