Trouble on the High Seas – Raddington Report (blog)

A report out this month from global piracy watchdog Oceans Beyond Piracy (OBP) paints a mixed picture of crime on the high seas off Asian coastlines, long the piracy capital of the world. Although piracy remains an under-reported crime globally, reliable statistics on it have been collected by the International Maritime Bureau since 1993. Since then, nearly 60 percent of global pirate attacks have occurred in Asian waters.

Asias seas retained the dubious honor of being the worlds most dangerous in 2016, with South-East Asia posing a particular challenge for regional law enforcement agencies. Two-thirds of pirate attacks in Asia were concentrated in the South-East, with Indonesia alone accounting for 23 percent of world piracy (1993-2015) according to a recent report from the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime (GITOC). Nevertheless, during 2016 the number of recorded incidents of armed robbery and piracy at sea fell from 199 to 129, a fall of 35%. Meanwhile ,attacks in the second worst affected region, West Africa, rose steeply, nearly doubling from 54 incidents in 2015 to 95 in 2016.

Since the end of the Cold War, South-East Asian piracy has been a particular problem along the narrow, 800km long Straits of Malacca and the Singaporean coast; this global shipping superhighway sees more than 120,000 ships each year moving slowly along predictable shipping routes and unsurprisingly traffic there has long been targeted by hijackers, thieves and pirates. Asias littoral states have taken steps to crack down on criminal activity within their waters in recent years, with OBP suggesting that traffic transiting the Straits of Malacca and Singapore was now a lower risk following a fall in hijackings for cargo theft from 12 incidents in 2015 to just three in 2016.

Greater coordination between regional states has clearly had some impact. However, robbery and armed robbery continued to be the most common type of crime committed against merchant shipping in Asia. Meanwhile, a surge in kidnappings in the Sulu and Celebes Seas has led to a spike in violence in both those regions and caused great alarm among shipping circles. Perpetrators often moved their victims to land shortly afterward, where mistreatment and abuse were commonly reported after captives were released. OBP reported some captives were also used as slave labour by their kidnappers, who have executed several of their victims in 2016 and 2017.

In fact, there is a lot of overlap in the region between actors engaged in hijacking, armed robbery or kidnapping and groups involved in other criminal behaviours such as smuggling and terrorism. The GITOC reported that criminal syndicates involved in hijacking ships for cargo in the Straits of Malacca and Singapore had switched to smuggling because falling commodity prices made hijacking thefts less attractive in 2015-16. Meanwhile the surge in kidnapping for ransom in the Sulu and Celebes Seas was driven by the notorious Abu Sayyaf group, a fractious Filipino terrorist network with links to jihadist groups in the Middle East and East Asia. The group is supposedly fighting to establish an independent Islamic state in the southern Philippines but has alarmed Indonesia and Malaysia by disrupting trade routes with a string of hijackings at sea. Abu Sayyaf also blew up a ferry in Manila Bay during a 2004 bombing that killed 116 people.

Asias seas retained the dubious honor of being the worlds most dangerous in 2016, with South-East Asia posing a particular challenge for regional law enforcement agencies

The GITOC argues that the involvement of pirates in other types of crime is why any counter-piracy efforts at the multi-national level in the region must also include tackling other transnational maritime crimes. Other observers would add maritime terrorism and terrorist insurgencies on land are also fuelled by crime on the regions high seas. Islamist militants from several factions which have pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group recently joined together to battle Filipino troops in Marawi City. Their ranks include members of Abu Sayyaf, a leader of whom (Isnilon Hapilon), was named as Islamic States designated leader in the Philippines.

The battle in Marawi City began when troops moved to arrest Hapilon, only to find that in pursuit of his goal to establish a wilayat or Islamic State province, he had joined forces with a coalition of Islamists lead by an ex-criminal faction known as the Maute Group. The members of this group are extremely influential both within insurgency on Mindanao and with other groups of Islamic radicals across the South-East of Asia. A Singapore media outlet even reported that Indonesian terrorist network Jemaah Islamiyah had set up a training centre in the Southern Philippines to train foreign recruits attracted by the Maute Groups struggle, and warned of the threat posed to commercial shipping lines passing through the Philippine-Malaysian waters. But highlighting the porous separation between the Filipino criminal underworld and terrorism, siblings Omar and Abdullah Maute, the founders of the Maute Group, were petty criminals before they became leading extremists.

Partly due to terrorist-fuelled kidnappings, OBP reported that 2016 was much more violent year at sea than 2015, which saw no deaths. By contrast Malaysian security forces killed three perpetrators during a kidnapping incident aboard a fishing vessel in Semporna waters on 8 December 2016. Two other perpetrators and a hostage were left missing after the clash, in which several other kidnapped victims were freed. Meanwhile Abu Sayyaf militants murdered a German woman during a kidnapping attempt in 2016, and in 2017 they executed both her husband and Filipino sea captain seized with his crew last year. The threat posed to trade in the Sulu and Celebes Seas by the Abu Sayyaf group was so great that Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines agreed to launch the Sulu Sea Patrol Initiative (SSPI) last year.

Modelled on the Malacca Strait Sea Patrols Program (MSSP), which is credited for reducing hijackings in that region, the SSPI calls for coordinated air and naval patrols, intelligence sharing and a right of hot pursuit in emergencies. A large number of other countries have expressed an interest in involving themselves with the initiative in some capacity, including the US. Meanwhile, Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte has called on China to aid the effort by sending ships to patrol the waters of his country plagued by pirate attacks on commercial shipping. However when the average cost of stolen goods per attack in Asian waters last year was $4.5 million and when only 23 arrests for pirate activity were made across the whole region, the effort to end piracy in Asias oceans clearly has some way to go.

Read the original:

Trouble on the High Seas - Raddington Report (blog)