From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Tue Oct 07 2008 - 08:46:42 EDT
PIRATES VERSUS WEAPONS DEALERS - Looking for the Good Guys off the Somali Coast
By Clemens Höges, Uwe Klussmann and Horand Knaup
10/07/2008
The pirates that captured the freighter Faina didn't know the ship was full of tanks. They also were unaware that by hijacking the vessel, they had ruined an international weapons deal that may have been illegally sending arms to Sudan.
Professionals have their standards, and they stick to their routines, regardless of their nationality or line of business. "As soon as we have entered a ship," says Sugule Ali, a Somali pirate, "we normally do what we call inspection: we search everything."
When they boarded the Faina, Ali and his men did not have to search long before finding the freighter's valuable cargo. A T-72 combat tank, measuring a full 9.5 meters (31 feet) long, from its stern to the muzzle of its cannon, a 41-ton steel colossus, is hard to miss. There were 33 of the tanks on the two decks of the Faina, enough military equipment from Ukraine to fill a medium-sized military parade.
The presence of the tanks made one thing abundantly clear to Ali and his men: By hijacking the ship, they would either be very rich very soon -- or dead. The Faina was not one of the usual targets -- such as tankers, freighters and yachts -- that Somali pirates have been hijacking in large numbers in recent months. Tanks are either the property of governments, or of men with a lot of dirty money and few scruples.
But then, human life means just as little to Ali and his fellow pirates -- even their own. "Everyone dies only once," says Ali. Speaking via a satellite telephone, Ali told SPIEGEL that, before the attack, he had "no information that a ship loaded with weapons was passing through our waters." When he discovered what the ship's cargo was, he was not overly perturbed. "There is no fear" within his gang of roughly 50 men, the pirate claims.
Diplomatic Entanglements
Once they gained control of the freighter, the pirates turned it around and set course for Hobyo, one of several notorious pirate haunts on Somalia's lawless Indian Ocean coast. The first pursuer, the USS Howard, an American destroyer under the command of Captain Curtis Goodnight, followed a short time later.
By Friday evening of last week, the Faina was anchored off Hobyo and was surrounded by warships and the standoff continues this week. Meanwhile, cabinet ministers, military officials and intelligent agents around the globe have spent days pondering the vessel's unusual cargo, diplomatic entanglements and military options. Also on the list of concerns is the crew of 21 people on board the Faina.
Ali's small-time gangsters, in their sneakers, have climbed up onto a world stage normally reserved for bigger players. In the ensuing drama, the boundaries between the good guys and the villains have become difficult to discern, primarily because there may not in fact be any good guys. In this production, the pirates are the equivalent of pickpockets who had the bad luck of stealing a mafia godfather's briefcase.
In reality, the incident is about much more than a hijacking and Ali's demand for $20 million (?13.8 million) in ransom money. It is also about anarchy in a failed state like Somalia, and about the interests of the United States, Russia and the European Union, as it gradually takes on a new role on the world stage.
Most of all, it is about Africa's longest-lasting civil war, the war in Sudan, which is relatively quiet at the moment but could soon erupt into as bloody a conflict as it was before. And it is about the international dealings of arms traders and possibly governments that are involved.
The Pirates Spoiled the Deal
Officially, the Ukrainian T-72 tanks were designated for Kenya. But now there is mounting evidence that the tanks on board the Faina were en route to Sudan via Kenya. If this is true, it would be embarrassing for Ukraine and devastating for Kenya, whose president likes to portray himself as a peacemaker. At any rate, it looks as though pirate Ali and his men spoiled the deal.
The pirates caught sight of the freighter on Thursday, Sep. 25, at about 4 p.m. It was unarmed, had no escort and was flying the flag of the Caribbean nation of Belize.
Fleeing was not an option for the Ukrainian captain, Vladmir Kolobkov, when he saw the pirates coming. At full steam ahead, the ship's Sulzer diesel engine could barely push the Faina's 14,000 tons through the water at 15 knots -- a bicycle's pace. The pirates' open, lightweight attack boats were easily twice as fast.
