“The New Piracy” by Charles Glass, in The London Review of Books (Dec. 18, 2003), 28 Little Russell St., London WC1A 2HN, England.

While everybody talks about digital piracy these days, piracy of the old-fashioned kind, which supposedly disappeared after the Napoleonic Wars, has been making a big comeback—and some fear that the worst is yet to come. There were 445 attacks on ships around the world last year, compared with 370 in 2002 and 106 in 1998. Twenty-one seafarers were killed and 71 others listed as missing. The estimated cost to international trade in lost cargo and ships and higher insurance premiums now runs about $16 billion annually, according to the Asia Foundation.

“Ninety-five percent of the world’s cargo travels by sea,” observes Glass, author of Tribes with Flags (1990). “Yet no one, apart from ship owners, their crews, and insurers, appears to notice that pirates are assaulting ships at a rate unprecedented since the glorious days when pirates were ‘privateers’ protected by their national governments.”

Piracy today is most common in waters where it flourished in the past: in the Bay of Bengal, in the Java and the South China seas, off the Horn of Africa, and in the Caribbean. Instead of Spanish galleons and the like, today’s pirates prey on oil tankers and other merchant ships, then sell the captured cargo on the black market. Beyond
national territorial waters, there are no laws and no police. “Many countries lack the will or the resources to police even their own waters,” says Glass.

Owners of small vessels often can’t afford some obvious protective measures, such as satellite-tracking devices, closed-circuit cameras, and onboard security officers. “Owners and trade unions discourage the arming of merchant ships in the belief that firearms will put crews’ lives at greater risk,” Glass adds.

Lax security opens the door to terrorists as well as pirates. Singapore would be one tempting target. Each day, some 200 ships, carrying more than half the world’s oil exports and a quarter of all its cargo, pass through the island state’s port and refinery. Terrorists who seized an oil tanker and steered it at full speed into the port could cause tens of thousands of casualties and cripple the port’s operation for years. And the economic impact would shake the globe.