Feral Jundi

     If this is true, this would be a very interesting development that kind of slipped through the cracks last year.  I first read about this in John C. Payne’s book on piracy on page 104.  I was kind of surprised to find such information, and I decided to do a little snooping around on the web.  The only reference I could find for this was in the ECO Terra publication I posted below. That is it.  Nothing mentioned in the media and nothing mentioned on the Puntland Government website. I even scanned through the Puntland Government constitution to see if they had an Amendment that authorizes their government to issue a Letter of Marque.  It did not.(although they did come up with a new constitution later on that summer, so maybe their older one had it in there)

     That’s not to say they did not issue one. It is just surprising to me that there has been nothing mentioned in the media about such things.  So hopefully with this post, the Puntland Government can confirm or deny what Mr. Payne printed in his pretty extensive book about the subject of piracy.

     If this is true, I believe this would be the first modern use of the LoM in over a century.  (Or at least half a century if we can ever get a confirmation on the Airship Resolute LoM that was supposedly issued by the US during World War Two.)  –Matt

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From the ECO Terra publication.

MT SEA PRINCESS II and her crew of 15 seafarers (including 8 Indian and 2 Yemeni sailors) is free. The coastal fuel transporter, a 1,902 gross tonnage Oil Products Tanker built in 1977, was bound to deliver 2,000 tonnes of diesel fuel to the disputed Island of Socotra, when it was seized near Jabal Al Kalb off the Bir Ali coast by an armed gang on 3rd January 2009. The St Vincent & The Grenadines flagged ship is owned by Hodduia Shipping Comp. and managed by OSSCO from Hodeidah in Yemen.

The cargo belongs to three Somali businessmen from Yemen and Somalia, which made the freeing of the vessel difficult, since the owner left it to these Somalis to find a solution. They turned to sending an armed vessel, whose owner was equipped with a Letter of Marque by the former Puntland Government. (Such Letter of Marque makes a pirate a privateer – either a government sanctioned pirate, or a “sea ranger” working on commission. An 1856 treaty called the Declaration of Paris prevents many nations from issuing Letters of Marque, but Somalia is not one of those nations.)

That “coastguard” ship drove the MT SEAPRINCESS II far down the coast into coastal areas of a clan basically hostile to the captors of the vessel and pirates of a different group. Luckily the coastal mercenaries ran out of fuel before they could engage the Sea Princess in a battle at sea, which would have been extremely dangerous due to her fuel cargo. A complicated negotiation process involving a new mediator finally brought the solution. A safe release in Somalia without any bloodshed can take time. The last pirates left this morning and right now the crew and vessel will come into Bossasso harbour, where the crew will get some rest in order to then return guarded to Yemen.

Story here.

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Somali pirates free Yemeni ship

Apr 26, 2009

NAIROBI (AFP) — Somali pirates have released a small Yemeni freighter and its 15 crew, held since January, the Kenya-based environmental organisation Ecoterra International said Sunday.

“The MT Sea Princess II and her crew of 15 seafarers, including eight Indian and two Yemeni sailors, is free” said the non-governmental organisation which closely monitors piracy off Somalia.

“The last pirates left this morning and right now the crew and vessel will come into Bosasso harbour (off northeast Somalia) where the crew will get some rest in order to then return guarded to Yemen.”

The small ship, flying the Saint-Vincent flag, belongs to three Yemeni and Somali businessmen.

It was seized by pirates on January 3 when it was on its way with 2,000 tonnes of fuel on board to the Yemeni island of Socotra.

A total of 16 ships and 273 sailors are currently being held by Somali pirates pending the outcome of negotiations for ransom money for their release.

According to the International Maritime Bureau, pirate attacks off Somalia have increased tenfold in the first three months of this year compared with the same period in 2008, going from six to 61.

Story here.

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Piracy Today: Fighting Villainy on the High Seas

By John C. Payne

April 8, 2010

Part I: The Resurgence of Piracy

Chapter 1: With Seeming Impunity

Piracy in the twenty-first century has flourished in part because merchant ships have become more technologically advanced, and, consequently, crews have become smaller. The world’s largest container ships, which carry between eleven thousand and fourteen thousand containers, are fully automated. A crew of only a dozen or so merchant mariners is all that’s needed to operate these vessels, and with such a small crew it only takes an equally small number of heavily armed pirates to snatch a ship. Years ago, much smaller merchant vessels required a crew of forty-five hands. Such a large crew would pose a major logistical problem for pirates determined to seize a ship and hold the mariners hostage.

