From: senaey fethi (senaeyfethi@yahoo.com)
Date: Fri Mar 13 2009 - 20:58:43 EST
The Pirate Latitudes
When the French luxury cruise ship Le Ponant was captured by a raggedy, hopped-up band of Somali pirates last spring, in the Gulf of Aden, it looked as if the bandits had bitten off more than they could chew. But after a week-long standoff, they got what they had come for—a $2.15 million ransom. Describing the terrifying attack, the ordeal of the ship’s epicurean crew, and the tense negotiations, the author examines the ruthless calculus behind a new age of piracy.
by William Langewiesche April 2009
Last spring, as crew members of the small French-flagged cruise ship Le Ponant prepared to sail through the Gulf of Aden, off the coast of Somalia, they taped blackout cardboard over the windows, readied fire hoses to repel boarders, and mounted a special pirate watch to port and starboard. The Gulf of Aden is a hotbed of piracy, a crucial waterway where over the past several years Somali gangs operating far from shore have been hijacking ships, and allied navies have tried to respond. The Ponant was not built for such places. It is a modern, 290-foot, three-masted sailing vessel, with Riviera-style raked lines, that sells luxurious holidays to a maximum of 64 passengers at a time. It has four decks (including an upper one for lounging in the sun), two restaurants serving sophisticated French cuisine, individually air-conditioned cabins, a bar, a library, and a marina platform close to the water at the stern, for the launching of Zodiacs and water toys.
It spends Northern Hemisphere summers in the Mediterranean on old-stone excursions to dead-city sites, and Southern Hemisphere summers in the Indian Ocean, visiting Madagascar and the pristine islands of the Seychelles. Its customers tend to be silver-haired and genteel. Most are American or French, traveling in groups sufficiently large to charter the entire ship. On this run now, however, no passengers were aboard. The ship was being repositioned to the Mediterranean for the summer season—a trip requiring a monotonous passage beyond sight of land for a full week at sea. The crew took advantage of the pause to relax and perform minor chores. Despite their precautions they did not believe that the Ponant would be attacked.
There were 30 crew members aboard—the ship’s full complement, less one professional pianist. They occupied cramped but adequate quarters on the lowest deck, toward the bow. Most were not sailors but hotel staff. Six were Filipinos, and formed a group apart. In the kitchen, the chef was an African from Cameroon, but because he had learned to cook in Lyon from Paul Bocuse, a famous father of nouvelle cuisine, he was considered to be as French as the French themselves. Of the rest of the crew all except one Ukrainian were as French as the French, but by birth. This meant that nouvelle cuisine was important to them, and, generally speaking, so was sex. With the exception of a 69-year-old ship’s doctor who had gone to sea after a rough divorce, they were young to middle-aged. Seven of them were women, and sporting as European women can be. Three couples had formed—the cruise director with the chief mechanic, a chambermaid with a steward, and the
sports coordinator with the third mechanic. Their liaisons were discreet but of interest to everyone. There were no secrets on a ship the size of the Ponant. Surprisingly, there were also few jealousies.
You had to be sociable to endure in the job, because however pleasant the Ponant seemed to its passengers, the conditions of work aboard were not easy. The wages were low, the hours were long, and no retirement benefits were provided. During rotations ashore there were no wages at all. These terms were non-negotiable. They stemmed from the culture of a global shipping industry which over the past 60 years has pursued profit and efficiency in part by ridding itself of labor unions, and more fundamentally by freeing itself from the constraints of the nation-state and its laws. The company that owns the Ponant is a Marseille-based shipping conglomerate called CMA CGM, which is held by a Franco-Syrian-Lebanese family named Saadé, and does business through 650 agencies and offices worldwide, serving 403 ports in 150 countries, and operating more than 400 container ships, many of them under flags of convenience—cherry-picking the official home ports in a
mockery of national chauvinisms. If there were a God looking down from above, he would have to approve, if only on the basis that all are equal in his sight. Appropriately, the CMA CGM personnel department promotes the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and vigorously denounces “any kind of discrimination, based on national, social or ethnic origin, race, sex, age, religion, political or other opinions.” This means, of course, that the company denounces discrimination in favor of the French.
The WarningIt has to deal with the customers’ prejudices nonetheless. As is well known, the French still think that French is better, and many Americans quietly go along. It might be difficult to sell expensive cruises on a truly non-discriminatory ship, for instance sailing under the Mongolian flag with a mixed Pakistani and Indonesian crew. A partial answer for the Ponant is a special registry based 10,000 miles from Marseille in the South Pacific, in a tax haven that does not impose French labor laws on shipowners but allows the French flag to be flown. The tax haven is Mata-Utu, the home port painted on the Ponant’s stern, and the capital of a loosely held French protectorate called Wallis and Futuna, where the Ponant has never been. There are three main islands there, one of which has been uninhabited for more than a century—ever since, it is reputed, the last of its residents were killed and eaten. Today the territory is ruled by a French
envoy, a fractious assembly, and three local kings. CMA CGM maintains a mailbox and an e-mail address there, in Mata-Utu, through which employment inquiries can be routed. But these are details that did not have to concern the passengers, for whom, by appearances, the Ponant was a French ship with a French crew that was happy and healthy and did not require tips.
The crew were romantics, or they never would have gone to sea. The captain was a die-hard sailor named Patrick Marchesseau, aged 40, who came from La Rochelle, on the French Atlantic coast, and had three young daughters, two of whom, Alizéa and Océana, had nautical names. Marchesseau is a gracious, soft-spoken man, whose appearance, except for the crow’s feet around his eyes, is unmarked by the sea. I met him in a village in the center of France. He told me that he started sailing as a child in nine-foot Optimists, became a sailing instructor as a teenager, made his first ocean trip at age 18 in a 41-foot fiberglass sloop, went off to merchant-marine school, graduated, rose through the ranks aboard various vessels, and at the age of 35, in 2003, assumed command of the largest passenger ship then operating under the French flag—a 700-foot, 1,700-person monster called the Mistral, which belonged to the Greek-owned Festival Cruises and was home-ported
(naturally) in Mata-Utu. Marchesseau had 500 crew members representing 40 nationalities under his command, and as captain of a ship was rather far removed from the sea. The job was above all an exercise in scheduling, logistics, and personnel management. Then Festival Cruises went broke, and creditors stepped in to seize the Mistral in Marseille. It was January 16, 2004. One day later Océana was born. Eventually, Marchesseau flew to Tahiti, where he captained a yacht for a few months, before returning to Marseille to manage a small maintenance crew on the Mistral, which remained blocked in port. These were hard times, but to be expected in the business.
