Pirates

by Ross Kemp

  ‘Of course,’ Amaechi stated. ‘You can be honest.’

  ‘You haven’t paid me.’

  That smooth smile spread over Amaechi’s face once more. ‘We will pay you, my friend,’ he said. ‘You do not need to worry about that!’

  But the contractor looked worried, and I had the distinct impression that his worry derived from the fact that telling the governor of Rivers State that he was downing tools might have consequences for more than his bank balance. Maybe he just felt the same sense of paranoia that we all did in this town. I don’t know.

  I wasn’t so naive not to realize that our excursion with Governor Amaechi was little more than a PR stunt, but even so it struck me as he walked around the town that he was genuinely popular with a lot of people. I was left to consider that I had seen a number of different sides to the same story. The political piracy, kidnapping and industrial sabotage carried out by MEND was clearly a big problem for the area. As with many militant groups who seek their ends by unacceptable means, their grievances were real. I’d met ordinary folk who sympathized with MEND because their lives, frankly, had been ruined by the awful consequences of bunkering and oil spillages. And now I’d met the administration, whose principal aim was to crush the militants and the criminality with which they were associated, and that administration had its supporters too.

  The only people I hadn’t managed to connect with were MEND themselves. And truth to tell, I was beginning to wonder if we ever would.

  That night MEND once again told us to stand by, to wait for another call that would tell us where to go, and when. Yet again we prepared to slip away from our security under cover of night; yet again the call never came. The trouble was this: the Joint Task Force had been carrying out a sustained attack on MEND bases in the area. Either the militants thought it was too dangerous to meet us at that moment in time, or they just weren’t in a position to do it. And so the following morning – exhausted and a bit demoralized – we took the decision to cut our losses in Rivers State and travel elsewhere in the Delta. If we could get closer to some MEND strongholds where the JTF hadn’t been active, maybe we would have more luck.

  The town of Warri is 95 miles from Port Harcourt in neighbouring Delta State. The security goons who had been tasked with accompanying us seemed very anxious that we should leave early, and we soon found out why that was. To get there, you need to travel up a road which has been dubbed Kidnap Alley. No prizes for guessing why. The journey from Port Harcourt to Warri takes about six hours; if we left too late, the security boys would have to come back down Kidnap Alley in the dark. Not to put too fine a point on it, they were shitting themselves at the prospect. These were burly, armed policemen – a fair indication of how dangerous the road was. While we were en route, we would occasionally have to stop by the side of the road to take a leak. Whenever that happened, the guards’ paranoia increased a hundred-fold. They really didn’t want to be there.

  The journey was made slower by the fact that we were forever being stopped at checkpoints by local police looking for chop-chop. We managed to stream some Eddie Izzard from an iPod to the car radio – surreal stuff at the best of times, but doubly so when you’re driving up Kidnap Alley. This didn’t please our driver. He wanted to listen to his tribal beats – fine for 20 minutes, but six hours of it would send you east of Barking. I’d never seen our guards look so happy as when they dropped us off at our hotel in Warri. Not even a goodbye – they were instantly gone in the hope that they could get back to Port Harcourt before it was dark.

  Now that we were out of the jurisdiction of Governor Amaechi we no longer had to contend with the ever-present personal security. That didn’t mean, however, that we were entirely free agents. There was a heavy police presence around our hotel, and we were told in no uncertain terms that we would be stupid to leave. Travel into town, they said, and you’ll get killed or kidnapped. The hotel, though, was not the sort of place where you really wanted to spend any time. When we arrived, I was greeted by the hotel owner. ‘We have a big room for you, Mr Kemp,’ he said, and led me proudly up.

  It was a big room all right, but that was all that could be said for it. At some stage the door had been pulled off its hinges, then inexpertly replaced using screws without proper threads. I’d been given one of those plastic key cards, but there was no point because you could just open the door without it. Not that you’d want to. Inside, parts of the walls were spattered brown and red. It was either ketchup and brown sauce, or it was blood and shit. The carpet was mysteriously sticky. The shower curtain stank of mildew and there was a bucket by the toilet so that you could flush it, as the cistern didn’t fill properly. There were mosquitoes everywhere and it was obvious that the bedclothes hadn’t been changed in a long time – they were black with grease from other people’s bodies, and there was a dent in the pillow from when it had been last used. The sort of bed that makes you itch just looking at it.

