Why rob banks?
That is where the money is...
We are seeing the same trends in the established black market of maritime tolls and hostage taking off the Somali and Seychelles coast. Via Eagle Speak:
Pirates in two skiffs fired automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades at the Hong Kong-flagged BW Lion about 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) east of the Somali coast, the EU Naval Force said....
The high-seas hijackings have increased despite an international armada of warships deployed by the United States, the European Union, NATO, Japan, South Korea and China to patrol the region. U.S. drones launched from nearby Seychelles are also patrolling the region for pirates.
The pirates are chasing the money. The international naval patrols that are sucking up a significant proportion of the global long range naval deployment capacity has done a decent job of suppressing piracy in the near-littoral but the sorting problem of identifying which skiff is up to no good out of dozens/hundreds of skiffs that are dispersed throughout the western Indian Ocean is a nasty problem. The pirates are going to where there is easy prey because they know that if they can catch and capture a large international freighter, they still have localized chaos on land to protect their backsides while they collect their ransom. The money is further out to sea, but the money is still floating on by.
Unless there is order on land that recognizes the local realities of power and influence as well as having some stakes in maintaining the free flow of international trade on the high seas, piracy will continue to pay off as that is where the moeny is.
The same can be said of the drug trade --- there is too much money to be made that even successfull local barrier strategies will have work-arounds as the profit margins are too good to pass up when there are few other viable alternatives to making a good living.
The stories of piracy typically skip over what I think is one of the main drivers of piracy: K&R insurance.
ReplyDeleteI never heard of "Kidnap and Ransom" insurance before digging around after the big story last spring. I put up a post about it at the time.
Most people have no idea about this elegant feature of American business but it has been around for several years now. I first heard about it a few months ago on some NPR report and thought little about it until this last weekend [April] when the pirate story took a couple of loops in the news cycle. I heard passing reference in some early reports to several hundred other hostages already being held by pirates. My first reaction was amazement that they were not already in the news. What's going on?
Then the penny dropped: They're probably waiting for ransom negotiations to be concluded. Hostages are part of the pirate enterprise backlog, the criminal equivalent of a high value inventory. I wonder if they keep maintenance records tracking expenses like food, shelter, ammunition and other costs of doing business. So hey, what's the holdup? Wait! I know! They're waiting for K & R insurance claims to be processed! And that's why the story isn't exciting enough to be newsworthy.