Dangerous Waters: Modern Piracy and Terror on the High Seas Review & Ratings

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Dangerous Waters: Modern Piracy and Terror on the High Seas Review

_Dangerous Waters_ is an excellent book by John S. Burnett, a revelatory work that showed me a whole new world I had little idea existed, the world of modern pirates. Pirates are unfortunately thought of as dashing romantic figures of the earlier centuries, perhaps a threat during the age of sail or suitable for a Hollywood movie, but not a threat today. Burnett contradicts this stereotype, showing that pirates are alive and well in the 21st century, a threat to everything from the lives of sailors at sea to quite possibly international security, with 335 assaults worldwide and 241 seafarers killed, held hostage, or wounded in 2001. Indeed attacks are up 400 percent since 1992, with over 2000 sailors having been taken hostage in the ten years from 1992-2002.
The pirates today are a mixed bunch and can be found all over the world and can be anyone from a highly trained guerilla warrior to a rogue military unit (such as in Indonesia) to part of an international criminal gang or cartel. Pirates might also be part of international terrorist organizations (particularly Abu Sayaf out of the Philippines, which has strong links to Al-Qaeda as well as Asian crime syndicates and the heroin trade) or even simply local down-and-out fishermen who see a rich prize steaming by and can't resist (he states that poverty has driven many to piracy in the Caribbean, in Nigeria, Bangladesh, and elsewhere). Burnett writes that pirate weapons can vary from knives and machetes to modern assault rifles and grenade launchers. Pirates have even been known to have an insider in the crew of a ship, planted there to assist in a plan act of piracy.
The reader will discover that pirates can attack any ship - ranging from small private yachts to the largest of the supertankers - in any locale, including port or on open, international waters. The goal of the pirates can vary from robbing the ship's safe and the sailors of their personal possessions (such as money and jewelry) to the ship's cargo (be it millions of dollars in petroleum or on a private yacht the expensive electronics) to the ship and the sailors themselves, the former turned into a phantom ship that is used to smuggle weapons, drugs, or illegal immigrants, the latter fodder for a thriving international kidnapping trade (that is if the crew are not simply killed and dumped overboard).
Pirates can be found anywhere in the world though the main areas that they seem to operate in are west from Indonesian waters to as far east as Taiwan and the Philippines (favoring the vital shipping lanes through the Malacca Straits and the dangerous waters of the South China Sea), as well as off the coast of Brazil, off the Somali coast of East Africa, and West Africa. The Malacca Straits in particular are a vital area plagued at times by pirates; as $500 billion in goods passes through it annually, sometimes as many as 600 ships a day going through the Straits, which in some places are less than a mile wide, it is a target rich environment for pirates but one that is not particularly well policed. Though some waters where pirates operate are regularly patrolled - the Royal Malaysian Marine Police and the Singapore marine police are very active against pirates - other countries are unable or unwilling to work against them, with in Indonesia some military units either working with the pirates or pirates themselves. His description of the South China Sea - bordered by Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, the Philippines, China, and Taiwan - was particularly chilling, an area where international laws and standards aren't particularly well-enforced; which he writes is an "unpatrolled black hole where unarmed vessels and their civilian crews simply fall off the edge of the planet," an area where Abu Sayaf rebels have been know to attack ships with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades and kidnap rich tourists off of resort islands.
Burnett found that the odds are stacked in the pirate's favor. Ship crews are smaller than they used to be; in the 1950s a crew of 40 to 45 might manage a tanker carrying 6.3 million gallons of oil; now it is not unusual to find a few as 17 (such as on the _Montrose_, a ship Burnett traveled on) transporting 84 million gallons of oil. With the exception of Russian and Israeli ships, merchant ships very rarely carry weapons (something generally not encouraged on a supertanker anyway), having to rely instead on other anti-piracy devices, such as carpet tacks spread on decks, fire hoses, deck patrols, dummies set at the railings at night, brilliant deck lights, and new satellite tracking devices that can help the International Maritime Bureau and local navies locate hijacked ships (such as ShipLoc). Burnett has shown though that it is nearly impossible to keep off a ship determined pirates, and it is best for a crew to not try and resist (as in many cases pirates do not kidnap or kill). Some shipping companies that have the resources have employed more high-tech and expensive measures, such as wiring decks to administer lethal electric charges, closed-circuit TV cameras to detect someone slipping aboard a ship, and particularly in the case of cruise ships armed mercenaries (some cruise lines are known to use Nepalese Gurkhas). Though the U.S. and British navies don't appear to operate much against pirates, they do appear to take the threat seriously at least in some circumstances; the ships that are used to transport plutonium from Europe to Japan are constantly monitored by spy satellites, often escorted by a surface warship, and always shadowed by at least one British or U.S. nuclear sub.
Burnett laments the fact that pirates are not taken seriously as a growing threat in today's world, not by many of the world's navies, not in some cases by shipping companies, and rarely by the general public (particularly in the United States).

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