In the fall of 2004, Marchesseau’s luck changed, and he was hired to serve as one of two rotating captains of the Ponant. The split duty placed him onshore more than he would have preferred, and meant that he would be paid for only half of every year, but the offer was better than others in sight and had the added attraction that the Ponant is a true sailing ship, capable of moving under wind power alone. Marchesseau flew to the Seychelles and assumed command. Soon afterward, on December 26, 2004, the ship was anchored in deep water off an island called Curieuse, tending to a group of French passengers, most of whom had gone ashore to loll on a beach. Around noon a sailor radioed from the island reporting in confusion that the ocean had suddenly somehow withdrawn. It was the ebb before the surge of the murderous Asian tsunami that was reaching across the Indian Ocean and slamming into its shores. Marchesseau had received no warning of the event, and he
had no time to make sense of the sailor’s call. The tsunami swept smoothly under the Ponant’s keel, in the form of a current, pivoting the ship 90 degrees around its anchor, and then rearing up into a steep wave which obliterated the beach from right to left before Marchesseau’s eyes. Marchesseau was horrified, but perhaps because the French are so well practiced with beaches, it turned out that every passenger survived. Elsewhere, a quarter-million people died. Marchesseau retrieved his wards. He was annoyed that some of them then made a fuss about losing their sunglasses.
On a larger ship a captain would not have had to listen to such complaints. Nonetheless, Marchesseau was pleased with the Ponant’s modest size. He liked the proximity to the sea and the crew, and he appreciated the flexibility that comes with attending to only 64 passengers at a time.
Many of the trips were full charters. Among the national groups, the French were the easiest to handle, if not necessarily to like. They slept late, savored the refined cuisine, and demanded little of an itinerary beyond the chance to lie in the sun. They could be imperious with the waiters and maids, but overall they were simple to satisfy. American passengers were different—individually more accessible than the French, but collectively exhausting. The problem seemed to stem from a lack of skepticism, or of philosophical distance from themselves. Certainly this was not true of all Americans, but it did seem to apply to the types who came to these cruises. They sincerely regarded traveling on the Ponant as an opportunity for self-improvement. They would read up beforehand (from recommended lists), and then appear for the trips with sunblock creams and special shoes, accompanied by lecturers who were expected to enrich their minds. They were nice
people, but of the sort who go for swims wearing long-brimmed visors and drawstring hats. Rather than lingering late in the Ponant’s bar, they retired after dining because they wanted to be fresh for sunrise departures and goal-oriented hikes. They did not walk, but trekked. They did not like long lunches of nouvelle cuisine. Midday they preferred quick meals of barbecued burgers and New York cheesecake, or Caesar salad. They did not mean to offend. But their tastes were insulting to the chef, and upsetting by birthright to the crew.
Three such American groups had chartered the Ponant consecutively just prior to the repositioning run last spring, and another was scheduled to join the ship a week ahead, on the far side of Yemen, for a self-improvement sail up the Red Sea. Marchesseau wanted to give the crew a rest. From Victoria, the capital of the Seychelles, they motored north for several days, doing 12 knots across a flat sea and tidying the ship when not sleeping or reading or sitting down to eat. On the first night out, a Sunday, they enjoyed an exquisite dinner of freshly caught bonito. We know about the food because Marchesseau later published a book in France recounting the ship’s ordeal, and, as a Frenchman writing for the French, he kept the readers closely informed on matters of cuisine. The book is called Prise d’Otages sur le Ponant. It is a chronological account, informed by technical detail. In the absence of the ship’s log, which has never been made public, it is
the closest thing to a document of record, and a helpful supplement to the captain’s memories.
On the morning of the second day, a Monday, a breeze arrived from the northeast, and the crew raised the sails—16,000 square feet of brilliant white fabric, which added only slightly to the speed produced by the ship’s engine, but was glorious to observe. That night they passed the latitude of Mogadishu, but 800 miles at sea. Their route was the prudent one. It gave the Somali coast a wide berth for the longest possible time, at first by sailing north to a position northeast of the island of Socotra, off the Horn of Africa, before turning west and entering the Gulf of Aden. The Gulf of Aden is a gauntlet between Somalia and Yemen, about 550 miles long by 200 miles wide, which ships sailing to and from the Suez Canal must cross. The pirates there are drawn by the concentration of prey, and nourished by the freedoms that exist along both shores, especially in Somalia, where formal government has long since collapsed.
One of the ironies at play is that the maritime industry being victimized is itself a standard-bearer for the advantages that exist in a world beyond law and regulation. But Marchesseau was not thinking about that. He planned to traverse the Gulf of Aden exactly as the French Navy recommended, moving precisely along the centerline and skirting each coast by an equal 100 miles. The route was too predictable to be prudent, and it seemed mostly to reflect a bureaucratic preference for symmetry, but it was justified by the claim of equal dangers to the left and right. As the professional captain of a passenger ship, Marchesseau was in no position to disagree. In any event, they would be in the most dangerous zone for only about 36 hours. Marchesseau was not very worried.
But on the morning of the third day out from the Seychelles, with hundreds of miles still to sail before the turn point beyond Socotra, he received word from the global Piracy Reporting Centre, in Kuala Lumpur, that pirate attacks in the Gulf of Aden were again on the rise, and that a chemical tanker had just been shot up while evading five speedboats that had pressed an assault despite the presence of a warship in the vicinity.
Marchesseau assembled the crew to review the situation. He pointed out that thousands of ships pass through the Gulf of Aden every year, that the Ponant itself had made the passage 12 times before, and that they would be in communication with the French and allied navies. Nonetheless, the situation had deteriorated, and the crew would have to take defensive measures—standing reinforced watches, blacking out the windows, preparing the fire hoses, and trailing lines from the stern to ensnare the propellers of small boats approaching from behind. From what was known of Somali patterns, an assault was more likely in daylight than at night. Marchesseau said that the low marina deck aft would be the obvious place for pirates to climb aboard. It was all very unlikely, but there was one other point he needed to make: given the obvious risks to the women if the Ponant came under attack, he expected all seven of them to move immediately into the forward storage
hold, a sub-deck space toward the bow beneath the crew’s quarters, where pirates would be unlikely to look.
