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Regional Cooperation’s Unsung Success Story
Fighting Piracy in the Malacca Strait

At its narrowest point, the Strait is only 2.7 km wide, which creates a bottleneck and an opportunity for shore-based pirates to seize vessels.

Photo by AFP

The MV Alondra Rainbow was not long out of port from Indonesia when 15 men in high-speed boats surrounded the huge cargo vessel. Armed with swords and guns, they quickly took control of the 9,000-ton ship. The hull contained about 7,000 tons of aluminum ingots—worth nearly $15 million—bound for Japan.

The 17 crewmen were unarmed and stood little chance if they fought back. The Alondra Rainbow disappeared, and her crew was abandoned at sea in lifeboats a week later. They spent 10 days adrift before being rescued off the coast of Thailand. Bulletins were sent out worldwide before a ship matching the Alondra Rainbow’s description was sighted in mid- November near India.

Indian Coast Guard and Navy boats chased the vessel, but it did not stop until fired upon. A fire was burning in the ship’s engine room and the illegal crew was flooding the hull in an apparent attempt to sink it. Investigators discovered that the vessel had been renamed, given a new flag and phony registration, and about half its cargo was gone.

The hijacking of the Alondra Rainbow in the Malacca Strait happened in 1999, and it was not a particularly unusual incident at the time. The narrow passageway between Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore was considered one of the world’s most pirate-infested waterways.

Today, this vital passage is one of the safest of the world’s critical shipping lanes, and its transformation in the past decade is an unsung success story of regional cooperation in Asia.

The Strait of Malacca, which links the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea and Pacific Ocean, is the shortest sea route between Persian Gulf oil suppliers and the Asian markets. An estimated 15 million barrels per day flow through the area, according to the United States Government’s Energy Information Agency (EIA).

At its narrowest point, the Strait is only 2.7 km wide, which creates a bottleneck and an opportunity for shore-based pirates to seize vessels. Over 50,000 vessels transit the Strait of Malacca each year, according to the EIA. “If the Strait were blocked, nearly half of the world’s fleet would be required to reroute,” the agency notes in a fact sheet on the area.

In previous years, the Strait had been preyed upon by pirates very different from the swashbuckling adventurers who once plundered royal vessels centuries ago. Today’s pirates are sophisticated young mobsters with Ray-Ban sunglasses, automatic weapons, and satellite phones.

The most dangerous pirates are the phantom ship operators like those who hijacked the Alondra Rainbow. They can steal a 9,000-ton ship, rename and reregister it, and put its cargo onto the black market in a matter of days. The ship can then be pulled into a poorly regulated port and offered to companies as a legitimate ship for charter.

In ports all over the world, whitecollared pirates produce fake paperwork to claim incoming cargo that does not belong to them and use ghostships to hijack outgoing cargo from unsuspecting exporters. One of the most disturbing aspects of the cargo pirates is their ability to deal with such a variety of different types of cargo.

“We have had those incidents in the Malacca Strait where the vessel is emptied of its cargo, the crew set adrift, and it becomes a phantom ship that is used to steal cargo,” said Pottengal Mukundan, Director of the International Maritime Bureau (IMB), which tracks piracy worldwide. “The vessel is run down, then the pirates sell it for scrap or sink it. These are very serious attacks.”

“Before 2003, there really was not any proper coordinated action taken against piracy,” said Mukundan. “The situation at the time was critical.” Between 2003 and 2004, the number of attacks in the Strait nearly doubled, from 36 to 60, according to the IMB.

TIME TO WALK THE PLANK Indian Coast Guard officials detain the pirates who seized the MV Alondra Rainbow.
Photo by AFP

The issue of rampant piracy in the Strait and its possible links to terrorism hit a crescendo on 20 June 2005, when the Joint War Committee of the London-based insurance giant added the Malacca Strait to its Hull, War, Strikes, Terrorism and Related Perils Listed Areas, which gave the area the same risks—and insurance premiums—as operating in a war zone.

“This war zone classification had a tremendous impact among the littoral countries of the Strait, Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia,” said Mukundan during an interview in his office in Kuala Lumpur. “There was also an outcry from shipowners, and from the international community. The littoral countries saw that the situation had to be brought under control.”

Amid threats that navies from other countries would begin patrolling the Strait, the littoral countries sat aside long-simmering border issues and began sharing information and conducting joint patrols of the area, said Mukundan. Donors assisted Indonesia in upgrading its naval patrol vessels in the area, and helped finance a joint information center in the Strait.

“There was a very limited right of hot pursuit, but the navies generally kept to their side of the border,” said Mukundan. “But they shared information, they cooperated with each other.”

This cooperation had an enormous impact. The pirates could no longer jump from one country’s jurisdiction to the other, leaving a pursuing naval vessel behind. Now, the navy of the next jurisdiction was waiting. The result was that the Strait was being diligently patrolled from all sides.

After three-way talks between the littoral countries took place in Jakarta in September 2005, cooperative arrangements—both high-level political and working-level logistical— were accelerated. Extensive coordinated air and sea patrols in the Strait were launched.

On a broader scale, the Regional Cooperation Agreement on Combating Piracy and Armed Robbery against Ships in Asia, which includes 16 Asian member countries, has been coordinating a regional response to piracy and maritime security in Asia.

When the Malacca Strait littoral countries began working together, the result was dramatic. In August 2006, Lloyd’s removed the war risk insurance rating from the Strait in light of the decreasing attacks.

“Maritime piracy in the Strait has been coming down since 2003,” said Mukundan. “The littoral countries worked together to prioritize the issue and sure enough, once they did that, the attacks came down. We don’t consider the Strait to be a high-risk area for piracy today.”

In 2008, there were two attempted—and no successful—attacks recorded by the IMB. Both involved pirates trying but failing to board tankers passing near the Indonesian coast.

“When maritime pirates don’t succeed, it acts a major deterrent,” said Mukundan. “They go to a lot of expense to launch these “When maritime pirates don’t succeed, it acts a major deterrent,” said Mukundan. “They go to a lot of expense to launch these

“It’s a business proposition,” Mukundan continued. “The pirates look at the risk and they look at the reward. In Somalia, the risk was zero and the reward was tremendous. So, of course, everyone wanted to be a pirate. What happened in the Malacca Strait is that countries cooperated to change that balance. Every time the pirates tried to take a ship, one of the navies thwarted them. The pirates began to think: ‘It isn’t worth it to do this kind of activity.’”

The result of the cooperation is not only safer shipping in one of the world’s most important sea lanes but also improved relations between the countries that surround the Strait.

“I think the efforts to fight piracy have had an overall positive effect on how these countries cooperate on other matters,” said Mukundan. “It has improved communication between them. Other problems remain, but they have worked successfully to address this issue and that is a good example of how cooperation among countries can work.” •