Hijackers seize Indonesian ship during anti-piracy conference

KUALA LUMPUR – International maritime officials were given a graphic illustration of the threat facing their industry yesterday when hijackers seized a cargo ship and kidnapped its captain during a conference on the dangers of modern day piracy.

A group of pirates yesterday demanded the equivalent of $NZ 226,000 for Simon Perera, the skipper of the Indonesia-registered MT Tirta Niaga which was hijacked on Monday off the coast of Malaysia.

The crime took place as delegates from 20 countries were arriving in the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, for the anti-piracy conference.

According to Malaysian coast guards, the pirates released Captain Perera's twenty crew men yesterday along with his ship, and its 2,850-ton cargo of palm oil.

The captain himself was being held in the northern part of Indonesia's Sumatra island, 563 km from Kuala Lumpur, across the perilous Straits of Malacca.

The conference, organised by the International Maritime Bureau (IMB), drew to a close yesterday with the simulated rescue of a pirated ship by Malaysian police to the accompaniment of a James Bond sound track.

But the hijacking of the MT Tirta Niaga illustrates the growing helplessness of regional law enforcers to fight what looks increasingly like a piracy epidemic.

A record 469 piracy incidents were recorded by the IMB last year, an increase of 57 per cent on the previous year. During the same period the number of sailors killed by pirates rose twenty-four fold from three to 72.

More than half of the attacks occurred in south-east Asia where a prolonged economic crisis, combined with political troubles and weak law enforcement have created ideal conditions for pirates.

Fourteen of the incidents last year occurred in the Straits of Malacca, a crucial sea lane which links the oil fields of the Middle East to the fuel hungry economies of Japan, South Korea and China.

This year there have been 10 attacks within the Straits already, and delegates at the conference warned that, unless governments in the region improved their co-ordination, the situation would continue to deteriorate.

"The cooperation among these countries is not necessarily in the most ideal state," said Hiroshi Terashima of the Japan's Nippon Foundation, which specialises in marine security. "How we go about creating regional cooperation in the future is going to be a key issue."

At the heart of the problem is Indonesia, the vast archipelagic nation which supplies pirates with their personnel, their hide-outs and much of their prey.

Even with an efficient navy and coast guard, comprehensive policing of Indonesia's 13,000 islands would be impossible. But weak political leadership, corruption and collusion between criminal syndicates and military officers make it a pirates' paradise.

More than a quarter of worldwide piracy attacks occurred in Indonesian waters last year, and an eighth of them in Malaysian waters.

Many of the pirates who board the vessels are poor young Indonesians, but they work for shadowy syndicates based throughout south-east Asia and in China.

In parts of the region, piracy has a political dimension, particularly in the southern Philippines, where the Muslim guerrilla group, Abu Sayyaf, has made millions of pounds from ransoming kidnapped western tourists.

Attacks typically take place at night and are launched from small boats with outboard motors which are silenced as they approach an oil tanker or cargo ship. The pirates climb aboard with grappling hooks and threaten the crew, who are generally unarmed, with knives and guns.

If they are not murdered, the crews are often set adrift in small boats. One group of sailors hijacked off Indonesia last month were forced to jump overboard and survived only because they found themselves on a shallow reef.

The hijacked vessels are then piloted to safety, often to ports in southern China where corrupt local officials will turn a blind eye for a price. Repainted, renamed and re-registered, they are surprisingly hard to track down.

Outwitting pirates is a full-time job for a surprising number of maritime officials and insurers.

The IMB maintains a 24-hour anti-piracy operation in Malaysia. A number of private security companies offer to organise teams of ex-commandos and mercenaries to board and recapture pirated vessels. But tracking down a single ship in the vastness of the Indian Ocean or South China Sea is a daunting job, and few pirates are ever brought to justice.

One recent exception was the notorious Viroj Buasuwan, a Thai pirate known as Roj of the One Hundred Corpses, because of his habit of forcing hijacked crews to jump overboard. The 50-year old Mr Buasuwan was arrested on Saturday after the crew of a trawler swam to safety and reported him to the Thai police.

- INDEPENDENT