But it still seemed unreal. Months later, the bartender Bertrand Viallet mentioned to me that a few crew members had expressed concern after Marchesseau’s briefing, but that others had easily reassured them. Out in the Ponant’s aft open-air restaurant, they had a light salad accompanied by delicately grilled meats subtly spiced with herbs from Provence. Blacked out, they sailed past Socotra in the night. The following day, they turned west and headed for the midpoint entrance to the Gulf of Aden, about 300 miles ahead. Marchesseau sent a position report to the French Navy. The wind was light. The sails were up. Marchesseau ran a combination fire and abandon-ship drill, and was pleased with the results. He inspected the storage holds for cleanliness and order. In the afternoon he gave the crew time to relax. Two women put on bathing suits and lounged on the upper deck looking beautiful in the sun. Two decks below, Bertrand Viallet cranked some music
up full blast. Marchesseau settled in with a biography of the explorer Captain Cook. The sun set, and the wind shifted to the southeast, freshened, and filled the sails from behind. The night passed without event. By morning the Ponant had progressed some way into the Gulf of Aden and was rushing westward at its maximum practical speed of 13 knots.
“They’re Coming!”Around lunchtime on an empty ocean a blip appeared on the Ponant’s radar, about nine miles ahead. Marchesseau was on the bridge along with a junior officer who was standing watch. The target was stationary and directly on the centerline route. After a few minutes Marchesseau was able to spot it through binoculars. It seemed to be a fishing boat, a long-liner of perhaps 150 feet, with a high bow and a rugged oceangoing appearance. Marchesseau was wary. He ordered the junior officer to approach no closer than four miles, and if necessary to deviate to the south to pass at a safe distance on the upwind side. He then walked aft to eat. The lunch was a delightful meal of salad, potatoes, and grilled meats, accompanied by a light wine, but Marchesseau was preoccupied. The Ponant, he recorded, detoured to the south as planned. From the aft restaurant the fishing boat came into view to starboard: it remained stopped in the water, with no
sign of activity on the decks. Marchesseau watched it uneasily. While the rest of the crew ate, he allowed the meat to cool on his plate, and accepted a second offering of salad without knowing if he was hungry. Such is the burden of command. Eventually, however, with the fishing boat dropping farther astern, and the Ponant continuing to sail westward at 13 knots, he allowed himself to relax. As the tables began to be cleared, and coffee was served to others, he returned to his meal.
It was at that moment that the cruise director said, “Captain, aren’t those boats over there?” So much for the formal pirate watch. Marchesseau leapt out of his chair. Two small skiffs—white dots to the naked eye—were speeding from the fishing boat toward the Ponant. He said, “Shit, they’re coming!” He ran to the bridge and broadcast a message throughout the ship, ordering the women to take refuge in the forward hold, and the men to prepare to repel boarders. Most of the women were in the restaurant at the time. Some were attired in bathing suits, and some in shorts—a poor choice for an Islamic region, but hardly surprising on a ship unaccustomed to accommodating local cultures. The local culture was certainly approaching now. One woman rushed to the rail to see. One grabbed a bottle of wine, a rosé of average quality. The cook urged them to get moving. Together they hurried down through a floor hatch, closing themselves off below the
waterline in the storage hold.
The aggressors approached quickly from behind. Up on the bridge Marchesseau transmitted a silent distress signal to the naval authorities. He instructed the officer on watch to take manual control of the helm. On a lower deck the crew had extended the fire hoses and were crouched defensively against the bulkheads, particularly above the vulnerable marina platform at the stern. The pirates themselves were now clearly in view—eight ragtag Somalis between the two boats, armed with Kalashnikovs and a reloadable rocket-propelled-grenade launcher. They seemed to be experienced men. They ignored the temptation of the marina platform, and advanced with both boats to a mid-hull position on the Ponant’s starboard side, bypassing the ropes trailing off the stern, and rendering all but one fire hose useless. Marchesseau ordered the helmsman to zigzag violently, hoping to overwhelm the skiffs or shake them off, but because the mid-hull position was close to the
Ponant’s axis of rotation, the maneuvering had little effect on the pirates. For five minutes at 13 knots the struggle went on. Marchesseau ordered the fire hose into use, but it was weak and could not deter the attack. The pirates managed to hook a ladder over the ship’s gangway, and one of them began to clamber up the side. The ship’s doctor fought back, straining to dislodge the ladder and throw the pirate into the sea, but the angle was difficult, and he could not overcome the weight. Faced with resistance, two gunmen began to spray the Ponant with rifle rounds. The banging of their Kalashnikovs was muted compared to the augmented sounds portrayed in the movies, and this led some of the crew to conclude that the rifles were toys. Others knew better, and shouted for everyone to get down. Everyone did, and then went squirming off in every which direction as the pirates came climbing over the railing. For a brief but indeterminate time, sex and
even nouvelle cuisine were forgotten aboard the Ponant.
Six crewmen had taken shelter on the bridge. With the pirates closing fast, Marchesseau made a single blind radio call to the French Navy. He set down the microphone just as the pirates burst onto the bridge with their rifles leveled. Marchesseau and the others raised their hands. The pirates were scrawny and barefoot young men, dressed in rags, and edgy under the effect of the stimulant khat. Their leader was more mature but equally nervous. He was a short, clean-shaven man, with a muscular build and deep scars on his shoulders. Among all the pirates, he was the only one in shoes, and the sole possessor of a pistol, which he had attached to his belt with a cord and was now waving around menacingly. Marchesseau figured he was 30 years old. Later Marchesseau would learn that his name was Ahmed, and that for lack of proper upbringing he did not speak French. His English was not much better. First he shouted, “O.K.!” Then he shouted, “All crew!”
Then he shouted, “Who captain? Who chief?”
Marchesseau answered, “Me.” Communication was with gestures as much as words. At gunpoint Ahmed forced Marchesseau to slow the ship and summon all hands to the upper deck. Marchesseau took the risk, in French, of summoning only the men. The women remained safe and unknown to the pirates. The men surrendered, and were forced to sit on the sundeck under heavy guard. They were 22 in all—less one Filipino steward, who was dead or wounded or in hiding. Marchesseau did not mention the missing man. He claimed that the assembly constituted the entire crew. He asked, “What do you want?”
Ahmed answered, “Money.”
It seemed easy enough. These people were not political. They were not terrorists. They were perhaps Muslims, but probably not devout. They were pirates, plain and simple. The crew assumed they would rob the ship and leave. Marchesseau wanted to get them off as soon as possible, and he hoped it could be done cheaply. He enlisted the hotel director and led Ahmed two decks below to the cramped hotel office, where the proceeds from the sale of trinkets were stored. In a safe there they found about 800 euros. Ahmed was disappointed. On the way out, he spotted a fleece jacket inscribed with the Ponant’s logo in a display case. To Marchesseau’s surprise, he did not smash the glass with his pistol, but waited patiently for the hotel director to dig up a key and unlock the case before helping himself to the prize—in size extra-extra-large. He put on the jacket as if unaware of the heat of the afternoon. But back on the upper deck the sun was cooking the
crew. Marchesseau asked that they be moved into the shade of a sail and given something to drink. Ahmed issued the necessary orders. At 2:30 in the afternoon, an hour and a half after the attack had begun, a Canadian naval helicopter arrived overhead. The crew was relieved, but the pirates did not seem to care. Some made dismissive gestures. The man with the rocket launcher raised his weapon as if to fire. The helicopter circled twice and flew away to the northeast.
