They left the pirates with enough food and water to get home across about a hundred kilometres of ocean, and that was it. ‘The only problem was that we couldn’t do anything with them and there were no consequences for them really.’
They could have detained the pirates but that would have meant transporting them back to Perth to be prosecuted under Australian law.
‘That’s never going to happen,’ Hutchison says.
The Australians were authorised to destroy one of the skiff’s two engines but because they were so far from shore he did not think that was a good idea. ‘We left one engine but we took all their oil and destroyed it and we took all their intel from phones and their handheld GPS.’
All the weapons except for the G3 German-made Heckler and Koch assault rifle were cut up and disposed of in a 3000-metre-deep part of the Indian Ocean. The G3 was sent to the navy’s historical collection housed on Spectacle Island near Cockatoo Island off Drummoyne in Sydney Harbour. This collection is a treasure trove of naval memorabilia ranging from muskets to heavy guns and missiles, from uniforms to glassware. A large, secure armoury at the facility contains weapons from all conflicts of the past 200 years, with special emphasis on recent operations in the Gulf.
Later, Hutchison happened to be on the island for a leadership conference and during a tour of the armoury he noticed the G3.
‘They told me it was from [HMAS] Arunta – so I had to straighten them out and give them a stern talking to,’ he says with a smile.
By 2012, it was estimated that maritime criminals were costing the global shipping industry about $6 billion a year in lost earnings and additional costs such as security and longer journeys as vessels sought to avoid pirate-infested waters. Between 2005 and 2011 Somali bandits had captured thirty-two vessels and held 736 hostages. The last of these – twenty-six Asian men detained for almost five years – were freed in November 2016. At the peak of Indian Ocean piracy in 2011 there were 151 attacks on merchant vessels and the estimated 5000 pirates involved in the trade earned $146 million, or $4.87 million per ship held.
In 2013, thanks to a concerted multinational naval operation targeting pirates, the number of attacks fell to just nine without a single successful hijacking.
Royal Navy Commodore Guy Robinson is the commander of the Bahrain-based counter-terrorism Combined Task Force (CTF) 150. Speaking on the sidelines of a major Indian Ocean piracy conference in the Seychelles, in June 2016, Robinson said many of the navies engaged in the Combined Maritime Forces (CMF) had mandates to target only pirates. Those countries include Germany, Japan, the Netherlands and South Korea, while others such as the US, UK, Australia, Pakistan, Canada and France focus on more aggressive counter-terrorism operations. Other European Union and NATO countries also contributed to the counter-piracy mission but they tended to operate in the affected countries rather than at sea.
The thirty-one member nations of the CMF are Australia, Bahrain, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Iraq, Italy, Japan, Jordan, South Korea, Kuwait, Malaysia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, the Philippines, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, Seychelles, Singapore, Spain, Thailand, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States and Yemen. They operate in three Combined Task Forces: CTF 150 for counter-terrorism, CTF 151 for counter-piracy, and CTF 152 for Gulf security.
Robinson said it was understandable that some nations focus only on counter-piracy operations rather than narcotics or weapons smuggling. Under current international law, pirates detained on the high seas in international waters can face prosecution, whereas drugs and weapons smugglers cannot be prosecuted so are set free once their illicit cargo has been confiscated.
When it comes to drugs or weapons it is the responsibility of the flag state to deal with a vessel’s owners and the crew, but when a vessel is stateless, as is the case with most smuggling boats, then no country is responsible and they fall through a large legal crack.
‘It’s not an international crime such as piracy is, and of course we ended up interdicting narcotics through the participating nations,’ Robinson said. ‘Different countries all have different domestic law to deal with narcotics and weapons and so understandably people have a different perspective on it. I think generally people recognise it’s a bad thing, but within CMF we have to recognise the mandate that allows nations to come here and participate, and respect that.’
The combined forces operate under United Nations Security Council Resolutions 1918 (piracy) and 1988 and 1989 (the funding of terrorism) and numerous articles of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) pertaining to piracy, illicit drugs and fake flags.
The small island nation of the Seychelles lies about 1500 kilometres east of Kenya. The country is 99 per cent ocean and 1 per cent land, has a population of just 90,000 and stretches across 1.3 million square kilometres of the Indian Ocean. A large chunk of its livelihood depends on tourism and especially cruise liners. So the impact of piracy on the tiny economy was catastrophic. The tourism Mecca saw its vital cruise ship trade fall from about fifteen ship visits a year to zero.
Seychelles Foreign Minster Joel Morgan believes that UNCLOS should be tightened up to close the legal loophole that allows drug and weapons smugglers to go free unless they are caught inside a country’s territorial waters.
‘If they are not caught within our territorial waters, it means that we have no jurisdiction over them and even if we were to bring laws into place that would give us that jurisdiction it could be contested internationally because there is no definite mandate arising under UNCLOS,’ he says. ‘This is why all of the navies have to operate on a “catch and release” principle while they can seize the arms, but there is no country that will be really in a position to prosecute unless the flag state takes responsibility to prosecute. Very often you find that the flag states of some of these vessels are not willing to take on that responsibility in the first instance.’
