The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [71]
The second successful measure is a tactic that I call the “turtle defence,” which involves the crew barricading themselves in a secure area of the vessel—typically the engine room—in the event that pirates manage to get on board. With foreign warships bearing down on their position, pirate boarding groups often have only a short window to seize control of the ship (and more importantly, the crew). With the crew safely out of the line of fire, international forces would be free to retake the vessel with less risk of civilian casualties. Deprived of access to their human shields, most pirates would flee back to their skiffs before the cavalry arrives.
The turtle defence has been successful on multiple occasions. In February 2010 the Danish warship Absalon became the first vessel to stop a hijacking once it was already in progress, its appearance causing such a panic in one automatic-weapon-wielding pirate on the deck of the MV Ariella (an Antigua and Barbuda–flagged cargo ship) that he jumped into the sea. A more noteworthy incident occurred two months later, when Dutch marines abseiled onto the German cargo ship Taipan and arrested ten pirates, whom they subsequently extradited to Germany to face trial.
The turtle defence, according to International Maritime Bureau manager Cyrus Mody, is not without its drawbacks. First, the threatened vessel must be in prior contact with a warship with the resources to launch a commando assault—a capability that many in the international fleet do not possess. “If a crew in the middle of the Indian Ocean broadcasts that they’re going into lockdown,” Mody told me, “and there is no naval asset in a hundred-mile-or-so radius—which is basically VHF [high-frequency radio] range—then no one’s going to hear them.”
Second, if help does not arrive soon, the pirates may try their hand at cracking the safe room using the only tools they have available. “There was an incident some time back in which there was a crew in lockdown and the pirates started firing, and a couple of bullets went through the bulkhead and injured a few crew members,” said Mody. “That is one scenario; the other scenario is that the shooting causes a fire to break out. What happens then? There has to be an escape route for the crew.”
In spite of these potential risks, the turtle method has been effective even when a warship was not in the immediate vicinity. In a May 2010 incident, the Russian destroyer Marshal Shaposhnikov was over twelve hours away from the oil tanker Moscow University when her crew went into lockdown. For unknown reasons, the pirates remained aboard for an entire day as the Shaposhnikov bore down on their position, then engaged the Russian special forces in a suicidal shootout while the crew was still safely out of harm’s way. Whether stubborn or reckless, the pirates paid for their error in judgment; after killing one pirate during the rescue operation, the Russian commandos probably summarily executed the remaining hijackers, later concocting a story that they had perished at sea.10
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With $1–$1.5 billion per year being spent to clamp down on a piracy “industry” worth not more than $90 million, it is hard to argue that the international naval armada has provided a good return on investment. When hijackings fail (60–70 per cent of the time), it is usually because of early detection, increased speed, and evasive measures—not because of warships or navy helicopters saving the day. In 2009, fewer than one in six unsuccessful pirate attacks were stopped by the direct intervention of coalition forces, with only two of these rescues occurring in the Indian Ocean (out of fifty-three failed attacks).11 All told, in 2009 the coalition probably saved the world something in the range of $80–$100 million in potential ransoms—less than one-tenth its operating budget.12