Soon afterward Marchesseau’s hopes for the pirates’ imminent departure were dashed when additional gunmen arrived carrying large quantities of cigarettes and supplies, which they began unloading onto the marina platform. The food was crude but not beneath comment by the French. It included disgusting soft drinks, disgusting cooking oils, and cartons of disgusting spaghetti, which spilled onto the deck from a box that split. A bucket contained a full sheep’s worth of disgusting sun-dried meat. It was upsetting. Surely these Somalis realized that a ship like the Ponant would have plenty of its own supplies, and that in terms of cuisine it was not just some average prize. As if in punishment for this stupidity, one of the pirates then slipped off the marina platform and fell into the wake. He immediately disappeared. Ahmed came rushing up the stairs and demanded that Marchesseau maneuver the ship to search for him. The search lasted 15 minutes, until
Ahmed called it off. He said the dead man was a hero, and his family would be paid $100,000 for his sacrifice. That sum was probably a brag, but the promise of a payment indicated a level of organization that turned out to be real.
Marchesseau had taken advantage of the confusion to steer the Ponant to the northeast, toward the helicopter which was still visible on the horizon. He hoped to close the distance with whatever naval force lay out there. Ahmed had a different idea. He ordered the crew to turn the ship to the south and make full speed for Ras Asir, the cape that tips the Horn of Africa. Ras Asir is on the coast of Puntland, a so-called breakaway region of the so-called Somali Republic, and currently the world’s premier pirate haven. Like the rest of Somalia, Puntland ranks low in the measures of national progress that matter, for instance, to people like the statisticians of Transparency International, but in its own fashion it is without a doubt one of the freest places on earth. Marchesseau dreaded going there, but he advanced the throttle and directed the ship toward Ras Asir. Cheating was impossible because of the close supervision of a nasty little pirate named
Adam, who stood on the bridge worshipping a handheld G.P.S. and arguing over every compass degree. The cape lay 120 miles ahead—merely eight hours away under the ship’s combination of sail and engine power. Marchesseau was determined to delay. He came up with a ruse which allowed one of the ship’s engineers to surreptitiously push an engine-kill button on the bridge. The engine stopped, the alarms sounded, and Marchesseau feigned surprise. The pirates briefly left him unguarded on the bridge, and hurried the engineers down into the engine room to see what was wrong. When Marchesseau was alone, the satellite phone rang. It was a manager from the company, calling from Marseille. Marchesseau did not let him speak. In French he said, “We have about 10 pirates aboard. They want to take us to Somalia. We’ve stopped the motor. I can’t talk any longer. It’s dangerous, and I’m hanging up.” His heart pounded. He had taken a chance, but the
contact with the company turned out to be the one that counted.
Belowdecks, the engineers were taking their own chances by claiming they could not re-start the engine, though circumstances strongly hinted that the failure was contrived. Ahmed realized he was being taken for a fool. Furious at the insult, he marched the engineers from the engine room with a pistol to the head of one of them, then went up to Marchesseau and fired a round into the deck at his feet. “O.K.! Finish to play!” he said. Marchesseau got the message. He ordered the engine re-started. The Ponant proceeded south at eight knots, which was the least Marchesseau believed he could get away with.
The ArmadaAround sunset a Canadian warship named the H.M.C.S. Charlottetown appeared over the northern horizon and assumed a position a few miles in trail. Its captain did not dare get closer because of the hostages. The Charlottetown was cruising in the Gulf of Aden as part of the U.S.-led effort known as Operation Enduring Freedom—the global war against terrorism, which in its naval form naturally requires the deployment of carrier task forces, nuclear submarines, and large allied fleets. The Charlottetown is a 443-foot frigate that carries a crew of 225 and is capable of dashing around at more than 30 knots. The Canadian Navy boasts that the ship possesses a complex command-and-control system combined with an impressive array of electronic sensors and modern weaponry. It has eight Boeing Harpoon long-range surface-to-surface missiles, 16 Raytheon Sea Sparrow surface-to-air missiles, a Bofors 57-millimeter rapid-fire gun, a General Dynamics Vulcan
Phalanx 20-millimeter close-in defensive gun system, an untold number of Honeywell Mark 46 torpedoes with ship and airborne launchers, and six Browning .50-caliber machine guns. It also has a Sikorsky Sea King helicopter—the one that had circled the Ponant and departed. A month later, after the ship returned to its home port, in Halifax, the Canadian Navy summarized its deployment as follows: “Charlottetown contributed significantly to deterrence of terrorism and other threats to maritime security—illegal migration, bootlegging and drug-running, for example—that harm legitimate commerce in the Gulf region. And because terrorism is a global problem, [the ship’s] efforts in the Gulf region also contributed significantly to security in Canada.”
More modestly, the Ponant’s crew felt relieved by the Charlottetown’s arrival. The pirates, however, did not seem to care. With these hostages they could hold off any armada. They rummaged through the ship, helping themselves to the clothes and music players they found. The Ponant continued steadily south. Marchesseau knew that the three crewmen with shipboard lovers were consumed with worries for their safety. He himself was frustrated by the isolation of the women in the forward hold, but he assumed that their continuing silence meant that they were finding some way to get by. He approached Ahmed and demanded food for the men on the upper deck, insisting that the chef be allowed to prepare a proper meal. Apparently, Ahmed knew better than to argue back. He dispatched the chef to the kitchen along with four guards to watch over the kitchen knives. The chef whipped up a meal of wok-seared vegetables and al dente pasta, with which he and the guards
returned to the upper deck. The crew ate using proper forks and plates. They had nothing for dessert, but some privation was to be expected. The pirates for their part let pass the chance to experience creative French cuisine, and chose instead to prepare a concoction of dried meat fried in rancid oil and shredded into a starchy spaghetti mash, which they ate out of a communal bowl with unwashed fingers. It was a small but disconcerting moment for the civilized world—evidence of the anarchy that prevails where nations fail and savagery threatens Canada. Luckily for the French, the bartender, Bertrand Viallet, had filled some thermoses with aperitifs, which helped to ease the trauma.