The Seychelles is leading the way with the first ever prosecution of an Iranian skipper and his crew caught with help from Darwin. Their dhow was caught carrying a cargo of illicit drugs inside Seychelles territorial waters. The captain, who had already been caught three times smuggling drugs in his fishing dhow, finally lost the boat and was facing twenty years in prison and the likelihood of never seeing his family again.
In his office in a lovely colonial building in the Seychelles capital, Victoria, Morgan tells me there should be a UN Security Council resolution that deals with the problem of illegal activities on the high seas, specifically arms and drug trafficking, just as there is for terrorism. Like many political leaders, he feels confounded about the legal loophole given that most of the drugs are funding terrorist activities by organisations such as Al-Qaeda, and all of the smuggled weapons end up in the hands of terrorist groups such as Al-Shabaab in Africa or ISIS in the Middle East.
‘I think it will come, it’s coming, but we just need to give it the momentum it needs,’ he says.
Seychelles Minister for Finance, Trade and the Blue Economy Jean-Paul Adam says the success of counter-piracy operations is a double-edged sword because it has driven those involved to other illegal activities such as drugs, arms or people smuggling.
‘A lot of the forces that were driving piracy were economic so people are turning to other things such as people trafficking, they’re turning to drug smuggling and these are, while perhaps less sensational, as disruptive to our economy,’ he says. ‘In Seychelles, we have a rising drug problem among the young people in the country which leads to issues of productivity.’
Adam says that nullifying piracy means that a major source of funding for the criminal networks has been cut off. ‘We have to make sure that we’re dealing with the other parts of these criminal networks. Unfortunately, the criminal networks are globalised these days, you know they operate like global conglomerates. If one part of their business is not successful they will diversify and they’ll go into others but using often the same a
ssets. So precisely when you catch a vessel doing something illegal it has to be impounded, it has to be seized or it has to be destroyed and you have to take out the capacity to continue to operate illegally.’
Like his colleague Minister Morgan, he says that the international community must act to take responsibility for the shared space that is the ocean.
‘The challenge really is to bring law and order as we know it on land to the ocean,’ he says. ‘It’s harder because of problems with jurisdictions, problems of capacity. Not every country can afford to have navies that can crisscross the ocean and so we need better networks [not just] in terms of intelligence sharing, of coordination, but a willingness. One of the things that has been missing, and maybe we’re going in the direction where they’re starting to be much more willing, is to take responsibility for that shared space. I think piracy has opened our eyes to how much trouble there actually is.’
Piracy shone a light into the dark world of maritime criminality in the Indian Ocean region, which includes not only drugs and guns but also charcoal smuggling, the ivory trade, fish poaching and people trafficking.
‘These criminal networks make the most of the fragile states like Somalia where there are large parts of the country not necessarily under sustained governance in terms of law and order,’ Adam says. He says Seychelles is very grateful for Australia’s involvement in the fight against high seas crime. His country could never match the bigger nations when it comes to deploying naval assets to hunt down the criminals. However, his tiny country has shown the way when it comes to using the courts to tackle piracy, with about half of all prosecutions taking place there.
At the Seychelles piracy conference, there was a strong sense that while piracy had been nullified in the short-term there was a grave risk of a resurgence should the Combined Maritime Forces ever take the pressure off pirates while pursuing other criminal enterprises.
Not all the blame for the piracy epidemic lies with the criminal gangs. Fish poaching by foreign vessels and the dumping of toxic waste in the waters off Somalia, triggered by the civil war in 1991, all but destroyed the incomes of local fishermen along the Horn of Africa. With their fish stocks and livelihood gone, poverty pushed them into the arms of criminal networks, which forced them to form armed groups to intercept foreign ships and hold them and their crews for ransom.
According to those who worked on the issue at the time, the desperation of the Somali fishermen was accurately portrayed in Captain Phillips, as was the US Navy’s rescue of the central character played by Tom Hanks.
Captain Richard Phillips was the skipper of the Danish container ship Maersk Alabama when she was hijacked in the Gulf of Aden in April 2009. He was rescued from one of the ship’s lifeboats by US navy SEALS, who killed two of his three Somali captors. The third remains in a US prison where he is serving a thirty-year sentence.
On 29 May that year the Australian government, under then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, agreed to join CTF 151, which had been established to counter the piracy attacks. The navy frigate HMAS Warramunga and an RAAF AP-3C Orion maritime patrol aircraft were sent to the mission.
The RAN’s first taste of counter-piracy operations had occurred earlier that month when HMA Ships Sydney and Ballarat were transiting the Internationally Recommended Transit Corridor in the Gulf of Aden on their way to the UK for Exercise Northern Trident via the Suez Canal. Thanks to the close links forged between Australia and the US Navy in the post-World War II era it was a simple matter for Australian warships to be used operationally where possible as they steamed through one of the world’s most enduring trouble spots.
On this occasion, the two ships were attached to CTF 151 for the duration of their transit and on 17 May they responded to a call for help from the oil tanker MV Dubai Princess steaming about thirty kilometres ahead. When they arrived on the scene, two pirate skiffs disengaged from the tanker. A lethal attack was averted and the Australian task group handed the incident over to a US warship and continued on their way.
