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[John Feltham]

The below article was sent to you from Mike Feltham (mj.feltham at madasafish.com 
) with the following message: I thought you might be interested in the  
article below.

Protection from pirates would be a fitting tribute to modern seafarers
Monday 15 September 2008

ON THE Dover waterfront the other day, a beautiful memorial to the  
dead of the British merchant navy was unveiled.

In the Second World War the merchant navy lost a higher proportion of  
its workforce than any of the combatant services. This sacrifice,  
commented a fine old chap interviewed by local television, had been  
“largely forgotten”, as has the merchant navy itself. It is a  
beautiful work of figurative sculpture, eminently more worthy of a  
position on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square than the pretentious  
rubbish that has occupied that site in recent years.

Of course, this collective amnesia about what we owe merchant mariners  
is an international problem. Just the other day, on the embankment  
opposite the International Maritime Organization, there was a group of  
tourists being lectured by a guide. He was burbling on about the Tate  
Gallery and MI6, and resolutely ignoring the important UN agency  
across the road behind them all. There, on his green copper bow, his  
heaving line on his arm, stands the international seafarer, looking  
out over the Thames, and a memorial to all those thousands, from every  
race and nationality, who have died at sea. If I had an ounce of  
courage I would have urged them all to turn around and lectured them  
on the significance of that lonely figure looking out of the IMO  
building’s facade. But I hurried on and must be considered guilty for  
my neglect.

But it is far from a matter of historical remembrance, this inability  
to consider the importance of seafarers and the essential nature of  
shipping. You might think of it as a contemporary ailment, as we take  
what they do completely for granted. Look at what is going on, almost  
on a daily basis, in the Gulf of Aden and off the Somali and Nigerian  
coasts, with the local warlords picking off large merchant ships  
practically at will. Who knows about this criminal ‘harvesting’ of  
merchant mariners for ransom, along with their ships? And more to the  
point, who is interested? Where are the stories of these criminal acts  
in the newspapers and network TV stations?

It is over the horizon, outwith the understanding of those who will  
confine their outpourings on marine transport to dashing off a few  
hundred words on the evils of transport miles, or the frightfulness of  
oil pollution.

There is a sort of grim parochialism that does not help, either.  
Piracy was, albeit briefly, given some temporary exposure when a group  
of German business folk on a chartered yacht off Sicily were held up  
by some bandits in a rigid inflatable and relieved of a sizeable sum.  
The seizure of a couple of French yachtsmen by the Somali pirates was  
actually noticed by the mainstream media, which had conspicuously  
failed to register the fact that there were some 180 merchant mariners  
from ten big ships currently in the bloodstained hands of the  
warlords, while negotiations for their ransom ground slowly on. But  
nobody knows that they are there, because nobody thinks it that  
interesting.

I am reminded of the 1990s and a particularly grim period in the  
scandal of the bulk carrier sinkings, which naturally featured at some  
length in this newspaper. After the loss of a couple of capesizes with  
their entire crews, I was called up by a TV presenter from one of the  
network channels, who seemed to think that this was a story worth  
covering. I have to say I encouraged him in this belief and he turned  
up in this office to determine the facts of the terrible losses, which  
were running then at more than two bulkers every month.

Perhaps I had misled him, because as the interview progressed, it was  
clear that what he was interested in was the loss of British bulk  
carriers. There was the Derbyshire, of course, ten years previously,  
but in the long list of sunken bulkers with which I presented him,  
this was the only ship which flew the Red Ensign and in which Britons  
had died. You could see his initial enthusiasm visibly waning and he  
eventually closed his notebook and took his leave. There would be no  
TV programme exposing this horror story, because dead foreign seamen  
in foreign-flagged ships would not raise a flicker of interest in the  
bored eyes of the producers, who like Roman emperors in the VIP seats  
of the arena, would give the thumbs down to such a project, quick as  
wink. Dead merchant mariners make no waves.