Night fell. The French government arrived, at first with another warship, a smallish, 260-foot corvette named the Commandant Bouan, which overtook the Canadians and assumed a position about three miles in trail of the Ponant. Unbeknownst to the Ponant’s crew, a large operation had been launched by officials in Paris under the direct supervision of the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy. Over the next several days the operation would grow to include a half dozen French Navy ships, two Bréguet maritime patrol planes, several Falcon executive jets, at least one government Airbus, many helicopters, at least 50 commandos from the navy and the gendarmerie, a squad of frogmen, several landing craft, hundreds of amphibious assault troops, multiple urgent motorcades through Paris (with motorcycle escorts), and a string of command-and-control centers, starting with a 24-hour crisis-management bureau that was established in the presidential palace. The commandos
were particularly dashing, the way they flew from Djibouti and parachuted into the sea to get aboard the warships.
Meanwhile, on their first night aboard the Ponant, the pirates took blankets and pillows to the upper deck to ease the sleep of their captives. Marchesseau remained awake on the bridge. The wind rose to 35 knots, and he roused some men to help him lower the sails. They came to Ras Asir before dawn, and headed south down the wild Somali coast. The sun rose. Marchesseau asked for a full French breakfast for his crew. Ahmed acquiesced. The cook responded with a buffet of cheese and charcuterie, fresh fruits, cereals, warm pastries, French bread, little pots of apricot jam, and strong French coffee. A French maritime patrol plane had arrived overhead and was circling persistently, as if drawn to the offering.
Ahmed the GallantBy that afternoon the women had been 24 hours in hiding. With them in the forward storage hold was the missing Filipino steward, who had panicked as the pirates approached, and had burrowed into the farthest reaches of the space, behind a stack of empty suitcases, from where he refused to move. The women were disdainful of his fear—all the more so because three of them had lovers who had squarely faced the threat and, for all the women knew, were now dead. The storage hold was an isolating place to hide, cut off even from sounds by the clattering of a water pump overhead. Like most sanctuaries it began to feel like a prison. It was physically uncomfortable too, because, although it was lit and ventilated, it had a sloped floor (corresponding to the V shape of the forward hull), and was encumbered with a central ballast tank and racks of hotel supplies. Luckily, the supplies included raisins and nuts, and bottles of good wine, which by
birthright the women were able to open. As necessary they relieved themselves into a steel bucket. No leader emerged among them. Rather, they handled the situation collegially, as women are said to do. They had little to go on. They were certain only that the ship remained in motion. As the first night passed, and the following morning wore on without sign of life from above, they began to imagine that the men had been slaughtered, and even that the pirates might have gone. If so, the Ponant was sailing on autopilot alone, heading blindly for ruin on some desolate shore. Desperate for information, they decided to risk a scouting mission. The person they selected for it was the Filipino steward. This made sense to them collegially. Somehow they bullied the man out of his hiding place and got him up the ladder, through the overhead hatch, and into the crew quarters above. Ten minutes passed in suspense until he returned. He had spent much of that time
hiding, but finally had dared to peek out on deck and had spotted a pirate right away.
The women went back to their deliberations. Some were crying in fear. Most were calm, though concerned. Whether or not the crewmen had been killed, it was clear that the pirates continued to control the ship, and would for the foreseeable future. The wine remained in good supply, but the food was running low, and it was obvious that they could not endure indefinitely in the storage hold. Of course they could have stayed there a few more days, but late that afternoon they took a vote and decided to emerge right away. The idea was frightening, but they saw it through. Led by the hapless steward, clustered together for courage, holding hands and expecting the worst, they climbed out of their hiding place and emerged into view on the Ponant’s forward deck, almost all of them now in tears. The pirates were stunned. Marchesseau was in the restaurant at the time. Ahmed rushed him to the scene and demanded an explanation. Marchesseau admitted that these were
the rest of the crew, and that he had hidden them because he had feared that women might be at risk. Ahmed was offended at the very idea. He said, “We do not touch women! We want money!” Referring to himself and his men, he said, “Robbers! Not terrorists!” With that distinction again in mind, he made a show of scolding Marchesseau for having subjected the women to such conditions. It was an annoying performance, but at least unthreatening. Marchesseau informed the women that none of the crew had been killed or injured. Ahmed escorted the group aft to the luxurious lower lounge, where he ordered that the women be provided with water and food. He was very gallant. He smoked a cigarette dramatically. When the water arrived, he sent it back for being lukewarm.
Jamah the LawyerBy strutting in front of the women and pretending to the high moral ground, Ahmed weakened himself to Marchesseau, who increasingly was able to demand that Ahmed and his men live up to the standard they professed. The crew noticed the change, and were amused by Marchesseau’s assertiveness, which probably helped to protect them from violence. Nonetheless, the pirates remained in control. The Canadians had dropped out of sight over the horizon. With the French warship trailing close behind, the Ponant moved deeply down-coast through Somali waters, heading for a fishing town called Garacad, now known as a pirate stronghold. It took two days to get there, during which time the pirates aboard the Ponant showed some concern about piracy themselves, and fired warning shots on a few occasions to keep small boats away. They made a stop along a stretch of coast, where small boats began to shuttle to and from the Ponant, delivering reinforcements
and supplies. The supplies included two sheep whose job, in an unrefrigerated environment, was to keep their meat from rotting until they could be properly bled out on the deck, chopped up, and fried. At Ahmed’s invitation, another pirate chief came aboard, was given a formal tour of the ship, and responded with expressions of admiration, as if he approved of the décor.
On the third night of the ordeal, the Ponant arrived off Garacad, and anchored about a mile offshore. In the morning the crew could see the town only as some metal roofs, perhaps a half-mile inland from the beach. As the French warship loitered helplessly nearby, Ahmed convened a council of the senior leadership to decide the fate of the Ponant. Among the dignitaries was an older man who introduced himself to Marchesseau as the group’s chairman. More important, a translator had come aboard in preparation for ransom negotiations. The translator’s name was Jamah. He wore polyester slacks and a long-sleeved shirt, and informed Marchesseau that he was a lawyer. Marchesseau remarked that he must not have many clients in Somalia, and Jamah answered without irony that he would indeed rather practice in Europe. He might also have considered the United States.
