October 1, 2003
BY ERIC ELLIS, Bintan
Indonesia holds a world record that Jakarta doesn’t like to make public: the most pirate-infested seas on the planet.
To the Australian eye, Indonesia’s Bintan Island is one of Asia’s stranger places. Phillip Island-sized Bintan has a northern strip that’s all five-star resorts and ritzy golf courses. The Singaporean elite – the men strutting in Greg Norman resortwear, their women (tai-tais) in platform Chanel sneakers – regard Bintan as their private playground, an extension of the overcrowded island where they make their money just half-an-hour’s luxury cruise away.
Bizarrely, HQ Holdens circa-1972 are the people’s chariots of choice here, out-numbering even the much-loved Kijang 4WDs, ubiquitous in the islands. In the north, it’s Singaporean spotless, effectively separated by barbed-wire Berliners would recognise. The south is common or garden-poor Indonesia, of raffish kampungs, road-range chooks and pious Islam.
But the world’s business community – and those fighting the war on terror – would be well-advised to address Bintan’s south over the north if they are to prevent one of the most serious problems facing the region’s water-ways: piracy. It is from the myriad inlets of Bintan and nearby islands that Indonesian pirates, abetted by friends in the country’s coast guard and armed forces, have set a world record Jakarta would care not to hold.
The International Maritime Bureau reports that a record 64 attacks were reported in Indonesia waters alone from January to June this year, more than a quarter of all piracy acts worldwide. Add the raids in the nearby Malacca Straits that separate Malaysia from Indonesia’s island of Sumatra and that means a third of all raids this year took place just a day’s sail from Singapore, the region’s economic hub and traditional entrepôt. Chillingly for Singapore, which has long made much of its living from shipping, some of the more brazen of the recent attacks have occurred just off Bintan.
“This is no local problem,” says Noel Choong, the Kuala Lumpur-based manager of the IMB’s piracy watch centre. “These are the waters that connect Asia and the Middle East to Europe and the Americas. It’s a global problem.”
About 800 vessels – from oil supertankers to tugs and sampans – ply these waterways every day. For shippers from Kobe to Copen-hagen, the route is the shortest and least expensive way to transport goods between Europe, Asia and ports in between. Some 80% of Japan’s oil, for example, comes from the Middle East via the Malacca Straits.
Captain John Melaa is one shipper who doesn’t take chances. For him, there’s no creeping his heavily laden tankers out through the busy waterways of the Singapore Straits. “We go full power ahead,” says the Norwegian skipper. “And with all the floodlights on.”
But Melaa isn’t being reckless with his massive vessels – anything but. For the good captain’s employers, the Oslo-based Wallenius Wilhelmsen Group, of Tampa fame and one of the world’s biggest ship owners, a fast passage through the region is also a safe one – for cargo and crew. “The bandits tend to go for oil and commodities like tin and aluminium,” Choong says. “Bintan has been a real problem for vessels passing through the Singapore Straits.”
While Malaysia and Singapore have stepped up patrols in their waters, Indo-nesia seems almost powerless to stop the attacks in its far-flung archipelago. Indeed, many shippers and insurers in Singapore privately finger renegade Indonesian naval and coast guard officers as responsible for much of the problem. “Villagers can’t afford the guns and boats they have,” a Norwegian cargo insurer says.
That’s sensitive stuff in South-East Asia, where regional governments tiptoe around each other lest offence be caused. And in the arcane politics of the region, it’s the regional superpower Indonesia that everyone is keen to keep happy. Part of the problem is that there is little co-operation between the three most concerned nations – Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia. Singapore has a bristling coast guard that keeps its own waters pirate-free, and Malaysia, too, is finally taking concrete steps, recently setting up its own coast guard to watch over its western flank, where 60% of its 25 million people live.
But the response of Indonesia, distracted by terror and the sheer scale of policing some 14,000-odd islands, seems hit and miss at best. Choong says that when his agency identifies hotspots, the Indonesians act “pretty quickly”, only to see the problem spring up elsewhere, such as the Aceh coast of northern Sumatra where piracy raids are helping float an independence movement.
What’s needed, says a concerned Mohamed Sidik Shaik, chief executive of Tanjung Pelepas, the Malaysian port neighbouring Singapore, is “heightened surveillance and closer co-operation. The three countries really do need to sit down and sort this out before it gets out of hand,” he says.
Sidik is worried about the possible consequences of a terrorist hijack in the tight waters of the Singapore and Malacca Straits, only about 1km wide at some points, and dotted on both coasts with oil and gas refineries.
But while governments dither, shippers have few alternatives. Avoiding these tricky waters means an extra four days’ sail in open waters south of Java near safer Australia, then north through the more placid waters around Bali. Avoiding Indonesia altogether means another week still further east.
With the coast of keeping a tanker afloat running at about $200,000 a day in one of the world’s most cut-throat industries, running the gauntlet of Bintan’s flotilla of modern-day Indonesian Captain Kidds seems a risk the shipping industry has little option but to take.
Centuries before being romanticised by the likes of novelist Joseph Conrad, piracy was a common maritime hazard in the seas of South-East Asia and for the masters of the 600-odd ships that make their way through the Malacca Straits each day, it remains that way.
However, a disturbing trend has emerged. Last month, the Malaysian tanker Penrider was en route from Singapore to Penang carrying 1000 tonnes of oil when it was intercepted by a fishing boat just 12 nautical miles off Port Klang, the main gateway to Kuala Lumpur.
Instead of stealing goods, the 14 men who clambered aboard – all armed with AK-47 and M-16 assault rifles – forced the crew to sail the boat into Indonesian waters, where the captain and two members were held hostage. The group, who, according to one crew member, were dressed in fatigues and identified them-selves as “Aceh soldiers”, eventually received a reported ransom payment of $M200,000 ($79,600) from the ship’s owners.
In late July, there were three attempted boardings off Aceh in less than a week and although crew members averted a boarding – in one case employing high-pressure hoses – the trend has the IMB worried.
IMB spokesman Captain Pottengal Mukundan warns that politically motivated pirates are prepared to take greater risks. “Their principal motivation is to fund their political cause by holding hostages for ransom,” he says. “Authori-ties need to recognise the motives behind these crimes and adopt new methods of tracking and deterring them.”