Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe / Bloomberg
Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe / Bloomberg
The world’s largest shipping company has demanded a more effective military response to angry pirate attacks and record abductions off the coast of West Africa.
The number of attacks on ships worldwide rose by 20% to 195, with 135 crew abducted, the International Maritime Bureau’s Piracy Reporting Center said in a January 13 report. report. The Gulf of Guinea was responsible for 95% of the hostages taken in 22 separate cases, and all three hijackings that took place, the agency said.
The attacks have increased insurance and other costs for divers operating in West Africa, and some have dared to hire escort vessels manned by armed naval personnel. AP Moller-Maersk A / S, which transports about 15% of the world’s cargo by sea, said decisive steps must be taken.
“It is unacceptable at this time and time that seafarers cannot do their job to secure a major supply chain for this region without having to worry about the risk of piracy,” said Aslak Ross, head of marine standards at Maersk in Copenhagen, said. “The risk has reached a level where effective military capacity must be deployed.”
The Gulf of Guinea encompasses a vast area of the Atlantic Ocean that is traversed by more than 20,000 vessels a year, making it difficult for governments that do not have enough resources. Surrounded by a nearly 4,000-kilometer-long coastline stretching from Senegal to Angola, it serves as the highway for crude oil exports and imports of refined fuels and other goods.
Twenty-five African governments, including all bordering on the Gulf, signed the Yaoundé Code of Conduct in 2013 to tackle piracy. It aims to facilitate the sharing of information and establish five maritime zones that need to be jointly patrolled, but has only been partially implemented and most fleets remain focused on protecting their own waters.
Bertrand Monnet, a professor of criminal risk management at the EDHEC Business School in France, who has been studying piracy in the oil-producing Niger Delta region in Nigeria for 15 years, estimates that a maximum of 15 bands are operating abroad in West Africa. , which each consists of 20 to 50 members.
Hostages are usually held as ransom in Nigeria, the local power station that took the lead in preventing attacks. The government plans to use nearly $ 200 million in new equipment this year, including helicopters, drones and speedboats, to boost the fleet’s capabilities.
International intervention
Nigeria is committed to ‘ensuring that this threat of piracy in our waters is eliminated so that those legally engaged in shipping, fishing and oil and gas can go without fear,’ ‘Adiral Oladele Daji, Commander of the Western Navy’s Western navy, said in an interview.
Many shipowners like a more muscular international effort, based on the military response to hijackings abroad in Somalia, which was the global epicenter of piracy from about 2001 to 2012. Armed guards and warships operated by the European Union, NATO and A U.S. force sent to patrol vessels sailing through the Suez Canal, one of the busiest trade routes in the world connecting Europe with Asia, brought the problem under control.
Nigerian special forces are sailing to intercept pirates during 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 shores – large naval forces could further reduce piracy in the Gulf by deploying two or three helicopters equipped with helicopters, said Jakob Larsen, chief of Maritime Security at the Baltic and International Maritime Council, a Copenhagen – based group. He considers such support unlikely because the sea routes are not as important as those on the east coast of Africa.
“There is little international appetite to get involved in Nigeria’s security issues,” he said.
The Liberian Shipping Council has asked the Nigerian authorities to disrupt the pirates’ criminal activities on the land. Improving employment prospects for impoverished coastal communities would reduce the threat of piracy in the long run, but does not address the immediate problem, said Kierstin Del Valle Lachtman, the council’s secretary general.
Attacks spread
While the West African attacks were initially concentrated off the coast of Nigeria, they have since spread to waters of Benin, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Ghana, Togo and Cameroon, according to Kamal-Deen Ali, executive director of the Accra-based center. for maritime law. and Security Africa and a former Ghanaian naval officer.
The number of violent attacks in the Gulf of Guinea has remained fairly constant over the past decade, but kidnappings of more than ten people have become increasingly common, said Dirk Siebels, senior analyst at Risk Intelligence in Denmark.
According to the IMB, the pirates are increasingly finding their way deeper into the sea, and kidnappings will take place on average 60 nautical miles abroad in 2020. The farthest place took place in mid-July, when eight pirates with a machine gun aboard a chemical tanker before climbing Nigeria’s coast and seizing 13 crew members before fleeing. Only unqualified seafarers remained on the Curacao Trader, which was left 195 nautical miles offshore. The crew was released the following month.
“The perpetrators of such incidents are fully aware that there is almost no risk of being caught,” said Munro Anderson, a partner at London’s maritime security firm Dryad Global. “This is exactly the kind of incident that could mitigate an international naval coalition.”
– Assisted by Gina Turner
(Updates with the analyst’s comments in the third paragraph below.)