Pirates striking terror in Asian waters

By Swadesh M Rana/New York

South and South East Asia are faced with the likelihood of profit-motivated-pirates committing acts of terror and politically-driven terrorists resorting to piracy. Unlike terrorism that emanates from South/South West Asia and piracy that originates from South East Asia, terropiracy is linking South and South East Asia as a contiguous unit of operation.

With the Durand Line as the epicentre of global terrorism, the Taliban on both sides of it see no barrier separating the South from South West Asia. For the pirates in and around the Straits of Malacca, the peninsular confluence between South and South East Asia is but a choke point to disrupt the supply chain of global trade. Over 90% of it is conducted by sea with Singapore as the world’s busiest port and its largest container trans-shipment hub for a network of 250 shipping lines connecting it to 600 ports in 123 countries.

The Taliban under attack for nine years by over 110,000 US led troops and the pirates being pushed out of business from the Straits of Malacca with joint naval operations by at least 20 countries stand to gain by swapping their tools of combat and tricks of trade. The Taliban have light weapons to spare that pirates find handy to carry in their small and swift boats.

The Afghan-Pak theatre is a virtual warehouse for bargain deals on light weapons with some going for a penny to a dollar. Tens of thousands of assault rifles, AK 47’s, Kalashnikovs, hand grenades and other man-portable weapons were amassed during the Soviet military occupation of Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989.

Since the 2001 US-led military action there are also more stolen weapons, weapons mistaken for exploded, weapons resold by small business contractors in the surplus industry, and weapons simply unaccounted for.

The pirates are skilled in hijacking ships with cargo that may include materials for Improvised Explosive Devices (IED’s) that the Taliban find easier to assemble, harder to detect and cause more panic when exploded than a combat with conventional light weapons.

Indonesian authorities see the entire South and South East Asian region as vulnerable to piracy attacks by politically motivated Free Aceh Movement ( Gerakan Aceh Merdeke:GAM) seeking independence for a gas and oil-rich region in Sumatra. Some Asian intelligence agencies reported links between GAM and Al Qaeda as the latter considered shifting its base from Afghanistan to Aceh and launched a naval offensive against its target vessels by ramming, blowing-up, air striking or torpedoing them with underwater suicide bombers aboard small, swift dinghies.

Without any reported links to Al Qaeda, such dinghies were used in successful recent attacks on tankers and smaller vessels, according to the Shipping Association of Singapore. The Directorate General of Shipping in Mumbai has recently banned small mechanised vessels called dhows from sailing south and west of Oman and the Maldives amid reports of clandestine trading in drugs and weapons between the pirates in Kismayu in Somalia and contraband traders using the Indian port state of Gujarat on the African east coast off the Arabian Peninsula.

As soft targets of terropiracy, the governments concerned in South and South East Asia need credible assurances that the arms and ammunition brought into Afghan-Pak theatre by the ISAF do not fall into the “wrong hands”. A key challenge is to find a forum to raise the issue with a three-point agenda for action:

nA common position on licensing the production and permitting the sale of ammonium nitrate to keep this substance from falling into the hands of terrorists and pirates for making IED’s.

nA closer look at the IAEA’s regulations and IMO’s Dangerous Goods Code on radio-active materials to remedy any loopholes for applicability to the storage and disposal of medical waste by the hospitals using radio-active materials for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes.

nA joint proposal for the forthcoming UN Conference on an Arms Trade Treaty in 2012 for a global standard on inventory taking of the weapons brought into and taken out of an area of insurgency by an external power directly engaged in the counter-insurgency operations. — Global Expert Finder (www.globalexpertfinder.org)



* Swadesh M Rana is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute New York, former chief of the Conventional Arms Branch in the Department of Disarmament Affairs, United Nations and United Nations Global Expert (www.globalexpertfinder.org)
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