Kolobkov also knew that he could not ram and sink the pirates' boats. Professionals bring along the right tools, and for Somali pirates that means Kalashnikovs and RPG-7 bazookas, which are designed to shoot holes into steel walls. Faced with such odds, an experienced captain knows not to play the hero.
Using cables and grappling hooks, the pirates hoisted themselves on board. The crew -- 17 Ukrainians, three Russians and one Latvian -- surrendered, but not before sending out a distress signal, which apparently put the USS Howard on the hijacked ship's trail.
There was, though, someone else who quickly realized that a hostage crisis unprecedented in the region was taking shape off the coast: Andrew Mwangura. A former seaman, Mwangura sees himself as a social worker of sorts, as someone who helps seamen from around the world by providing information, contacting relatives and finding doctors. "Seamen have no lobby," he says. But in East Africa they have Mwangura and his "Seafarer's Assistance Programme," headquartered in Mombasa, Kenya.
Ransom for Ships and Crews
In the last two-and-a-half years, the offices of his program have turned into a news center. Since 2006, more and more people have been kidnapped, a growing number of ships have been attacked and higher ransoms have been demanded -- and paid -- on the Horn of Africa. This year, Somali pirates have attacked more than 60 ships in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean. At least 10 hijacked freighters and tankers are at anchor off the coast of Somalia. The pirates are holding their crews, roughly 260 seamen, hostage on board the vessels until their ransom demands are met.
In this year alone, shipping companies have had to pay $30 million (?20.7 million) in ransom for ships and crews, and insurance premiums have grown tenfold in some cases. The pirate gangs are already making serious inroads into the flow of global trade at their bottleneck near the entrance to the Red Sea. More than 16,000 ships pass through the area each year. The problem is so severe that some shipping companies are already considering ordering their captains to take the long route around Africa.
Hardly anyone knows more about the pirates than Mwangura, who maintains a large network of confidantes and informants. And because no one else but Mwangura has such good connections, even in anarchic Somalia and within the pirates' clans, many are asking for his help, including embassies, shipping companies from around the world, family members of hostages, and insurance companies from the financial centers of the West.
Part 2: Where Did the Tanks Come From?
Mwangura is tense. Many along the coast here are now nervous. He refuses to meet in his office, because it would mean revealing his address. He prefers a hotel, for reasons that soon become clear. What Mwangura has to say about the cargo of the Faina will create problems for dangerous people.
His informants say that the tanks, after being unloaded in Mombasa, were to be delivered to southern Sudan, where rebels with the Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA) have been fighting for independence from the central government in Khartoum for the last 21 years. The warring parties signed a makeshift peace treaty three-and-a-half years ago. A referendum for the independence of the south is scheduled to take place in 2011, but some fear it could trigger a renewed outbreak of fighting. The southern part of the country has enormous oil reserves, which have triggered greed. The government and the SPLA are both using the cease-fire to rearm.
The T-72 is a typical Soviet-era shooting machine, with unrefined technology, miserable protection for its crew and enormous firepower. In Sudan, where much of the killing is done with machine guns, 33 of the tanks would be a huge factor.
Although Mwangura has no evidence to support his claims about the clandestine deal, a spokesman for the American Fifth Fleet, of which the USS Howard is a part, backs up his claims, as do intelligence officials in Washington. Another factor supporting the notion that the tanks were bound for Sudan, not Kenya, is the way the Faina was camouflaged.
Investigating the Faina
The trail of this special freighter, which has had various names -- the Marabou, the Loverval and the Matina -- can be found in the databases of the International Maritime Organization (IMO). The Ukrainian ship is registered in Belize, but the official owner, a company called Waterlux AG, is registered in Panama. But the IMO lacks even a letterbox address for Waterlux. All it has is the address of a supposed subsidiary in Ukraine called Tomex. Tomex does exist, and its offices are in an elegant building in Odessa, but no one there is willing to discuss the Faina.