  But this was our hotel and we had to make do. We once more started to put out the feelers, to make calls to contacts that we had. And then we did the only thing we could do. We waited.

  And waited.

  Confined to our hotel for our own safety, we just had to hope that the nearby MEND bases had escaped government attacks. But there was no way of knowing, and our lines of communication were worryingly silent. We waited for several days and nights, long past the time when we should have been on a plane out of there. There’s only so long you can wait in a hotel room in 40-degree heat, with shit on the walls, having read the same book four times. As each day passed, it became increasingly clear that MEND were unlikely to get in touch – we could only assume that they’d been hit by the JTF – and we were going to have to bail out. It was increasingly clear that the programme we wanted to make wasn’t going to happen. With the frustration of failure weighing heavy on us, we finally decided there was nothing more we could do. We would have to return to Lagos empty-handed.

  Once the decision was made, we moved quickly. We wanted to be on the next flight out of there. We packed our gear up like madmen, knowing we had to shift sharpish if we weren’t going to miss our plane, and we asked our fixer to organize a couple of cars to the provincial airport nearby. Somehow he forgot, which only made our rush through the go-slows of Warri even worse, but we finally got to the airport. Strangely we were recognized – a white oil worker even came up and asked me to sign a Gangs book for them – but all our attention was focused on splitting. Warri, we had decided, was far too much of a worry. The queue at the airport seemed to last for ever. When the time came for me to put my hand luggage through the scanner (it was the day pack I used in Afghanistan) I saw it slip into the machine before the conveyor belt stopped. One of the security men addressed me.

  ‘Who is your big boss?’ he demanded.

  By now I’d lost all patience with Nigerian bureaucracy. ‘We’re an autonomous organization,’ I told him facetiously. ‘We don’t have a big boss.’

  ‘What?’ He had suddenly been joined by a number of others. ‘We need to speak to your big boss.’

  ‘We don’t have one.’

  ‘We have to know. We need chop-chop.’

  I shook my head. ‘There isn’t any chop-chop. Can I have my bag back, please?’

  ‘No. We need chop-chop.’

  I shook my head again, then put my hand towards the machine to drag out my bag.

  ‘If you put your hand in there,’ a female security guard snapped at me, ‘we chop it off.’

  I froze. She half looked as if she meant it.

  ‘We need chop-chop,’ she insisted.

  But by now I’d truly had enough. I raised my voice. ‘I’M NOT PAYING CHOP-CHOP.’ Everyone in the terminal must have heard me. They all looked towards me and sucked their teeth at the oyibo kicking up a fuss.

  I looked back along the queue. Ewen, our director, was only a few positions down. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘You want chop-chop? Ask him.’ It was a bit of a three-billy-goats-gruff tactic – I felt
pretty sure that Ewen in his six-foot-four Glaswegian way would make it very clear that they weren’t getting any chop-chop from him either. I went through and stood back to watch the fireworks. Funnily enough, the Nigerians came off second best in that little argument. I think they’d just picked the wrong batch of exhausted, disillusioned, pissed-off foreigners to tap for cash.

  We returned to Lagos, and then to London, feeling that we had failed, but maybe we were being too hard on ourselves. It was true that we hadn’t managed to meet MEND or any pirates. But in our time in the Niger Delta we had certainly gained an insight into why the pirates do what they do. I couldn’t condone what was happening in the Niger Delta – kidnapping, murder, acts of terrorism – but I felt that at least I could now understand why it was happening. The political piracy in the Delta and out at sea – like the criminal piracy in the quarantine zone of Lagos or the petty piracy that hits the fishermen of Ajegunle – had its origins in abject poverty and the environmental degradation that was ironically a direct offshoot of the fact that Nigeria was so oil rich. And perhaps it’s fair to say that the biggest pirates in Nigeria are the people in power, those who, as Ledum Mitee had explained, made millions from selling bunkered oil on the open market.

