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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 &#8220;largely forgotten&#8221;, 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&#8217;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 &#8216;harvesting&#8217; 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&#8217;s head, he better not bother coming home. We don&#8217;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&#8217;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 &#8220;pirate parties&#8221; 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&#8217;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?

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