Pirates in Somalia are at it again. Over the weekend they claimed their biggest prize to date: a Saudi oil tanker the size of three football fields, laden with $100 million in crude oil.
Before you summon romantic images of rum-soaked swashbucklers gallivanting "Pirates of the Caribbean"-style, consider this: The sophistication of the most recent attack has the attention of U.S. Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
On Monday Mullen said he's "stunned" at the pirates' ability to hijack a vessel in the open ocean so far from the coast (though most attacks occur closer to the Gulf of Aden, this one took place 450 miles off the coast of Kenya).
"[The pirates are] very well armed. Tactically, they are very good," Mullen said.
Indeed, the seizure of the Saudi tanker is the latest in a series of high-stakes incidents in recent months. Piracy has long plagued the waters off the Horn of Africa, but attacks this year have spiked 75 percent, according to this video from AP.
Just last week, the British Royal Navy got into a firefight with Somali pirates attempting to hijack a Danish cargo vessel. As the Times of London recounts:
Pirates caught redhanded by one of Her Majesty’s warships after trying to hijack a cargo ship off Somalia made the grave mistake of opening fire on two Royal Navy assault craft packed with commandos armed with machineguns and SA80 rifles.
In the ensuing gunfight, two Somali pirates in a Yemeni-registered fishing dhow were killed, and a third pirate, believed to be a Yemeni, suffered injuries and subsequently died. It was the first time the Royal Navy had been engaged in a fatal shoot-out on the high seas in living memory.
But the mother of all Somali pirate attacks this year has to be the seizure in September of a Ukranian ship carrying, of all things, weapons -- $30 million worth. And as Wired summed up, we're not talking small arms here, but tanks and anti-aircraft guns. American and Russian warships raced to surround the hijacked vessel, but nearly two months later, the standoff is ongoing.
That brings us to the key question: What happens after the pirates seize a ship? As many have pointed out, it's not as if they have the means to easily offload crates of Soviet-era weaponry or thousands of barrels of Saudi oil. To find out, the New York Times' Jeffrey Gettleman went straight to the source, interviewing a spokesman for the pirates aboard the hijacked Ukranian vessel, who said, "We just want the money":
"We don’t want these weapons to go to anyone in Somalia. Somalia has suffered from many years of destruction because of all these weapons. We don’t want that suffering and chaos to continue. We are not going to offload the weapons. We just want the money."
And many pirates do, in fact, get ransom money. The Christian Science Monitor reports:
Ransoms that used to be in the tens of thousands of dollars a few years ago can now be a few million dollars. And this has been a good year for pirates: Total ransom payments for 2008 could top $30 million....
Q. & A. With a Pirate: “We Just Want the Money”
Somali pirates in small boats hijacked the Faina, a Belize-flagged cargo ship owned and operated by Kaalbye Shipping Ukraine, on Sept. 25.Sugule Ali, the spokesman for the Somali pirates holding hostage the Faina, a Ukrainian freighter loaded with weapons, spoke to me by satellite telephone today from the bridge of the seized ship. In the holds of the Faina, which the pirates seized on Thursday, are 33 Russian-built battle tanks and crates of grenade launchers, anti-aircraft guns, ammunition and other explosives. American officials fear that the weapons could fall into the hands of radical Islamist insurgents who are battling Somalia’s weak government. My questions were translated into Somali, and Mr. Ali’s responses into English, by a translator employed by The New York Times.
Q. Tell us how you discovered the weapons on board.
A. As soon as we get on a ship, we normally do what is called a control. We search everything. That’s how we found the weapons. Tanks, anti-aircraft, artillery. That’s all we will say right now.
Q. Were you surprised?
A. No, we weren’t surprised. We know everything goes through the sea. We see people who dump waste in our waters. We see people who illegally fish in our waters. We see people doing all sorts of things in our waters.
Q. Are you going to sell the weapons to insurgents?
A. No. We don’t want these weapons to go to anyone in Somalia. Somalia has suffered from many years of destruction because of all these weapons. We don’t want that suffering and chaos to continue. We are not going to offload the weapons. We just want the money.
Q. How much?
A. $20 million, in cash. We don’t use any other system than cash.
Q. Will you negotiate?
A. That’s deal making. Common sense says human beings can make deals.
Q. Right now, the American Navy has you surrounded. Are you scared?
A. No, we’re not scared. We are prepared. We are not afraid because we know you only die once.
Q. Will you kill the hostages if attacked?
A. Killing is not in our plans. We don’t want to do anything more than the hijacking.
Q. What will you do with the money?
A. We will protect ourselves from hunger.
Q. That’s a lot of money to protect yourselves from hunger.
A. Yes, because we have a lot of men and it will be divided amongst all of us.
Q. [There are 20 crew members, most of them Ukrainian, being held hostage.] How are you interacting with the hostages? Eating with them? Playing cards?
A. We interact with each other in an honorable manner. We are all human beings. We talk to one another, and because we are in the same place, we eat together.
Q. What if you were told you could leave peacefully, without arrest, though without any ransom money. Would you do it?
A. [With a laugh] We’re not afraid of arrest or death or any of these things. For us, hunger is our enemy.
Q. Have the pirates been misunderstood?
A. We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits [”sea bandit” is one way Somalis translate the English word pirate]. We consider sea bandits those who illegally fish in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas. We are simply patrolling our seas. Think of us like a coast guard.
Q. Why did you want to become a pirate?
A. We are patrolling our seas. This is a normal thing for people to do in their regions.
Q. Isn’t what you are doing a crime? Holding people at gunpoint?
A. If you hold hostage innocent people, that’s a crime. If you hold hostage people who are doing illegal activities, like waste dumping or fishing, that is not a crime.
Q. What has this Ukrainian ship done that was a crime?
A. To go through our waters carrying all these weapons without permission.
Q. What is the name of your group? How many ships have you hijacked before?
A. I won’t say how many ships we have hijacked. I won’t talk about that. Our name is the Central Region Coast Guard.
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