Jamah was a reader. Jamah spoke good English. Jamah turned out to be the nastiest pirate of them all. Once he was aboard, business could be done. Ahmed seated the group in the Ponant’s formal dining room. After 45 minutes of discussion they decided to ask for a ransom of $3 million in cash to be brought directly to the ship. The demand for cash delivery is a relatively new twist in the patterns of Somali piracy. In Mombasa, Kenya, I recently spoke to a seafarer named Andrew Mwangura, who has become the go-to man in many piracy cases, and who described elaborate payment schemes involving investors, money-launderers, and specialized middlemen in London, Dubai, and Nairobi. But Ahmed was going to handle this differently. He authorized Marchesseau to make the call to the company headquarters in Marseille, where CMA CGM had set up a 24-hour crisis office, under the direction of the owner’s 38-year-old son and heir apparent, Rodolphe Saadé. A stranger
answered in Marseille. Speaking in English, Marchesseau relayed the pirates’ demand. The man promised to call back. Long hours later, the company’s representative (it was Rodolphe Saadé himself, though Marchesseau did not know this then) called and pleaded for time. By nightfall no counter-offer had been made. If this was a tactic, it seemed reckless. Marchesseau knew that, on the scale of the Saadés’ operations, the sum demanded was quite small. He began to suspect that an assault was planned. The pirates seemed to sense the same. Their moods were swinging wildly. By now there were around 30 of them aboard—the exact number was hard to know. Some were secretly consuming alcohol from the mini-bars in the guest cabins, and all of them, it seemed, were hopped up on khat. The crew had assembled in the lower lounge. Marchesseau spoke to them discreetly in French to prepare them for a military action. In the case of a raid, he thought they should
try to escape down the stairs. The choices were limited. It was likely that if shooting started crew members would die.
The French Navy knew it, too. To assist the warship already on the scene, two additional French vessels were charging into the area—a 460-foot frigate equipped to fight World War III, and a 600-foot helicopter carrier that was getting old but was armed with naval artillery and anti-ship missiles, and could launch multiple helicopters at a time. In addition were the congregations of commandos and anti-terrorist police—every one of them over-trained, under-used, and eager for action. If you added up the assets already available, or soon to be, the display of French power was impressive indeed. And it was arrayed against what? A band of barefoot natives, Fuzzy Wuzzies in rags, hip-firing their Kalashnikovs with poor aim, and worshipping some filthy G.P.S. as if it had fallen from the sky. They should have surrendered days before, even to the Canadians. But they hadn’t, and that was the problem. They were not particularly bellicose or arrogant, but
they refused to be impressed when they should have been. A warship coming at you is supposed to present an intimidating sight. But it was as if the pirates inhabited a different dimension from that of the governments confronting them. With nothing but a group of French nationals as a shield, they were enjoying meals, going back and forth between ship and shore, and negotiating directly with the Saadés in Marseille, as if the French Navy did not even exist. The pattern was unusually frustrating to French authorities, as more recent piracy cases have been to American, Russian, and Chinese authorities. It raised disturbing questions about the relevance of governments and the exercise of power. More specifically, a suspicion crept in that these pirates knew exactly what they were doing, and that they understood the forces at play with more sophistication than had been assumed. Fuzzy Wuzzies they were, but until Paris decided it could accept casualties
among the Ponant’s crew, they had stymied the French national will.
Sealing the DealIt was a serious challenge in Nicolas Sarkozy’s view because Sarkozy is the embodiment of the French national system. He stands five feet five inches tall. As an intent law-and-order man, he was opposed in principle to negotiations with the pirates, and eager to show them the fist of France. He was, however, merely a president, and like others he was less powerful than he was made out to be. Politically it would have been difficult to order an assault on the Ponant before exhausting all alternatives. Furthermore, the ship’s owner, CMA CGM chairman Jacques Saadé, was making it clear through back channels that he intended to pay some sort of ransom. Sarkozy and Saadé were acquaintances and political allies, if not close friends. It is said that Sarkozy invoked principle to persuade Saadé not to pay, but to no avail. Saadé understood the reasoning, but in practice he had to place the safety of his crew and ship first—a decision
compounded by the certainty that casualties would impose costs higher than the paltry $3 million demanded. Besides, the money was not going to be paid directly by CMA CGM, but by its insurance company—which, according to the Paris-based Intelligence Online, was the now-notorious American company A.I.G. This was private money, floating free of national constraints, and it could be spent quite legally on ransom. To be clear about the rules that apply: extortion is illegal everywhere, except when it is construed as taxation; the payment of extortion, however, is legal, unless it is construed as bribery. This meant that for a while Sarkozy’s hands would be tied. Reluctantly he agreed to give Saadé several days to work out a deal before he would damn the consequences and send the French Navy into action. He summoned the families of the crew to a confidential meeting in the presidential palace, where he is reported to have said, “We’re dealing with
crooks. They want money. We’re going to give it to them. But afterward it’s my affair.”
Jacques Saadé intended to pay, but only after maneuvering for advantage. At two a.m. on the second day of negotiations, Rodolphe Saadé called the Ponant and offered $1.2 million. Marchesseau called him back some minutes later with the pirates’ vigorous rejection. The night wore on in this ballet, until the pirates made a final demand—for $2.15 million. The Saadés kept trying to bargain, but to no avail. In the afternoon the pirates declared a freeze on any further discussions. Marchesseau knew that they were serious. They allowed him to make one final call, during which he informed the Saadés that they had come to the end of the line. Rodolphe remained noncommittal. After the conversation, the possibility of an assault seemed even more real. Jamah said to Marchesseau, “In any case, you are the first one we will kill.” But that night Rodolphe called back and agreed to the deal—the release of the crew and ship in return for $2.15 million, to
be delivered in cash. The game was not over yet. Looming ahead was the difficult question of how to arrange for the handoff of the ransom, and the safe disengagement of the pirates, and the liberation of the crew. But after the deal was struck, everyone on the Ponant had a lot to lose if things went wrong.
One night Jamah predicted to the assembled crew that they were all going to die. He had found a book critical of the invasion of Iraq, The Assassins’ Gate, by George Packer, and it seemed to have riled him up. Jamah announced that he was against the war in Iraq, against al-Qaeda, and in favor of an Iranian nuclear bomb. No one much cared. For most of the crew, life with the pirates had settled into a routine. The crew spent the nights in the lower lounge, woke every morning at eight, moved up one level to the aft restaurant for the day, and returned to the lounge at sundown. There was not much to do but wait. They played cards and board games—poker, Trivial Pursuit, Monopoly, Pictionary. They ate well. They drank in moderation. They celebrated one birthday. The couples did not make love, because they lacked the privacy and were held under guard at all times, but a new couple did form, a sailor and a receptionist. It was assumed that they had noticed
each other before, but had been shy until now. The bartender Bertrand Viallet believed that their relationship would endure, and he was thoughtful in such matters. He was thoughtful about the pirates too. Later he went around saying that he might have become one himself, had he been born on the coast of Somalia. He meant it more as a declaration of fact than of sympathy. Whether because of the barriers of language and culture, or the active risk of being shot, none of the crew members seem to have bonded with their captors. They did, however, learn to distinguish between the bad and the better among them, and they relaxed enough to laugh about the pirate teetotalers suffering hangovers for the first time. One of the Ponant’s women tried khat. One of the pirates tried French cooking. Some of the pirates got into American adventure movies on the library’s DVD TV, dialogue be damned. Others got into women’s fashion magazines. By degrees, they lowered
the muzzles of their weapons.