All of this secretiveness would be unnecessary if the deal involving the Faina had been normal. However, the excessive caution would make sense if what Nina Karpacheva, the ombudswoman for the Ukrainian parliament, says is true. Karpacheva claims that the man behind the deal is Vadim A., a businessman from Odessa with an Israeli passport, excellent contacts within the government bureaucracy and an unsavory reputation as a juggler of businesses.
Both Karpacheva and Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko are calling for an investigation of the Faina affair. The fact that Tymoshenko has become involved is, perhaps, not surprising. She has long been engaged in political battle with President Viktor Yushchenko, whose supporters in the Ukrainian intelligence service, the SBU, have long lined their pockets by selling off the remains of the former Soviet arsenal throughout the world.
The Faina case could also prove to be an international embarrassment for Ukraine in other ways as well. Russia, its more powerful neighbor, has sent the frigate Neutrashimy ("The Fearless") toward Somalia because Ukraine has no ships suitable for such a mission. If the Russians can free the sailors and restore calm to the Horn of Africa, they will have managed to polish up their image in the wake of their invasion of Georgia, as well as to demonstrate who is in charge at home, in a realm that was once the Soviet Union.
Unscrupulous Dealmakers
The Neutrashimy is likely to face off against thousands of pirates. In addition to Sugule Ali's boats, there are at least four other large groups operating along the Horn of Africa: a band of gangsters called the Somali Marines, a group calling itself the National Volunteer Coastguard, and the Puntland Group and Marka Group.
The pirate gangs can do as they wish along the coast of Somalia, which descended into chaos and civil war after the dictator Siad Barre was overthrown in 1991. Since then, unscrupulous dealmakers from Europe and the rest of the world have taken advantage of the vacuum. Some are dumping toxic waste and possibly even nuclear waste in the ocean off Somalia. Others are illegally exploiting the Somalis' fishing grounds. Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the United Nations Special Envoy for Somalia, calls it "a disaster for Somalia's coast, the environment and the population." In the beginning, angry Somali fishermen wielding Kalashnikovs took matters into their own hands and drove away the foreign fishing boats.
In the process, some of them apparently noticed how easy it was to attack ships, and they soon made a business of it. Using the ransom money, they bought themselves mansions, SUVs, better boats and weapons. But the hijacking and ransacking of ships off the Somali coast could soon come to an end.
Spurred to action by the attack on the Faina, the defense ministers of the EU agreed last Wednesday to a launch a joint military intervention. Under the plan three EU warships, one of them from Germany, will patrol off the coast of Somalia beginning in December. American and Russian ships will likely join them. This concerted response will likely deter many pirates. The Strait of Malacca off the Malaysian coast, once considered extremely dangerous, became virtually pirate-free after a similar alliance was formed and resolute military intervention began.
Sugule Ali, the pirate, claims that the Somalis have no choice but to take what they can. "An attack on us will not solve the problems," he says. "There should be a joint discussion of a solution to the problems in Somalia." When that happens, he says, "we will return to our old way of life and go fishing again."
His men, says Ali, are in fact nothing but fishermen, all of them decent people. According to Ali, they treat their prisoners well, and "everyone on board is in good shape."
Vladmir Kolobkov, the Faina's captain, died shortly after his ship was invaded, supposedly of heart failure. But instead of throwing his body overboard, the Somalis placed the dead captain into a cooler so that his family can bury him -- if the power doesn't fail on board, if a solution can be found soon and if the Faina makes it back to Odessa.
DER SPIEGEL
Suspected location of main pirate ships Areas with pirate camps Yemen Ethiopia Kenya Current location of the Ukrainian freighter "Faina" Sudan Africa Indian Ocean Gulf of Aden Eyl Mogadishu Obbia Haradera Mombasa
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
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