OSINFO - Open Sources Information

Adam Clulow

On April 8, 2009, pirates attacked a US-flagged cargo vessel, the Maersk Alabama, about five hundred kilometers off the Somali coast.  The ship, which carried a crew of twenty US nationals, including their now famous captain Richard Phillips, was on its way to Mombassa in Kenya with a cargo of soya, maize and cooking oil destined for the UN World Food Program.  In the early hours of the morning, a group of four teenage gunmen armed with AK-47 assault rifles, the ubiquitous tools of African conflict, boarded the 17,000 tonne ship using grappling hooks.  When the unarmed but well-trained crew put up stiff resistance, the pirates were forced to retreat to one of the Maersk Alabama’s lifeboats, taking with them Captain Phillips as a hostage.  He was subsequently rescued five days later when US navy snipers aboard the USS Bainbridge shot dead three of the pirates and captured the fourth alive. 

The Maersk Alabama, which is home-ported in Norfolk, Virginia, was the first American ship to be seized in the current wave of Somali piracy.  Its capture is also widely reported to represent the first time that a US merchant vessel has been taken by pirates since the war against the Barbary corsairs of North Africa ended almost two centuries earlier.  Although the only losses of property and lives were sustained by the pirates, the attack on the Maersk Alabama focused world attention on the long-standing problem of Somali piracy.  Inhabiting a failed state that cannot govern its own cities let alone its 3300-kilometer long coastline, these pirate gangs are able to operate with almost complete freedom in coastal waters and beyond.

Since 2005 when the first attack in the current wave was recorded, Somali pirates have gone from strength to strength.  2008 was a record year, during which they attacked 111 separate vessels, nineteen off the east coast of Somalia and a further ninety-two in the Gulf of Aden.  According to the International Maritime Bureau, these attacks resulted in the hijacking of forty-two ships, a figure that translates into an impressive success rate of just under forty percent, and the capture of 815 crewmembers.¹   One of the hijacked vessels was the Sirius Star, a Saudi-owned supertanker captured in open waters seven hundred kilometers southeast of Mombassa.  Without question, this vessel represents the largest prize ever taken in the history of organized piracy, which stretches back to the beginning of recorded history.  Measuring 330 meters, it displaces over 300,000 tonnes and was captured with two million barrels of oil onboard—a cargo so large that some journalists have claimed that its loss caused the global price of oil to jump by a dollar.²   A ransom of $25 million was initially demanded for its release, but the pirates later settled for three million dollars, which was airdropped from a low flying plane.  As the cargo alone was worth $100 million this represented a relative bargain for the ship’s Saudi owners, who like most other ship-owners in their position were perfectly willing to pay to ensure the safety of their investment.  While the capture of the Sirius Star was piracy on a spectacular scale, other less impressive prizes have regularly produced sizable returns with an average payoff of around one million dollars per vessel.  One conservative estimate suggests that Somali pirates earned between eighteen and thirty million dollars in the first nine months of 2008 alone.³

The Sirius Star

There is now widespread international recognition that something will have to be done about this problem.  Piracy has the potential to strangle commerce flowing through the Gulf of Aden, one of the world’s most important sea routes that is used by 20,000 ships every year.  There is also a risk that terrorist organizations will enter the piracy business to generate revenue, to gain bargaining chips in negotiations or, in a more frightening scenario, to use a captured vessel as a weapon.

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