No 4 2010 Shipgaz 67
Safety
Spotlight Photo: US Navy / Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Jason R. Zalasky
produce some uncomfortable comparisons. One suspects that a study of the safety culture aboard many ships prior to hijacking would come to the conclusion that it has not been well developed.
Handling firearms without killing oneself or one’s fellow crewmates requires the highest level of safetyawareness. Anyone familiar with maritime accidents can only conclude that such a level of safety awareness is a rare commodity aboard ships. To judge by the maritime casualty record the result of arming seafarers will be that more seafarers die in accidental shootings than die at the hands of pirates. Remember, too, that when it comes to guns, if you can shoot your enemy he can also shoot you. And being under fire is somewhat different to popping off a few rounds on a shooting range at a target that does not shoot back. Then, of course, there are the ethical, and liability, considerations of ordering a seafarer into a greater way of danger. A live hostage will go home sooner or later, dead people stay dead.
Should we ask seafarers to put their lives on the line for a few tonnes of sugar, or oil, or plywood? Or dollars? Even with armed guards aboard the ship, armed response may not be holistically beneficial nor have a useful deterrent effect. It may simply drive pirates away from one attack but leave them with the resources to carry out another. It may be akin to driving cockroaches out of the bathroom and into the bedroom. Single-point non-lethal weaponry, such as Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) and its variants, has yet to really prove its usefulness in the maritime domain and unless part of an over-all strategy is likely to be less effective than, say, dropping 55 gallon waterfilled drums on the pirate skiffs.
A benefit of the citadel system, and Best Management Practices generally, is that pirates are required to expend their resources, including time, which they can ill afford. Pirates leaving a citadel-defended ship are at greater risk of being captured by naval forces and have less where-
A suspected pirate skiff burns after being destroyed by the amphibious dock landing ship USS Ashland.
»Piracy is no more going to disappear than the Mafia, Columbian drug lords or politicians’ broken promises« withal to conduct another attack. In other words it is a holistic solution that goes beyond the defence of a single ship. The maritime industry itself must learn to be more pro-active than it has been in the past. When I first met Eric Ellen, founder of the International Maritime Bureau in the late 1980s, he was angry at the secrecy with which the industry shrouded piracy. Later, piracy was referred to as “The maritime industry’s dirty little secret”. In that darkness pirates prospered like cockroaches in a wet sewer. In a sense, the industry was complicit in promoting piracy through silence. It is now paying the price for that complicity, so are seafarers.
The brutal fact is that piracy is no more going to disappear than the Mafia, Columbian drug lords or politicians’ broken promises. Pirates, like the poor, will always be with us. The two are linked. Take a coastal community with little or no opportunity to feed itself and piracy will result. So where do we go from here? Short term solutions will not prosper. No single-point approach will prosper. More out of the box thinking is needed.
Far from home Somali pirates are intensifying attacks away from their own coast. The first report on a Somali hijacking in the Red Sea came in July, 2010, when Somali pirates hijacked a chemical tanker in the southern part of the Red Sea, reports IMB.
The greatest threat to seafarers off Somalia is not loss of life but the trauma that arises from being a hostage. Many former hostages have left the industry forever, a loss the industry cannot afford. Effective anti-piracy drills and training, and proper use of a citadel system, may indeed prevent a vessel being seized but attention must be given in anti-piracy training in how to be a hostage. It must inculcate the message that, regardless of the pirate’s threats and intimidation, the seafarer can be secure in the knowledge that he, or she, will be going home to his family and back to his life.
The industry must also take on board counselling for freed hostages and support initiatives to provide counselling. This will reduce the numbers of seafarers leaving the industry at a time when manpower and especially trained and experienced manpower, is needed, mitigating one of the hidden costs of piracy. It is worth remembering that, other than the warlord recruiting children to piracy, a major factor in the development of piracy were toxic waste dumping and illicit factory fishing. Appeals to the West to reign in this destruction of one of the few Somalian resources have been firmly ignored. The Somali complaint that the allied warships are there to defend those who are poisoning the country’s waters and denying its fishermen the ability to fish is not without foundation.