Piracy is also helped by the vagaries of jurisdiction, sometimes confused and tumultuous international diplomatic relations, and divisive international political issues, all which work in its favor. Pirates and their sponsors know how difficult it is for nations to stop them, and they use the situation to maximum advantage. Modern piracy falls into a few different categories. There are opportunistic pirates who attack and rob ships for cash, valuable materials, and the personal effects of the crew. There are pirates who set the crew adrift in lifeboats and hijack the ship. They repaint, rename, and re-register it, and sell it and the cargo.

Still others change the ship’s identity with forged documentation, then charter the ship and load the cargo, only to disappear with the cargo, which is then sold. These pirates are most prevalent in Asia. A final category of pirates has surged to prominence in the last decade. These are the ones you read about most often. They attack and take a ship and crew, holding both for ransom. Primarily this occurs within the Gulf of Aden. However, there have also been many ransom incidents in the Malacca Straits and South China Sea.

The pirates of the past and the pirates of the twenty-first century do share some similarities. Pirates need somewhere to prey upon shipping. In the sixteenth century the Caribbean was an ideal spot. Spanish galleons laden with gold and silver from the New World were easy pickings. Today, pirates favor the Gulf of Aden and the Straits of Malacca, ripe with ships carrying an unlimited variety of easily disposable cargoes.

Pirates also want a safe haven. They’ve got a good one in the Malacca Straits, with more than seventeen thousand islands that make great hiding places and with a population willing to protect and shelter them. In the Gulf of Aden, the lawless and anarchic Somalia provides a similarly welcome haven for pirates. Like the pirates of the past, today’s buccaneers have plenty of firepower, as opposed to virtually defenseless merchant mariners.

Misinformed journalists in media reports continue to portray the pirates as amateurish thugs, often trivializing them in articles and making references to the romanticized swashbucklers seen in the movies. But today’s pirates are not amateurs. They are professionals out to make big money, and they have no regard for human life unless it can turn a profit through a ransom payment. The pirates are very efficient at attacking in small boats and then capturing large, unprotected high-value ships with equally high-value cargoes.

Just a few pirates are able to hold the ship, its cargo, and the unfortunate crews for large ransoms, usually amounting to millions of dollars. And the problem is made worse because they almost always get the money, generally without harm to the hostages or themselves. That is if all goes according to plan. When it doesn’t, people die. As the saying goes, success breeds success. In 2005, the typical ransom averaged between $100,000 and $200,000. By 2009 the average ransom had soared to more than $2 million.

Obviously, then, piracy today is lucrative. That’s why it’s on an upward spiral. For example, the United Nations reported that Somali pirates collected roughly $150 million in ransom payments in 2008. Total losses in ransoms, ships, and cargoes as a result of piracy are estimated at around $15 billion.

The piracy problem persists and grows despite the presence of large, modern navies from powerful nations that routinely patrol pirate-infested waters. At times, the navies seem powerless to stop the attacks, though their presence does seem to deter attacks in some cases. Often, the navies are unable to rescue captured vessels and crews. They are also politically and judicially shackled as to the prosecution and punishment of any pirates they do capture, which further enhances the environment for piracy to flourish.

Some experts in the shipping industry believe that piracy will usually go unpunished, regardless whether they report an incident or not. Unfortunately, they are correct. Some industry experts also say that only 10 percent of all piracy incidents are actually reported, a sad but largely true statistic. In addition, they believe certain national governments or agencies are involved in piracy and support it, or at least look the other way. True again. Theories that spies working for pirates have infiltrated shipping companies, port and customs authorities, and other entities abound. This may or may not be true.

Why owners of merchant ships are reluctant to report piracy incidents is understandable, even if it encourages the pirates to increase the number of attacks to garner more and more profit. If an attack occurs and is unsuccessful, it’s typically ignored and unreported because a piracy report generates negative media coverage and increases insurance premiums. If a piracy attack occurs and is successful, shipowners often keep quiet about it and negotiate directly with the pirates without involving government officials. Reporting an incident can cost a lot of money in daily operating expenses for a ship idled during an investigation and for delayed delivery of valuable cargoes.

Daily operating costs average $10,000 for smaller ships and up to $100,000 for larger craft. These larger ships can carry cargoes valued up to $100 million. Insuring ships, crews, and cargoes is expensive, and so are ships sitting in port when they should be at sea. Filing reports and instigating investigations causes time-consuming delays. Investigating authorities are often incompetent individuals correctly assuming that there will be no positive outcome to the investigation in most instances, so the perception in the industry is that reporting piracy amounts to a waste of time and money. The reality is that the costs and losses incurred when reporting an unsuccessful or even a successful pirate attack are typically higher than the cost of the attack itself.