  As I think back on my time in Nigeria, I wonder if I was too harsh on it. Maybe I just saw the wrong side of the happiest country in the world. But I can’t help thinking that with all that potential wealth, it should be a lot happier than it is. That annoyed me, and saddened me.

  When we left, Robin Barry Hughes and Matthew Maguire were still being held somewhere in the Niger Delta. On 20 April 2009 Robin Barry Hughes was released for health reasons; Matthew Maguire was set free on 12 June 2009, having been held hostage for nine months. When we admitted we’d been in the Delta trying to find him, he told us we were mad. He probably wasn’t far wrong. It wasn’t long after our departure that government forces escalated attacks against militants in the Delta and a blanket ban was placed on all journalists in the area. Had we waited a couple of months, we couldn’t have gone there even if we’d wanted to. And as I write this book MEND have just destroyed another pipeline in the Delta. The problems of that region are far from over.

  Our global search for piracy, though, was to take us elsewhere, to the most famous pirate-infested stretch of water on the planet: the South China Sea. We had already learned that searching for pirates could take us to the most unexpected places, and none of us knew what we would find when we got there…

  PART 3

  The South China Sea

  Map 3. The South China Sea

  12. The Malacca Straits

  In 2005 the merchant vessel Nepline Delima was making its way north up the Malacca Straits, a narrow stretch of water bordered by Indonesia on the west and Malaysia on the east. It was night-time when it came under attack by a ten-man group of pirates armed with machetes and machine guns.

  The Nepline Delima was an oil tanker, carrying $12 million of oil, and a classic example of a low-freeboard vessel. Valuable and vulnerable. In this instance, however, things didn’t go quite according to plan for the pirates. Their attack was thwarted by a young member of the crew. His name was Muhammad Hamid, he was just 27 years old, and his story is one of great bravery. His actions that night could certainly have got him killed, and for all he knows that may happen yet. He agreed to meet us in his small village somewhere on the Malaysian mainland, but only on the proviso that we did not reveal where this was. This young man was living, along with his family, in fear.

  Muhammad explained to me what happened the night the pirates came to call. ‘The captain made an announcement: “Help! Help! There are pirates on the boat! Get up, boys! Get up!” They broke into the captain’s room and attacked him with a machete. The crew ran away.’ As he spoke he showed me pictures of the captain, his slashed face patched up and bandaged.

  The pirates chased the crew all around the boat; moments later Muhammad could hear his friends being beaten. ‘So I hid,’ he told me simply. He secreted himself under the bed in his cabin. At one point the pirates, who were searching for him, entered his room and the light from their torches illuminated his knees and chest, but by some miracle they didn’t see him. Knowing that the pirates must have arrived by boat, he then snuck away from his hiding place, looked over the edge of the ship and located their vessel. He climbed down the outside of the ship into their speedboat. ‘When I got into the boat, I was able to cut the rope. Finally I was free. I was safe.’

  Muhammad might have been safe, but his crew mates weren’t. He knew he had to do something, but he had never driven a speedboat like this before. It took him ten minutes to fumble around in the darkness for the ignition button before he was able to get the boat moving. Even then, he had only the vaguest sense of where he was and, more crucially, which direction he was supposed to travel in. But luck was on his side. He travelled 50 miles, through rainstorms and high seas, to shore. He stopped a couple of times for a cigarette to calm his nerves, and who can blame him? After five hours he ran out of fuel, but managed to locate a spare canister that the pirates had stashed away.

  While Muhammad was trying to find help, the crew of the Nepline Delima were all put into one room, where they were, quite literally, pissing themselves. They all assumed that their shipmate was dead.

  Muhammad finally hit land. Immediately he alerted the powers that be and told them that there was a pirate attack occurring right now on his ship. But the authorities didn’t believe him: for whatever reason, they thought at first that Muhammad was a pirate himself. Eventually, though, they accepted his word and an operation was mounted to retake the Nepline Delima.

