Numbers don’t lie: seafarers’ risk of piracy is exploding

The good news: successful pirate attacks fell over 50 percent in the Gulf of Aden (GOA) in 2010, from 117 the year before to 53.

The bad news: a record 1,181 hostages were taken worldwide in 2010, the highest number since records were first taken.

There were eight murders and thirteen crew members wounded, up from four killed and 10 wounded in 2009.

The numbers were released this month in an annual report from the International Maritime Bureau Piracy Reporting Center in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

While international warships receive credit for the GOA drop, the downside is that it forced Somali pirates to greatly expand their high risk area of attacks as far south as Mozambique and as far east as Oman. And experts predict they could push operations off of South Africa and toward Sumatra, in essence linking up with the pirates of the Malacca Straits.

“I’m afraid that the war on piracy might not be won until there is a stable government in Somalia,” said Commodore Michiel Hijmans, present commander of NATO’s Ocean Shield anti-piracy deployment.

Even though Best Management Practices (BMPs) have proven to deter numerous attacks and citadel safe rooms are credited with averting 16 hijackings, largely defenseless commercial sailors are proving to be less and less of a match against pirate gangs using hijacked mother ships as large or larger than their own vessels. Such mother ships allow pirates to fire from bridge level and use more powerful weapons than embarked security teams, said an analyst with the maritime consulting firm Risk Intelligence.

Mother ships have almost completely done away with the use of skiffs and fast motor boats. They allow gangs to stay out much longer because of more plentiful food and water and give them the ability to strike during monsoon season, when they used to be confined in coastal hideouts.

A consortium of maritime insurance carriers has considered financing a private navy to deal with the burgeoning pirate epidemic. But this intercept-rescue concept has only been kicked around for over a year with no actual steps of implementation taken because of financial, and especially liability, concerns. On the former point, the cost of deploying a limited number of vessels with helo strike capability and keeping a team of mercenaries on stand by is exorbitant. On the latter point, one emerging risk attorney who requested anonymity recited the number of parties who would have to sign off on agreeing to a rescue mission as follows: flag of registry, shipping company, management company, shipping unions (some vessels may have three or more unions represented), and crew members themselves.

Said an anonymous maritime security consultant from Maine, “it’s a great idea, until the first crew member is killed.”

So in the meantime, the international community is more concerned with the risk of 12 gauge shotguns and semi-automatic rifles getting into the black market than it is in making it feasible for vessels to carry legitimately armed and highly trained security guards.

For now, according to Ecoterra International, over 800 hostages aboard 45 hijacked ships sit and wait.

(Information obtained from Associated Press and AFP).