Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe / Bloomberg
Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe / Bloomberg
The world’s largest shipping company demanded a more effective military response to increasing pirate attacks and record kidnappings off the coast of West Africa.
The number of attacks on ships worldwide rose 20% last year to 195, with 135 crew members abducted, the International Maritime Bureau’s Piracy Reporting Center said on Jan. 13. report. The Gulf of Guinea accounted for 95% of the hostages taken in 22 separate cases, and all three hijackings that took place, the agency said.
The attacks have driven up insurance and other costs for shippers operating outside of West Africa, with some resorting to hiring escort ships manned by armed navy personnel. AP Moller-Maersk A / S, which carries about 15% of the world’s ocean freight, said decisive action needs to be taken.
“It is unacceptable at this time that seafarers cannot perform their job of ensuring a vital supply chain for this region without worrying about the risk of piracy,” said Aslak Ross, head of maritime standards at Maersk in Copenhagen. “The risk has reached a level where effective military capability must be deployed.”
The Gulf of Guinea comprises a vast stretch of the Atlantic Ocean traversed by more than 20,000 ships a year, making it difficult for governments with insufficient resources to control police. Bordered by nearly 4,000 miles of coastline stretching from Senegal to Angola, it serves as the main thoroughfare for crude oil exports and the import of refined fuel and other goods.
Twenty-five African governments, including all those bordering the Gulf, signed the Yaoundé Code of Conduct in 2013 to tackle piracy. It is intended to facilitate information sharing and has established five maritime zones to jointly patrol, but has only been partially implemented and most navies remain focused on protecting their own waters.
Bertrand Monnet, professor of criminal risk management at France’s EDHEC Business School who has studied piracy in the oil-producing Niger Delta region of Nigeria for 15 years, estimates that up to 15 bands operate off the coast of West Africa, each with 20 to 50 members.
Hostages are usually held for ransom in Nigeria, the regional powerhouse that has led the way in preventing attacks. The government plans to deploy nearly $ 200 million in new equipment this year, including helicopters, drones and high-speed boats, to increase the Navy’s capabilities.
International intervention
Nigeria is committed to “ensuring that this threat of piracy in our waters is eliminated, so that those with legitimate business in shipping, fisheries and oil and gas can do business without fear,” Vice Admiral Oladele Daji, Commander of the Nigerian Navy’s western fleet, said in an interview.
Many shipowners are in favor of a more muscular international effort, modeled on the military response to hijackings off the coast of Somalia, which was the global epicenter of piracy from about 2001 to 2012. Armed guards and warships sent by the European Union, NATO and a US-led task force to protect ships passing through the Suez Canal, one of the busiest trade routes in the world connecting Europe to Asia, helped bring the problem under control .
Nigerian special forces sail to intercept pirates in a joint exercise off the coast of Lagos.
Photographer: Pius Utomi Ekpei / AFP / Getty Images
If national governments focus on their territorial waters – the 12 nautical miles (14 miles) from their coast – major naval forces could reduce piracy further up the gulf by deploying two or three frigates equipped with helicopters, Jakob Larsen said. , head of maritime security at the Baltic and International Maritime Council, a Copenhagen-based shipowners’ group. He considers such support unlikely because the sea routes are not as strategically important as those off the east coast of Africa.
“There is little international interest in getting involved in Nigeria’s security concerns,” he said.
The Liberian Shipowners’ Council urged the Nigerian authorities to disrupt the criminal activities of the pirates ashore. Improving employment for poor coastal communities would reduce the longer-term threat of piracy but will not address the immediate problem, said Kierstin Del Valle Lachtman, the council’s secretary general.
Attacks spread
Although the West African attacks were initially concentrated off the coast of Nigeria, they have since spread to the waters off Benin, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Ghana, Togo and Cameroon, said Kamal-Deen Ali, executive director of the Accra-based Center for Maritime Law. and Security Africa and a former Ghanaian naval officer.
Violent attacks in the Gulf of Guinea have remained fairly constant over the past decade, but kidnappings of more than 10 people are increasingly common, said Dirk Siebels, senior analyst at Risk Intelligence in Denmark.
The pirates are operating deeper and deeper at sea, with kidnappings taking an average of 60 nautical miles from the coast by 2020, according to the IMB. The farthest corner happened in mid-July, when eight machine-gun pirates boarded a chemical tanker off the coast of Nigeria and seized 13 crew members before fleeing. Only unqualified seamen remained on the Curaçao Trader, which remained adrift 195 nautical miles from the coast. The crew was released the following month.
“Perpetrators of such incidents are well aware that there is almost no risk of being caught,” said Munro Anderson, a partner at London-based maritime security firm Dryad Global. “That’s exactly the kind of incident that an international naval coalition could mitigate.”
– With the help of Gina Turner
(Updates with analyst comments in the third paragraph under Stories about stories.)