The Next 9/11 Could Happen at Sea
Published: February 22, 2005
London
AN unsuspected bit of good news related to the Indian Ocean tsunami was revealed this month when the International Maritime Bureau released its annual report on pirate attacks against international shipping. The new figures showed a 27 percent decline in 2004, to 325 incidents from 445 in 2003, and noted that there had not been single attack in the pirate-infested waters off Sumatra since the earthquake.
Now, while these figures show an improvement, the positive trend should not distract us from the huge threat that piracy, and its connection to terrorism, pose to the global economy.
Piracy did not disappear with the killing of Blackbeard. I found this out the hard way in 1992 when pirates boarded my sloop as I was crossing the South China Sea. After suffering a beating, I was able to escape. But many others have not been so lucky. Last year, according to the maritime bureau, some 400 crew members and passengers were killed, injured, held hostage or remain missing as a result of attacks. Every year the pirates are better organized, ambushing ships with military precision and firepower.
Merchant vessels are the lowest-hanging fruit of global commerce, slow and vulnerable to attack. Hauling 90 percent of world trade, these lumbering beasts file through the world's choke points - the Suez and Panama Canals, the Bab el Mandeb (the entrance to the Red Sea), the Straits of Gibraltar and the Malacca Strait between Indonesia and Malaysia.
It is the Strait of Malacca, the shortest sea route connecting the Indian and Pacific Oceans, that has maritime and intelligence authorities most worried. The passage, 600 miles long but just over a mile wide at one point, is the conduit for 50,000 ships a year, carrying a third of the world's commerce and half of its crude oil.
Despite the global decline in the number of reported attacks (many experts feel that there are hundreds more each year that go unreported), the number of attacks in the Malacca Strait increased last year to 37 from 28 in 2003. And, while many raids are likely carried out by crime syndicates, there is evidence that many have been the work of the Free Aceh Movement of northern Sumatra, an Islamist separatist organization that has been fighting to gain independence from Indonesia since 1976. While the United States does not officially call the group a terrorist organization, the Indonesian government does. And many terrorism experts cite its links to Jemaah Islamiyah, the Islamist group suspected in the Bali nightclub bombings of 2003, and to Al Qaeda.
In 2002, the Free Aceh Movement announced that vessels moving through the strait were to seek its "permission for safe passage," a classic protection scam. It has also admitted to attacking Exxon-Mobil natural-gas plants in Aceh. In March 2003, the chemical tanker Dewi Madrim was attacked by heavily armed pirates in speedboats in the Malacca Strait. According to the crew, the pirates, speaking Indonesian, seemed less interested in robbery than in taking turns steering the ship down the congested waterway. They took two officers hostage and a satchel full of technical documents. Singapore's defense minister, Tony Tan, said that he was concerned that this incident and others like it were practice runs for a terrorist attack.
Just as terrorists learned to be pilots for 9/11, terrorists may now be learning to be pirates. Purposely grounding a crude carrier hauling two million barrels of oil at a place like Batu Berhanti, where the strait is little more than a mile wide, would close the waterway indefinitely. The delay in oil supplies to China, Japan and South Korea could devastate their economies, setting off a global economic crisis.
Such concerns are why Potengal Mukundan, the director of the International Maritime Bureau, said he was encouraged that there have been no attacks since the tsunami. The coastal fishing villages, or kampongs, from which the attacks are launched have probably been severely damaged. Indeed, I cannot imagine how the kampong I visited in the late 1990's, a backwater village on stilts among the mangroves, could have survived a tidal surge as high as 10 feet. "Many of the pirates may have died," Captain Mukundan said.
It is also possible that the large American military presence as part of the tsunami relief efforts in Aceh has given the pirates pause. In fact, American officials have been calling for a show of force in the Malacca Strait for some time. Adm. Thomas Fargo, head of the Pacific Command, told the House Armed Services Committee last year that the United States should team up with the Malaysian and Indonesian Navies to deploy special forces on high-speed boats to counter pirates. Unfortunately, the defense ministers of those countries rejected the plan, saying that the American military patrolling the strait would violate their sovereignty. (Another concern was that aligning their nations with American policy could add to the tensions both are experiencing with Islamic fundamentalists.)
Now, one hopes, these countries will take note of what an increased military presence can accomplish, because the pause in piracy will not last forever, nor will the cease-fire the Free Aceh Movement made with the Indonesian government in the aftermath of the tsunami. Unless Indonesia and Malaysia accept American help in fighting them, the pirates will be back. And we'll be lucky if plundering loot is all they have in mind.
John S. Burnett is author of "Dangerous Waters: Modern Piracy and Terror on the High Seas.