Earlier this week, families of seven Indian seafarers on board the Italian flag vessel MT Enrico Levoll heaved a sigh of relief. The men had been held hostage for four months after their ship was hijacked by Somali pirates on December 27 last year.

They were lucky. Pirates in Somalia are still holding seven other Indians of a total of 15 Indian crewmembers on board the MV Asphalt Venture captive. The ship was hijacked on September 28, 2010 and released after ransom was paid eight months later, but the pirates didn’t let the Indians go. They want 10 Somali pirates to be released for each Indian.

India currently has 120 Somali pirates in captivity in Taloja jail in Navi Mumbai. The Indian Navy captured the men in four separate encounters in 2011. Jail Superintendent SB Chavre said the pirates keep to themselves and are not a menace.

They are a danger when in their element, though.

So far in 2012, the Somali pirates have hijacked 11 ships and are holding 173 crewmembers hostage, according to the International Maritime Bureau. Most of the incidents occur off the coast of Somalia (see map) and are a threat to shipping in one of the most important trade corridors in the world.

Trade through the Suez Canal accounts for 8 percent of world trade. Sailors from India are increasingly reluctant to traverse this canal.

“We have tried to build a consensus with international unions for a ban on traffic through the Suez Canal”, says Abdulgani Serang, the secretary and treasurer of the National Union of Seafarers of India. This body has 70,000 registered members.

Serang says, “There are 15 lakh seafarers in the world and 1.5 lakh of them are Indians. We are next only to the Phillippines which has 4 lakh seafarers”.

A boycott on travel through the Suez Canal would mean ships would have to go all the way around the continent of Africa, past the Cape of Good Hope, an additional 15,000 km. “If that happens not only will it delay consignments, but also increase the cost of products. Only then will the world realize the importance of the seafarer”, says Serang.

Ship managers say traversing the Suez Canal is inevitable. “Over 60 percent of the world’s oil comes from the Persian Gulf countries and needs to be transported throughout the world”, says VK Singh, chairman of the Maritime Association of Ship owners, Ship managers and Agents. He adds that around 16,000ships a year pass through the Suez Canal, and only about 1 per cent of these are attacked. Only about 13 per cent of the attacked ships are actually hijacked.

Most of the hijacked ships do not follow guidelines, say Singh. These guidelines include having an armed guard on the ship, installing barbed wire around the ship to make it difficult for pirates to board, and building a secure citadel on the ship where crewmembers can take refuge if the ship is attacked.

Held hostage

The attacks usually come from pirates armed with firearms coming on small speedboats.

Jethva Devji Keshav, 55, was witness to one such attack. The seafarer, who had been sailing since 1977, was on board the Italian ship MT Savina Calyn when it was hijacked.

“We had crossed the Suez Canal and were around 1135 nautical miles from the Somalia coast when we saw an Iranian fishing vessel approaching our ship”, he says. Then, five armed pirates got off the ship in a speedboat and came at them.

“They tried to board from the front but their ladder was short. They then went behind the ship and somehow extended their ladder. The master of the ship had contacted the navy and they advised us to stop the pirates from climbing the ladder till they could reach us but by then the pirates had begun shooting. They finally boarded it”, he recounts.

“They summoned all of us to the bridge area and made a head count and also checked our passports. They had brought along petrol filled bottles that they placed all around the ship. They asked us to kneel down and put our hands behind our heads. Around 40 other pirates who were on the fishing vessel then boarded the ship. We later learnt that they had hijacked that vessel and held hostage the fishermen on that ship. After boarding our ship they released the fishing vessel”, he says.

This was on February 8, 2011. For almost a year after, Jethva and 16 other Indians in a crew of 22 were held hostage.

The pirates took the ship to the coast of Somalia, which they reached three days later. Once there, a new group of pirates took over the ship. They lived it up in style, says Jethva, and initially were good to their hostages, but after some time started giving each person only one liter of water a day, and leftover food.

The negotiations started after a month of the capture. Initially their demand was $ 8 million but the owner of the ship offered $3 million. The negotiations continued and by four months, if the owner had offered even $6 million they would have released the ship but that did not happen and in the meantime they suspected that their own negotiator/translator was striking a commission deal with the owner and so they sacked him and brought in a new translator who promised them $ 18 million from the owner,” he said.

As the negotiations dragged on, the pirates grew more frustrated. “I will never forget the day when they stripped the chief engineer and sent him inside the engine room which is very hot as punishment for some technical problem on the ship. They even plucked his nails using tongs”, recalls Jethva.

Finally on January 15 this year the deal was sealed and the owner paid $11.5 million for the release of the crew and the ship. A Kenyan helicopter came and dropped a part of the money on the ship, and the crew were put on a small boat and left to sail to a Kenyan ship that had come to pick them up.

Jolly good profits

Piracy is an organized business in Somalia, an impoverished country that ranks consistently first in the Failed States Index, well ahead of more celebrated cases such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Most of the pirates might otherwise have been fishermen, but piracy pays far better money. Ransoms run into millions of dollars, and each pirate can take home between $10,000 and $15,000 (Rs 5 lakh to Rs 7.5 lakh), according to a discussion paper on ‘The Business of Piracy in Somalia’. This is in a country where the average per capita annual income was estimated by the World Bank to be $226 in 2002. More recent figures are not available.

The business of piracy has proven to be relatively safe for the pirates themselves. Once they have hostages, they are relatively safe from attack. As Jethva recounted to this reporter, an Italian helicopter that approached their ship after it was hijacked had to leave after the pirates threatened to start killing crewmembers.

The pirates work in teams that report to a handler on the ground, who in turn sells the 'rights' on a hijacked ship to one of four or five warlords in Somalia. It works somewhat like the mafia.

India’s Director General of Shipping Satish Agnihotri however finds it difficult to believe that international forces are unable to sanitize the waters off the Somali coast. “The issue of piracy is more about international cynicism,” he says. “It is just that the western countries do not want to come under the United Nations command on the high seas. There is a clear UN mandate that international that international navies can enter the coast of Somalia to tackle piracy but no one wants to go there,” he says.

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He reckons that there are “just around 14-15 supply points on the Somali coast that provide logistical support to the pirates. If these are manned through a land based force and vehicles it would take hardly 40-50 vehicles and about 700 men to prevent the support provided to pirates from the shore,” he says.

Insurance companies are gaining through high premiums thanks to piracy, says Agnihotri. “They just exclude 12 nautical miles from the Indian coast from the war risk zone, whereas the entire 200 nautical miles of India’s exclusive economic zone which has been kept free of piracy by the Indian Navy should be excluded,” he says.

Asian companies ought to enter the business of insurance and security from which Western companies are profiting thanks to piracy, he says.

The Indian Navy has 34 warships patrolling the Gulf of Aden corridor. Captain Manohar Nambiar, Chief Public Relations Officer of the Indian Navy, says the navy has adopted a new way of dealing with pirates now. “If we apprehend pirates in the sea, we disarm them. We will arrest pirates now only if we catch them while attempting an attack”.

There are demands for a UN peacekeeping force to tackle piracy. “We have written to the UN seven months back seeking armed forces for the sea. The UN has Blue Berets for land but not for sea. So far we have not got any reply,” says Anil Devli of the Indian National Shipowners’ Association.

Until that happens, the pirates of the Indian Ocean, and the insurance sharks, can continue to hold ships to ransom.