JAKARTA/KUALA LUMPUR, 5 October 2003 — “Pirates of the Caribbean”, the blockbuster movie, has been raking in the loot at theaters around the globe in recent months, but real-life pirates of the Malacca Straits have been doing roaring trade for years.
According to latest reports out of the London-based International Maritime Bureau (IMB), there has been a new spate of pirate attacks on oil tankers in the Malacca Straits, one of the busiest waterways for world trade where modern-day piracy is hardly a ho-ho-ho affair.
An IMB warning issued to commercial ships earlier this month warned that gangs of heavily armed pirates using fishing and speedboats have been targeting small oil tankers in the Malacca Straits.
The chief suspect, per usual, is the separatist Free Aceh Movement (GAM), a rebel group that has been fighting for an independent Aceh State in northern Sumatra for the past 27 years.
In late July, according to the IMB, there were three attempted piracy boardings of small oil tankers in less than a week off the Sumatra coast in the Malacca Straits.
In another recent case, a Malaysian-registered fuel tanker was attacked by a fishing boat containing 14 pirates armed with AK-47 and M-16 assault rifles.
After robbing the crew and forcing it to sail into Indonesian waters, the pirates took the master, chief engineer and a crewman hostage, leaving the ship to continue its passage. After protracted ransom negotiations, the hostages were returned unharmed.
Eyewitnesses said the pirates were clad in fatigues and claimed to be Aceh soldiers.
In the weeks immediately following Indonesia’s imposition of martial law on May 19 in Aceh, cases of piracy in the Malacca Straits fell off considerably, demonstrating that adequate patrols of these waters can produce immediate results.
But the dropoff in May and June was due largely to the deployment of Indonesian navy warships to the Malacca Straits to ship thousands of troops and equipment to Aceh to crush the separatist Free Aceh Movement (GAM), experts said.
Western diplomats in Jakarta opine that the piracy attacks have started up again, with renewed intensity, in July and August, because the GAM is desperately in need of money to finance its struggle against Jakarta.
“We know that piracy is one of the main sources of funding for militant organizations. Aside from robbing the ships, the pirates also resort to kidnapping crew and demanding ransom,” said Noel Choong, regional manager of the London-based International Maritime Bureau (IMB) office in Kuala Lumpur.
“However, many of these cases are not highlighted or even reported to authorities as ship owners prefer to just pay the demanded amount in order to avoid unwanted publicity,” Choong said in an interview with DPA.
Piracy has been on the rise in the Malacca Straits for the past five to six years, in tandem with Indonesia’s drawn-out political and economic turmoil in the wake of the Asian financial crisis of 1997 and the fall of military strongman Suharto in 1998.
According to the IMB, a total of 404 pirate cases were recorded worldwide in 2002, of which 144 reportedly occurred in Southeast Asian seawaters with 109 of these recorded in Indonesian waters — making it the most piracy-prone area in the world.
Of the total of 103 cases of piracy that occurred in international waters during the first three months of 2003, 28 of the cases occurred in Indonesia’s territorial waters.
“The reason piracy occurs is that people think they can get away with it,” said one Western diplomat in Jakarta. “There is no law enforcement, there is no naval enforcement, out there. The Indonesian navy has virtually no capacity to stop this piracy unless it just happens to be in the neighborhood.”
Indonesia has 117 ships to patrol an archipelago spanning 5,000 kilometers and including nearly 18,000 islands, and only 35 percent of the existing fleet is seaworthy.
Earlier this month the navy announced plans to spend $1.95 billion over the next decade to boost its fleet, with two submarines and four new battleships high on the shopping list.
The Navy Chief of Staff, Adm. Bernard Kent Sondakh, has managed to justify the new purchases by emphasizing the navy’s new role in cracking down on illegal fishing, a problem that costs the country an estimated $4 billion in lost revenues a year.
Piracy, deemed an international rather than a domestic problem — despite the war against GAM — by the government, is seldom mentioned as a reason to boost the navy’s spending.
Western security experts in Jakarta note that what the navy really needs to combat piracy are more patrol boats.
“Indonesia doesn’t need warships. They need patrol boats, they need fast boats for all the problems in Indonesian waters such as piracy, illegal fishing, illegal logging, drug trafficking and smuggling,” said one security specialist.
IMB’s Choong concurs that if Indonesia is serious about fighting piracy, it should be looking into the purchase of smaller and faster patrol boats rather than subs and battleships.
“The rate of piracy declines with the increase in patrols. So as long as there is a constant presence of authorities in the waters, pirates will steer clear,” he said.