Most of us have a basic idea of what piracy is, but in the legal arena it has some very specific definitions. While it makes for a bit of dry reading, it’s well worth keeping in mind the legal terms when you think about piracy. After all, piracy is as much a crime today as it was in the days of Edward Teach, otherwise known as Blackbeard, who ended up having his severed head dangling from the bowsprit of a British naval ship after he was killed in battle.

Piracy and armed robbery are clearly defined in the following definitions, as applied to incidents at sea. Many argue that robbery of vessels at anchor or at a dock is not piracy, and perhaps rightfully so. For our purposes the term pirate applies to all ships attacked while under way, either on the high seas or in territorial waters. The term robbery will be used for incidents that occur while a ship or yacht is anchored or tied up at a pier. Politically motivated attacks, such as terrorist acts, are not executed for material gain and are also not classified as piracy in its truest sense.

The gist of Article 101 in the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea defines piracy as consisting of any of the following acts: any illegal acts of violence or detention, or any act of depredation, committed for private ends by the crew or the passengers of a private ship or a private aircraft, and directed on the high seas against another ship or aircraft, or against persons or property on board such ship or aircraft. The language also includes a ship, aircraft, persons, or property in a place outside the jurisdiction of any state, and any act of voluntary participation in the operation of a ship or of an aircraft with knowledge of facts making it a pirate ship or aircraft. Any act inciting or intentionally facilitating an act described above also counts.

Armed robbery against ships, which is defined in the Code of Practice for the Investigation of the Crimes of Piracy and Armed Robbery Against Ships (resolution A.922 (22), Annex, paragraph 2.2), is a little less complicated and reads as follows:

“Armed robbery against ships means any unlawful act of violence or detention or any act of depredation, or threat thereof, other than an act of piracy, directed against a ship or against persons or property on board such ship, within a State’s jurisdiction over such offences.”

As previously mentioned, pirates generally are not captured or punished, making the above legal definitions somewhat moot in many cases. However, laws are on the books that provide for punishing acts of piracy, though they differ from nation to nation in severity and effectiveness. They are also difficult for some national governments or agencies to enforce. Somalia is a hotbed of piracy, as evidenced in the news on a regular basis, and throughout this book the piracy problem there will serve as an excellent example of piracy today worldwide. Let’s take a look at what happens to pirates who are caught in Somalia.

Centuries ago pirates were punished with extraordinary brutality. In 75 B.C.E., Cilician pirates from southern Turkey kidnapped Julius Caesar while he was on a voyage across the Aegean Sea. He was held for ransom at the Dodecanese islet of Pharmacusa. The pirates initially demanded a ransom of twenty talents, not a very large sum of money. Somewhat miffed, Caesar insisted that the pirates increase the ransom to fifty talents, a sum more in keeping with his position. On payment and his release, he raised a fleet of ships, hunted the pirates down, and crucified them all.

Nobody cared much when pirates were hung, beheaded, or otherwise brutalized, and that is not surprising. Pirates were and are a menace. In London, the central location for capital punishment was known as Execution Dock. The name arose in the nineteenth century when British naval vessels brought many pirates there for execution. The British were superb pirate hunters (and pirates, too!). In the United Kingdom, the death penalty for piracy on the high seas remained on the statute books until 1998.

Modern pirates know that unless things go seriously wrong and they get killed during the execution of an attack, or they encounter a naval vessel, they will either get the money or will get captured and then released because no one knows what to do with them. Punishment is actually the lesser of the risk than attacking a ship or running from a naval vessel. Instead of arrest and imposing the death penalty, the United Kingdom, for example, has told its naval forces not to detain pirates. The fear is that detention might breach the human rights of the pirates, or that the pirates may even claim political asylum.

The British Foreign Office reasoned that any pirates subsequently returned to Somalia after detention could have their human rights violated, based on certain Islamic laws. It said the pirates might be beheaded for murder or have a hand cut off as the penalty for theft. Apparently, this was unacceptable punishment in the view of the foreign office. This line of reasoning was and still is highly objectionable to some people in the United Kingdom, who believe that the Somali pirates should get what they deserve under the laws of their own country. One politician, a member of parliament, was reported as saying that the pirates commit horrendous offences and that the convention on human rights quite rightly doesn’t cover the high seas. He went on to say that the action was a pathetic indictment of what the legal system in the United Kingdom had come to.