  Muhammad explained to me what happened. ‘The police promised them that if they surrendered, they would let them go free.’ The pirates bought it, but of course the police had no intention of keeping their word. There was a six-hour stand-off, at the end of which the crew were released and the pirates arrested.

  A happy ending, but there was more to this story than met the eye. It later transpired that the first officer and another member of the crew were in league with the pirates. They had delivered the coordinates of the ship for a piece of the pie. The first officer was later released, but the rest of the pirates were sentenced to seven years in a Malaysian jail. As for Muhammad Hamid, his life will never be the same. His bravery made a big splash in Malaysia, but he now feels unable to return to the job that he loves. ‘If I sail again, they might just find me,’ he said. He feared that the families or associates of the pirates would take revenge on him. Kill him. Hence his new life of enforced anonymity.

  Muhammad was a brave man, and a lucky one. If the pirates had caught him trying to escape, chances are that he’d now be dead.

  The Straits of Malacca are the second-busiest shipping lane in the world, after, believe it or not, the English Channel. Flanked by Malaysia and Singapore on the east and Indonesia on the west, it has historically been, and remains, an important channel for vessels making the profitable journey from China to India. It is also the most direct route from the bustling ports of south-east Asia to the Persian Gulf and up through the Suez Canal to Europe. Put simply, it’s full of boats, and those boats are full of goods.

  And this has been the case for centuries. In the days before oil became the world’s most valuable commodity, spices were transported in vast quantities through the Malacca Straits and they were worth a great deal to the Europeans of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Much of the European colonization of south-east Asia was driven by the desire to control the spice trade, and as the quantity of high-value shipping increased in these waters so, inevitably, did the incidence of piracy.

  Pirates had roamed the Straits of Malacca long before that, however. Just as the corsairs and buccaneers had been used for political reasons as private additions to countries’ naval might during the Golden Age of Piracy, so in the fourteenth century a local ruler by the name of Parameswara was able to fend off his land-hungry neighbouring rulers by
keeping the pirate crews of the Malacca Straits onside. If you were to travel to the bottom of these waters, the skeletons of old ships and the watery graves of generations of sailors would be a testament to the historically turbulent nature of the South China Sea, a stretch of water that has always been feared by seamen.

  The Malacca Straits and the South China Sea are no less turbulent now. In 2008 there was, on average, one pirate attack a week here. Singapore itself has the second-busiest port in the world. Each day 1,000 ships travel through its sea lanes, carrying a quarter of the world’s maritime trade and a third of its oil needs. Such a high quantity of shipping, of course, presents an easy target for pirates and until recently pirate attacks were so bad that the Malacca Straits were designated a war zone by Lloyds of London, with insurance premiums to match. The truth is that if you’re the owner of a merchant vessel and you choose to send your ship through the Malacca Straits instead of via a longer, and therefore more expensive, route, you’re taking a gamble.

  From a personal point of view, south-east Asia has a certain family resonance. My Uncle Tom was married to my nan’s sister Olive. During the Second World War, as a captain in the British army, he was stationed on the island of Singapore. This was a crucial strategic location, the site of the main British military base in south-east Asia. It fell to the Japanese on 15 February 1942, in part due to a surprising tactic by the enemy. Rather than attack the island, as had been expected, by sea, they sent their troops overland across Malaysia on bicycles. What followed was a rout. The Allies were forced to surrender and Winston Churchill called it the ‘worst disaster’ and the ‘largest capitulation’ in British history. Around 80,000 Allied troops became POWs, and Uncle Tom was one of them.

  I know only too well that there aren’t many pleasant ways to spend a war. But if there were, several years as a Japanese POW wouldn’t be one of them. Uncle Tom was set to work on the Burma Railway. Designed to link Thailand and Burma, the line was important to the Japanese precisely because without it they had to bring supplies and troops to Burma through the Malacca Straits, where they were a target for Allied submarines. Its construction came at a high price. The film The Bridge on the River Kwai is based around the Burma Railway, but the events of that movie are largely fictitious. The truth would be too gruelling to watch. The line became known as the Death Railway: an estimated 16,000 prisoners of war died constructing it, but that figure is dwarfed by the 90,000 Asian workers who perished.