The CO of Sydney and the task group commander, Peter Leavy, said in a Sea Power Centre paper that neither warship had had the benefit of a work-up period or any special counter-piracy training, but the core skills on RAN ships allowed them to deal with a tricky encounter.
‘The dynamic nature of the situation is perhaps best shown by the ships being at action stations, covering a skiff that had reportedly fired upon a merchant ship, while at the same time making internal plans on how to deal with a SOLAS [safety of life at sea] issue should that same skiff have subsequently become unseaworthy or if those on board needed rescuing. Both ends of the spectrum were being covered, Leavy said.
The experience of Sydney and Ballarat, he said, proved the value of a visible presence in deterring piracy and the inherent value in the flexibility and versatility of warships.
Bill Waters, who later commanded HMAS Melbourne on a Gulf deployment, was the Executive Officer in Sydney at the time and he recalls spending a lot of time on the radio back to Fleet Headquarters in Sydney discussing the possible ramifications of the incident. ‘We spent a number of hours radioing back to Australia saying, “Right, what do you need us to do with it now? What are our rules of engagement going to be? What are the legal implications, should we seize them?”’
By the time Waters returned to the Gulf region as CO of Melbourne in August 2015 all the legal and operational issues were resolved and the counter-piracy mission was clear.
7
Under the not-so-Jolly Roger
The navy’s deepest foray into the brutal world of Somali pirates took place in October 2014.
The guided missile frigate HMAS Melbourne, under the command of then Commander Brian Schlegel, had arrived in the region and was attached to Combined Task Force 151 for counter-piracy duty off the Horn of Africa. Following a quiet initial patrol, the ship’s second patrol began with a bang on 13 October when she was tasked, along with a Dutch warship, to steam about 650 kilometres south at full speed to the scene of a reported pirate attack.
Even at twenty-eight knots that was a twenty-four-hour transit, and by the time they arrived on site the pirates had left. However, soon afterwards a second attack by the same gang, dubbed the ‘Pirate Action Group’ (PAG), took place to the east of Melbourne’s position, which was about 500 kilometres east of the Somali coast in calm seas.
Schlegel says he could never understand why the pirates didn’t make a run for home after the first failed attack, but surmises, ‘They were clearly under instructions not to come home unless they were successful.’
As it was his first deployment to the region, he was fortunate to have an experienced Executive Officer, Lieutenant Commander Andrew Hough, who had deployed to the Middle East on four previous occasions. The command team established a search pattern that resulted in the ship’s helicopter locating two suspect pirate skiffs.
With a helicopter above, a warship nearby and two RHIBs packed with heavily armed sailors surrounding them, the nine Somali pirates had little choice but to surrender without a fight. The pirates were transferred to the warship, and Schlegel was ordered to gather as much evidence as possible from their boats before destroying them and steaming west to land the pirates back at home in Somalia.
The pirate vessels had several large drums of fuel on board to feed the powerful outboard motors. The Australians emptied the gasoline into the boats before the ship’s .50-calibre and the helicopter’s Mag 58 machine guns strafed them. The skiffs quickly burnt to the water-line and sank. Melbourne then made a beeline for the African coast with the prisoners held under shelter on the ship’s forecastle (bow area) behind the Mark 13 missile launcher.
Because of the lack of a piracy agreement at that time with the nearest country, the Seychelles, and the on-going stalemate under international law, the Combined Maritime Forces headquarters in Bahrain had decided to send the pirates back to their homeland.
As she steamed westwards, Melbourne conducted a replenishment at sea wit
h a British tanker before she set sail for the coast of Somalia.
Under international agreements the pirates could not simply be dumped in the desert. Two likely ‘safe’ locations were agreed for the transfer in the Hobyo region, northeast of the war-torn Somali capital Mogadishu and close to known pirate camps.
At the first landing spot, Melbourne’s RHIBs and a Zodiac found the surf conditions too rough to get ashore so they returned to the ship. The next day a suitable site was found and the RHIBs, under the command of Andrew Hough, towed the Zodiac carrying the pirates towards shore. Then the heavily armed boarding team drove the flat-bottomed Zodiac up onto a sheltered beach.
Schlegel viewed the entire operation in high resolution from the ops room on the ship’s powerful optical sensor from about 1600 metres offshore. He kept Melbourne’s main gun pointing away from the beach, but the ship’s Seahawk helicopter provided overwatch using its powerful Wescam camera and with its machine gun ready to roll at the first sign of trouble.
Suddenly, local militia vehicles bristling with heavy machine guns and RPGs appeared above the beach.
Says Schlegel, ‘It was always a line-ball decision – do we just pull back and wait and find another venue, do we have enough time? My worst-case scenario was if they had all jumped in the cars and gone screaming towards the beach landing point, at which stage it would clearly be a choice of – can we get the boats out quickly enough so they’re outside their range?’
It was an extremely tense situation. Commander Schlegel split his time between the bridge and operations room, monitoring the action, the ship’s position and, crucially, the depth of water.
The Smack Track Page 8