OPINION: Modern anarchy on the high seas

The second thought was “Pirates?”

Of course, it seems really foolish to leave investments as large as oil tankers unguarded, but I can make an educated guess about why ship owners generally don’t want armed-to-the-teeth crews on more routine voyages. You’ve got numerous poorly paid men of varying languages and backgrounds squeezed tightly together with rations of canned meats. They are surely nauseated by close-quarter smells and the waves that make the floor a constant one-man waltz with a drunk. And how much small talk about the weather could you really endure on a freighter from Singapore to Miami before your trigger finger got itchy?

We equate “earth” with “terra firma,” but the world is three-fourths water. The oceans are a wilderness with thousands of miles of waves, foam and oblivion. From land, we cannot conceive of the lengths, the depths and the lives of those who repeatedly endure the slow treks across the globe. We qualify each piece of land as someone’s property, but can vast waters really be split that way? And, if not, who really has authority over that space?

“At a time when every last patch of land is claimed by one government or another, and when citizenship is treated as an absolute condition of human existence, it (the ocean) is a place that remains radically free,” wrote William Langewiesche in his article “Anarchy at Sea” in the Atlantic Monthly published back in 2003.

I was thinking of those modern pirates receiving so much attention these days. And I found Langewiesche’s article on line and read it again recently. It’s good journalism and a fascinating read. Langewiesche addresses piracy, but beyond that, he paints a picture of the lawless reality of the modern seas, where government oversight is really a joke. No one can truly impose order across the oceans.

The author notes that there are roughly 40,000 large merchant ships that ply the open ocean along with uncountable numbers of smaller coastal craft, which “between them carry nearly the full weight of international trade.”

“These ships are crewed by mariners of varying quality drawn from the poor worldwide, and mixed together without reference to language or nationality,” wrote Langewiesche. “In many cases they are owned or managed by secretive one-ship companies so ghostly and unencumbered that they exist only on paper, or maybe as a brass plate on some faraway foreign door.”

Langewiesche writes of the common practice of flying “flags of convenience.”

“No one pretends that a ship comes from the home port painted on its stern, or that it has ever been anywhere near,” he writes, noting that there are ships hailing from the Mongolian desert, as well as landlocked Bolivia.

Under such a system, ship owners, pirates and terrorists have been able to avoid government controls “not by running away but by complying with existing laws and regulations in order to hide in plain sight.”

So, how do you know what’s in the many thousands of containers coming into our ports if you don’t even know that the flag on the ship is the real thing, if you don’t know who is on board, and if you know that holding up the whole shebang to make sure everything is legit will bring trade to a halt and undermine basic commerce?

Given such gaping holes in practical oversight, who can’t concede that the threat of terror by sea is certainly real? And who is not disturbed that piracy, too, is very real, not just the fictional stuff of hooks, eye patches or skull-and-crossbone sail ships.

In his article, Langewiesche details the hijacking of the Alondra Rainbow by pirates in 1999. This was just one of 1,228 pirate attacks reported worldwide between 1998 and 2002, with about two-thirds of the attacks happening in the South China Sea.

The Rainbow was a 370-foot Japanese general-cargo hijacked in the Andaman Sea by 10 barefoot men wearing ski masks and wielding knives, guns and swords.

Crewmen on the Alondra were familiar with a previous boat hijacking in which pirates in Chinese customs uniforms lined up 23 crewmen and then clubbed them to death before attaching heavy objects to their bodies and heaving them overboard. But these pirates put the crew of the Alondra Rainbow out in a rubber raft. Of course, they had no radio or navigation gear, and they were completely lost.

“For ten days the crew drifted,” Langewiesche wrote. “Ten ships passed within sight, and did not stop. All ten flares were fired off. The water rations grew precariously small. The crew caught a few fish, which they held up and squeezed over their mouths for the juice that dripped out. As the days went by, the men began to pray and cry.”

Finally, a small commercial boat came into view. The boat nearly turned away. “Pirates were known to have posed as stranded mariners to lure innocent vessels into traps,” wrote Langwiesche.

The Alondra was a rare case in which pirates were actually caught and then convicted in an Indian court. Langwiesche noted the jurisdictional problems in oceanic crime, the fact that the urge to do nothing and avoid the trouble can be pretty strong.

“The Indians could have sat back and done nothing,” he wrote. “The Alondra Rainbow was a Panamanian ship owned by Japanese, crewed by Filipinos, and attacked off the shores of Indonesia by pirates of uncertain nationalities.”

Langwiesche ended his article with a jail interview with Christianus Mintodo, one of the pirates convicted of hijacking the Alondra.

“Mintodo and his men were insignificant players on a very large sea — sailors who got stuck holding the loot, long after the smarter players had covered their tracks,” wrote Langwiesche. “Their arrest and conviction had been proclaimed around the world as an important message that disorder would not be tolerated on the high seas. But they knew the ocean better than most, and were just biding their time, unrepentant and undeterred.”

Zach Mitcham is editor of The Madison County Journal.