While the pirates in Somalia and elsewhere do act with relative impunity, some of them get caught, tried, and convicted. The number is small at this time, but perhaps it will grow as more nations begin to take the worldwide piracy problem more seriously. As the piracy problem off Somalia ramped up, the Russian Navy took decisive action. In the spring of 2009, it had twenty-nine pirates in custody aboard its naval vessels operating in the area. France held fifteen, and sent eleven of them for trial ashore in Kenya. France was and still is serious about combating pirates. By mid-2009 it had detained seventy-one pirates and killed four. Three Somali pirates detained in the French city of Rennes faced a judicial investigation following their capture after a hostage rescue. The United States was holding one pirate in the spring of 2009 after the famous Maersk Alabama incident, which will be highlighted later. The pirate was awaiting trial in New York at this writing. Three pirates were shot and killed in the same incident.

In all, the U.S. Navy sent 101 alleged Somali pirates to Kenya for trial. Seventeen of them were detained after failing to seize the Egyptian cargo vessel Amira in May 2009, after putting up some initial resistance to U.S. Navy forces and marines from the South Korean Navy. To date, ten of these pirates have been convicted and have received prison sentences of only seven years each, a fairly short term given the nature of the crime. At the time of this writing, holding cells in Mombasa, Kenya, were running short. Additional suspects were to be transferred and held in the coastal town of Malindi, about eighty miles north of Mombasa.

The Somali police are also trying to clamp down on the piracy problem. On one occasion a senior police commander in Puntland led a raid on a pirate base near the port of Bossaso, where they arrested five alleged pirates as they prepared to head to sea to perpetrate more mischief. The pirates were armed with AK-47 rifles and a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. They were arraigned in a local court on piracy charges. One significant factor in the renewed vigor in chasing pirates is that the Somali government is now paying salaries to their employees, including the police, when in the past they weren’t due to the continued economic plight of the nation.

In another case, a Mombasa court found ten Somali men guilty of piracy after a long trial. The destroyer USS Winston S. Churchill captured them following the hijacking of an Indian dhow, Safinat Biscarat, and its crew of sixteen off the coast of Somaliland. The pirates were trying to use the dhow as a mother ship to attack other vessels. The U.S. destroyer confronted the dhow, chased it, and fired warning shots. The pirates surrendered. The judge in Mombasa described the men as dangerous criminals and dismissed their claims that they were simple fishermen who had been rescued by the Indian vessel after their own boat experienced mechanical problems. A piracy conviction carries a possible life sentence in Kenya.

In July 2009, twenty-two alleged Somali pirates were brought before a court in Aden to face piracy or attempted piracy charges for acts committed within the Gulf of Aden. Russian and Indian naval vessels had captured the men in late 2008 and early 2009. One group were said to be involved in the seizure of a Yemeni fishing dhow and the kidnapping of twelve Yemeni fishermen, who were held as hostages. The pirates then used the dhow as a mother ship from which to launch an attack on an Ethiopian merchant vessel. The Russians captured ten of the men after they attacked an Iranian fishing boat off Socotra Island. All of the accused pleaded not guilty under the Yemeni Counter Abduction Law. The sentences, if they are found guilty, range from five to ten years in prison. The pirates claimed that they were all fishermen and that the charges were trumped up fabrications at the hands of nefarious Western forces.

Essentially, pirates are waterborne gangs, and it’s common for the gangs to fight one another over any number of issues such as territory, base locations, and, of course, money. In a noteworthy case, two gunmen killed one of the most notorious pirates in Somalia, Bi’ir Abdi, along with another pirate, while he was driving the streets of Garoowe, the capital of Puntland. The gunmen were captured shortly thereafter and kept in protective custody to guard against a retaliatory attack. The killings stemmed from a dispute over money.

Pirates seizing fishing vessels for use either as mother ships or as attack boats is a common pattern throughout the world, and especially in Somalia. These actions have upon occasion generated a violent response among the Somali people. In fact, regional leaders in northern Puntland went so far as to organize a militia of fishermen to hunt down known pirates and bring them to justice.

Any captured pirates in Somalia are now more likely to face the death penalty under recently reinforced measures announced by the Somali government. In April 2009, Somali militiamen captured twelve heavily armed pirates in two boats and turned them in to Somali officials for prosecution, an indication of efforts to stamp out the piracy problem using any means possible. This is a hopeful development, but it’s akin to a sandcastle in a rising tide. The rapid growth of piracy in Somalia and elsewhere is simply too big a problem for militias to handle. It will take a concerted effort on many levels—social, economic, political, and military—to make any progress in the war against villainy on the high seas.

From Piracy Today: Fighting Villainy on the High Seas by John C. Payne. Copyright © 2010 by John C. Payne. Reprinted with permission of Sheridan House, Inc.

Story here.

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