The Next 9/11 Could Happen at Sea

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February 22, 2005OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR The Next 9/11 Could Happen at SeaBy JOHN S.

BURNETT

 

ondon

 

AN unsuspected bit of good news related to the Indian Ocean tsunami was revealed

this month when the International Maritime Bureau released its annual report on

pirate attacks against international shipping. The new figures showed a 27

percent decline in 2004, to 325 incidents from 445 in 2003, and noted that there

had not been single attack in the pirate-infested waters off Sumatra since the

earthquake.

 

Now, while these figures show an improvement, the positive trend should not

distract us from the huge threat that piracy, and its connection to terrorism,

pose to the global economy.

 

Piracy did not disappear with the killing of Blackbeard. I found this out the

hard way in 1992 when pirates boarded my sloop as I was crossing the South China

Sea. After suffering a beating, I was able to escape. But many others have not

been so lucky. Last year, according to the maritime bureau, some 400 crew

members and passengers were killed, injured, held hostage or remain missing as a

result of attacks. Every year the pirates are better organized, ambushing ships

with military precision and firepower.

 

Merchant vessels are the lowest-hanging fruit of global commerce, slow and

vulnerable to attack. Hauling 90 percent of world trade, these lumbering beasts

file through the world's choke points - the Suez and Panama Canals, the Bab el

Mandeb (the entrance to the Red Sea), the Straits of Gibraltar and the Malacca

Strait between Indonesia and Malaysia.

 

It is the Strait of Malacca, the shortest sea route connecting the Indian and

Pacific Oceans, that has maritime and intelligence authorities most worried. The

passage, 600 miles long but just over a mile wide at one point, is the conduit

for 50,000 ships a year, carrying a third of the world's commerce and half of

its crude oil.

 

Despite the global decline in the number of reported attacks (many experts feel

that there are hundreds more each year that go unreported), the number of

attacks in the Malacca Strait increased last year to 37 from 28 in 2003. And,

while many raids are likely carried out by crime syndicates, there is evidence

that many have been the work of the Free Aceh Movement of northern Sumatra, an

Islamist separatist organization that has been fighting to gain independence

from Indonesia since 1976. While the United States does not officially call the

group a terrorist organization, the Indonesian government does. And many

terrorism experts cite its links to Jemaah Islamiyah, the Islamist group

suspected in the Bali nightclub bombings of 2003, and to Al Qaeda.

 

In 2002, the Free Aceh Movement announced that vessels moving through the strait

were to seek its " permission for safe passage, " a classic protection scam. It

has also admitted to attacking Exxon-Mobil natural-gas plants in Aceh. In March

2003, the chemical tanker Dewi Madrim was attacked by heavily armed pirates in

speedboats in the Malacca Strait. According to the crew, the pirates, speaking

Indonesian, seemed less interested in robbery than in taking turns steering the

ship down the congested waterway. They took two officers hostage and a satchel

full of technical documents. Singapore's defense minister, Tony Tan, said that

he was concerned that this incident and others like it were practice runs for a

terrorist attack.

 

Just as terrorists learned to be pilots for 9/11, terrorists may now be learning

to be pirates. Purposely grounding a crude carrier hauling two million barrels

of oil at a place like Batu Berhanti, where the strait is little more than a

mile wide, would close the waterway indefinitely. The delay in oil supplies to

China, Japan and South Korea could devastate their economies, setting off a

global economic crisis.

 

Such concerns are why Potengal Mukundan, the director of the International

Maritime Bureau, said he was encouraged that there have been no attacks since

the tsunami. The coastal fishing villages, or kampongs, from which the attacks

are launched have probably been severely damaged. Indeed, I cannot imagine how

the kampong I visited in the late 1990's, a backwater village on stilts among

the mangroves, could have survived a tidal surge as high as 10 feet. " Many of

the pirates may have died, " Captain Mukundan said.

 

It is also possible that the large American military presence as part of the

tsunami relief efforts in Aceh has given the pirates pause. In fact, American

officials have been calling for a show of force in the Malacca Strait for some

time. Adm. Thomas Fargo, head of the Pacific Command, told the House Armed

Services Committee last year that the United States should team up with the

Malaysian and Indonesian Navies to deploy special forces on high-speed boats to

counter pirates. Unfortunately, the defense ministers of those countries

rejected the plan, saying that the American military patrolling the strait would

violate their sovereignty. (Another concern was that aligning their nations with

American policy could add to the tensions both are experiencing with Islamic

fundamentalists.)

 

Now, one hopes, these countries will take note of what an increased military

presence can accomplish, because the pause in piracy will not last forever, nor

will the cease-fire the Free Aceh Movement made with the Indonesian government

in the aftermath of the tsunami. Unless Indonesia and Malaysia accept American

help in fighting them, the pirates will be back. And we'll be lucky if

plundering loot is all they have in mind.

 

 

 

John S. Burnett is author of " Dangerous Waters: Modern Piracy and Terror on the

High Seas.

 

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/22/opinion/22burnett.html

 

 

 

 

 

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