French Navy helicopter pilot Lieutenant Marine Bayer and Midshipman Thomas Baratte. By Jacques Demarthon/AFP/Getty Images.
Over time they provided small insights into their pirate careers. They called themselves the Coast Guard, and apparently did have origins as vigilante fishermen who in the early 1990s sailed out to regulate and rob foreign boats that were smuggling all manner of contraband to and from Somalia and overfishing the coastal waters. Loosely speaking, they were the same group who later, in September 2008, hijacked the Ukrainian ship Faina, loaded with weapons for southern Sudan, and who ignored the presence of American warships for more than four months, and then walked away with $3.2 million, to the embarrassment of officials worldwide. The Coast Guard is said to have 400 members—whatever membership means, and however a count could be taken. Four or five such pirate groups are believed to operate in Puntland. They are large, fluid, clan-based alliances whose contours are inherently difficult to discern, and who derive their resilience in part from the very
looseness of their structures. They are genuine organizations nonetheless. The Somalis on the Ponant had been through rudimentary training, some in boat handling, some in weapons, and all of them to some extent on the importance of battle discipline. Several times when Marchesseau objected to the theft of possessions from the crew, Ahmed reprimanded the culprits, and the possessions were at least temporarily returned. Equally surprising, signs appeared in Somali on the doors of some toilets forbidding the pirates’ entry at the risk of a $500 fine. According to Marchesseau’s book, Jamah described other sanctions: $100 for returning late from shore leave, $500 for discharging a weapon unnecessarily, $1,000 for sleeping on duty, $1,500 for leaving the ship without permission, and $2,000 for harming a hostage. Some skepticism is required here. As word of Jamah’s scribbled list got into the press, it escalated into reports that the pirates were guided
by a full-blown “pirate manual.” They were not. Furthermore, the penalties described, if remotely accurate, were probably poorly enforced. But although the pirates rejected French cooking to the end, they were less wild than the crew at first had believed.
The ExchangeIt did not make them less dangerous. No one doubted that they would shoot to kill if the coming exchange went wrong. Several days of negotiations were required to work out the plan. The pirates were wary of a trap, but ultimately had to trust in the Saadés’ intention to act with the minimum of risk and publicity. The appointed day was a Friday, one week after the Ponant’s capture. The moves were carefully choreographed, spelled out in e-mails, and agreed to in detail by all sides. In the morning Marchesseau raised the anchor and repositioned the Ponant still closer to the beach. The small warship that had been standing by steamed away and was replaced by a larger French frigate, to which the Saadés’ cash had been delivered. Twenty miles away, and just over the horizon, the 600-foot French helicopter carrier had been in position for several days trying to make itself discreet, despite the presence of Somali fishing boats that kept
motoring by. Now it launched helicopters with snipers aboard, several under the command of a female pilot, a 33-year-old lieutenant named Marine Bayer, who was French in the best way, and elegant in a flight suit that seemed to be tailor-made. When I met her months later at an air base in Brittany she was modest about her role in the affair. Her orders were to come in close in a crisis and provide the snipers with clear shots at pirates on the Ponant’s decks. But unless there was trouble, she was to stand off beyond the horizon and keep her forces out of sight.
Marchesseau was not aware of the helicopters, but he was wary of naval heroics, and he was determined to let nothing go wrong. Behind schedule but according to plan, all but six pirates evacuated the Ponant and shuttled to the shore. Among those leaving was the so-called chairman, who before his departure invited Marchesseau to visit Garacad. Marchesseau politely declined. Ahmed and Jamah remained on the Ponant, along with their four fiercest gunmen. After various delays, a Zodiac departed from the frigate carrying the cash and three unarmed men—one from the navy, two from the gendarmerie. Ahmed, Jamah, and another pirate, also unarmed, boarded a skiff and motored toward the midpoint meeting place. Three pirates remained on the Ponant, with their weapons leveled at the crew. The small boats met, and the French agents handed over the ransom in three bags, the first two containing a million dollars each, and the third containing the remainder—$150,000.
The French held the boats together while the pirates got down to counting.
After 15 minutes, Ahmed declared himself to be satisfied. Leaving Marchesseau as the sole remaining hostage, the rest of the Ponant’s crew boarded two Zodiacs and proceeded toward the frigate. With the money in hand, Ahmed and Jamah separated from the French agents and sped to the beach. Briefly Marchesseau was left with the three remaining guards. A skiff came out from the shore and fetched them. Marchesseau watched them depart. It was one p.m., and seven days to the hour after the Ponant’s capture. Alone at last and free, Marchesseau jumped into the ocean as instructed by the gendarmes, and began to swim. He was swooped up by commandos, who threw him face-first into the bottom of their boat. This was for his protection, of course. It was very dramatic. Soon enough, he climbed aboard the frigate. There he was re-united with his crew, who, because of the hour, had already sat down to lunch.
EndgameLieutenant Marine Bayer is an argument for French habits, I suppose. After the hostages were liberated, she and the other helicopter pilots returned to their ship, where they, too, sat down for a decent meal. Bayer later forgot what exactly she ate, but remembered that she lingered over it for a full 30 minutes before starting into a dessert of chausson aux pommes. At that very moment her helicopters again were scrambled. She ran and got airborne right away. An admiral on another ship had made the call. One of the patrol planes had spotted a four-wheel-drive vehicle heading west on a desert track from Garacad, probably with pirates aboard. The admiral wanted it stopped. Six helicopters joined the chase, one of them carrying a navy video crew, the others with commandos and sharpshooters aboard. Someone radioed a suggestion for the video crew to go in first, to get the most dramatic footage, but Bayer vetoed the idea and put the shooters up front.
The largest helicopter was a Panther with a team of three commandos. It took the lead. The formation swept low over the beach and picked up the track on the far side of Garacad. The vehicle was not hard to find. It was a Japanese S.U.V., creeping along through scrubland about six miles west of town. The Panther hovered beside it, and a sniper fired a single round into its engine block, bringing it to a halt. As the helicopters dropped into the desert, six men jumped out of the vehicle and tried to flee, scattering in different directions and diving into the bushes. The commandos easily rounded them up, and were videotaped in grainy scenes later shown on global TV. In the vehicle the French forces found some Kalashnikovs and two sacks containing 10 percent of the ransom, some $200,000 in cash. They confiscated it, loaded the suspects into the helicopters, and took off. One of the helicopters turned back and fired an anti-tank missile into the disabled
S.U.V. It exploded. This, too, was videotaped. The suspects were flown to the frigate offshore, where they were placed in the brig for eventual delivery to France. Soon afterward, Marchesseau had a look at them and recognized only three. As for the others, it would be up to the prosecutors to demonstrate their connection to piracy. One of them claimed to be merely a taxi driver and did seem rather upset about the loss of the S.U.V.