So if I was a Somali warlord, controlling a flotilla of small craft  
running illegal immigrants, guns and narcotics into the Arabian  
peninsular and trying to employ my heavily armed crews on the return  
voyage in the absence of any paying backhaul cargo, I would be  
avoiding headline grabbing prizes like yachts, or even cruiseships,  
which would attract unwanted media attention. I would be focussing my  
efforts on large slow merchant ships, the bigger the better, as  
clearly size begets larger ransoms, and my activities would pass  
almost unnoticed, except for the cursed IMO, the International  
Maritime Bureau and a few interfering international shipping  
organisations like BIMCO.

I would also be cautioning my captains to exercise a little care, as I  
have determined that there is a level of violent piracy that the  
authorities represented by the naval forces, seem able to tolerate, or  
might at the very least be seen be seen as politically acceptable. I  
would have made it clear that if some rash employee, out of his tiny  
skull with an overdose of qat, fires a missile or RPG into a gas  
carrier and sets it on fire, or inadvertently ignites a laden very  
large crude carrier because he so lazy that he cannot be bothered to  
climb up a ladder and stop it by holding a gun to the master’s head,  
he better not bother coming home. We don’t want to unduly provoke the  
infidel navies, or even frighten all the merchant ships around the Cape.

In my idle moments, I sometimes wonder whether such an imaginative  
scenario might not have a touch of reality about it. Nearly 200  
merchant seamen hostages is not an inconsequential number. If it had  
been 200 French yachtspersons or cruise passengers being exposed to  
heaven knows what frightfulness in some awful Somali coastal  
settlement, there would be serious military action, because there  
would be political pressure to intervene and end this nonsense.  
Merchant seafarers do not register on the international outrage meter.

And it is not entirely because the warships that are in the region’s  
waters are circumscribed in their actions, or, with the exception of a  
German frigate, prohibited from beating up any pirates they encounter.  
There are clearly not enough of them and they have other priorities,  
like showing the flag in the Straits of Hormuz and keeping the peace  
in the Gulf. A few frigates on passage or on patrol can have only a  
limited ability to effectively police the large number of small craft  
which may be fishermen, or traders, or combining this with an  
opportunist act of piracy.

Despite the energetic efforts of IMO secretary-general Efthimios  
Mitropoulos, who managed to activate the UN Security Council over the  
issue of hot pursuit, it is still the paucity of naval resources which  
gives the pirates the opportunities they need for a successful heist.  
Nelson complained bitterly about his want of frigates, and those  
operating naval assets in these troubled waters doubtless would  
understand his dilemma perfectly. It is resources, tightly controlled  
by those holding the naval purse strings, that will make the  
difference here; resources that are activated only by political  
pressure.

It is the fragmentation of the maritime industry that tends to act  
against it in these circumstances. The hostage taking pirates have  
taken ships from a dozen different flag states and their crews are no  
more or no less representative of the seafaring population at large.  
It is notable that the attacks upon two large Malaysian ships provoked  
the despatch of a frigate from that country to reinforce the patrol  
line. But a similar reaction from the Turks and Caicos, or a similarly  
peace-loving open register might seem a trifle unlikely, in the case  
of one of their ships being seized. It is when the chips are down and  
ships are in trouble in the badlands that the civil authorities find  
that their hands are tied. One wonders whether the pirates have made  
the connections?

But all of this is very serious stuff. People have lost their lives  
and it is a minor miracle more seamen have not come to a sticky end at  
the hands of the pirates. British children still go to “pirate  
parties” and romance about Long John Silver, but if you baled up their  
21st century parents and told them that heavily armed villains were  
capturing big modern merchant ships and holding their crews to ransom,  
they would not believe you. And perhaps that is the trouble.

Seafarers, somehow, are expected to put up with this nonsense. But  
this is one of the world’s major trade routes, for oil and gas,  
containers and goodness knows what else. Have we got to convoy this  
vast tonnage to prevent the pirates picking it off at will? Are we  
going to see insurance interests getting nervous and whacking on huge  
surcharges? Might we see a move to send ships around the Cape. All on  
account of a gang of maritime bandits tooled up with modern weaponry.  
Are the lives of merchant mariners not worth a bit of armed effort on  
the Somali shore? Or, despite the reminders of figurative sculptures  
on the IMO building and overlooking the Channel at Dover, have we just  
forgotten to care about seafarers?







ooroo

If you don't hear the knock of opportunity - build a door.

Anon.