The main culprits and 90 percent of the ransom money remained in Garacad, a town clearly in view from the frigate yet completely out of reach. Marine Bayer spent a few hours that afternoon shuttling the Ponant’s crew to the helicopter carrier, which, as a larger ship, had the space to accommodate these guests. In the evening there was a get-together, and Bayer met the Ponant’s crew socially for the first time. The women in particular opened up to her. One said angrily, “They were despicable! We should kill them all!” Another said, “They were not so bad. Honestly, they were pretty nice pirates.” Between the two views it was hard to say that one was more right than the other. But then there came another woman, who hugged Bayer and cried, “You saved our lives!,” and that was just plain wrong. In fact it was embarrassing. The pilots had saved no one’s life. Bayer planned to leave the navy and become a nurse, where she would have a better
chance of doing such things. It was true that she had performed some sort of service to something by helping with the arrest of the six Somalis, at least three of whom were pirates. But the hope that this would have a deterrent effect in the future was pretty far-fetched.
If anyone had saved lives it was the pirates themselves, along with Marchesseau, and the shipowners in Marseille, Rodolphe and Jacques Saadé. By satellite phone they had succeeded with negotiations in an evolving global dimension that lies beyond the reach of government and its conventions. For all its firepower and training, the French Navy was neutralized by the fact that Ahmed never threatened to start executing the hostages, and that for whatever reason he actually cared about their welfare. As a result, the best the French Navy could do was stand by, eat well, and serve as bagmen for the money. It was successful at this—maybe more so than other navies would have been—but the claims that were subsequently made of a French national victory were exceedingly thin.
Nonetheless, the claims were loud. Within hours in Paris the top French military commanders held a triumphant press conference during which they announced the liberation of the hostages, and the arrest of six Somalis (half the pirate force, they said), at the end of a successful military operation that had been carried out with the permission of Somali authorities, whatever that may mean, and had involved no payments of state funds. For public dissemination, the government described President Sarkozy’s personal satisfaction: “The president expresses his profound gratitude to the French armed forces and all the state services which enabled there to be a swift outcome to the hostage-taking without incident. He shares the joy and relief of the families, whom he will meet again at five p.m. today.” From the helicopter carrier Marchesseau called home to speak to his wife. His sister answered the phone, saying, “Haven’t you heard? She’s at the
Élysée Palace!” Gendarmes on the ship took Marchesseau aside and rehearsed him on handling the press.
The Ponant was left to a ferry crew, to be escorted later to safety. The helicopter carrier sailed north and west with its special guests through the Gulf of Aden toward the French base in Djibouti. At one point a French flagship with an admiral aboard came alongside blaring “We Are the Champions” over its loudspeakers. I do not know what Marine Bayer thought of this, but Marchesseau is a good sport, and he wrote in his book that he was pleased. When the crew got to Djibouti, they were greeted by diplomats, high officials, and other V.I.P.’s. A French government Airbus was waiting to whisk the crew to Paris. They arrived early, but were delayed in the air to give President Sarkozy himself time to get to the airport. They landed and pulled up to a gaggle of cameramen at 7:30 p.m., a half-hour before the French evening news. President Sarkozy was waiting at the bottom of the stairs. He was flanked by Minister of Defense Hervé Morin, because of the
military victory being declared, and transport secretary Dominique Bussereau, because the Ponant flies the French flag, though of the Wallis and Futuna Islands. Astutely, Sarkozy did not make a speech, but welcomed the Ponant’s crew with handshakes. Marchesseau was flustered. He thanked Sarkozy for everything he had done to liberate the crew. Sarkozy had the grace to leave when the photo session was over.
The Lawless SeaMarchesseau went home to La Rochelle and wrote his book with the help of a newspaper reporter. The book was published several months later, and in France it was widely, if superficially, noted. It was an adventure tale, and taken as such. But it was also unassuming and honest, and the story that it told had little to do with naval heroics, grave threats to the world order, or the importance of the French state. This was overlooked in references to the book, because the Ponant’s narrative had come to stand overwhelmingly for the opposite—for strong national leadership, for a vigorous French Navy, and for interventions abroad in places where anarchy is said to threaten civilization itself. Merely hours after Marchesseau had effected his own release, and French warships had clearly demonstrated the navy’s impotence, the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner (a founder of Doctors Without Borders), called for United Nations action,
and for an allied naval escalation off the coast of Somalia. It was an early step in what has turned into an ongoing process of doing more of precisely what has proved not to work.
Today, almost one year later, Somali pirates continue to ignore the increasingly urgent displays of national power. One of the ironies of the concern being shown is that the shippers being provided with naval protection are the very same people who for years have made a mockery of the nation-state idea. They know that whatever pirate tolls they pay will always pale in comparison with the taxes that would be imposed if global law and order ever actually prevailed. But there is little danger of that. In its place a convoy system has been instituted for crossing the Gulf of Aden. CMA CGM has ordered its cargo ships to use it when practical. The company runs about 65 transits a month. Because of an increase in crew pay, insurance, and other piracy-related costs, the company has imposed a $23 surcharge on every standard-size container that it takes through—amounting to a quarter-million dollars for each trip by the largest ships. Given the margins built in,
and despite the need for the occasional payout, this means that CMA CGM, its insurers, and its crews are profiting from Somali piracy. Other shipping companies are, too. By nature they are adaptable. If the navies would just sail away, they would devise their own methods to get through, maybe at still-higher cost, and probably at calculated risk, but almost certainly without violence.
But the navies will not sail away. The evidence lies not in the hijacking of the Ponant but in the hijacking of the Ponant’s story. I don’t think Marchesseau thought about it or cared. He toured around France after the book came out, went on television, and gave some public talks. A few members of the crew were acerbic—opposed to Sarkozy’s grandstanding, and disgusted by the treatment of the detained Somalis, who were being held under maximum security in Paris, as if they were serious threats to the state. Marchesseau did not get into all that. He kept his talks fairly easy. He soon went back to sea, in command of the Ponant again, with many of the same crew members aboard. They did not feel particularly traumatized. In December 2008, they sailed alone through the Red Sea, under escort through the Gulf of Aden, and alone again to the Seychelles. They were not overly worried about piracy, but they were aware of it. And therefore? Nothing new,
really. You can always tilt at disorder, and national leaders, invested as they are, will always insist on disorder’s dire consequences. But ships will keep sailing anyway, and people will go on with their lives, and maybe, just for once, here’s a reason not to go to war.
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