Monday 6 June 2011

Report warns of torture by Somali pirates


By Robert Wright, Transport Correspondent
Published: June 6 2011 23:16 | Last updated: June 6 2011 23:16
Seafarers captured by Somali pirates have increasingly faced beatings, use as human shields and other forms of torture over the past year, according to the authors of a report calling for greater recognition of the problem.
The authors of The Human Cost of Somali Piracy, published by the One Earth Future Foundation, a US-based think-tank, said seafarers were sometimes locked in freezers, hung from ships’ masts or meat hooks or had their genitals attached to electric wires. Pirates also sometimes called seafarers’ families from their mobile telephones, then beat them in their families’ hearing – a tactic designed to increase pressure on shipowners to pay ransoms.
Of the 1,090 seafarers taken hostage in 2010, 59 per cent had been abused or used as human shields, or both, the report found.
The tactics break a previous code of conduct, which had kept violence by Somali pirates at a minimum. This year has seen the first deliberate murders of hostages off Somalia – four American tourists on a yacht in February and two crew members from the captured Beluga Nomination in January.
Pottengal Mukundan, director of the London-based International Maritime Bureau, who helped to compile the report, said something had changed in the behaviour of the pirates.
“There’s definitely evidence of the violence growing greater,” he said.
The pirates’ change of tactics reflects the shift of much Somali pirate activity away from the relatively easily monitored Gulf of Aden north of Somalia to the vast spaces of the Indian Ocean, west of the country. The shift has depended on pirates capturing merchant vessels and forcing their crews to let their ships be used as floating bases for attacks.
Pirates typically deter international naval forces’ efforts to intercept the mother ships by parading captive seafarers on deck with guns held to their heads.
“In all cases where crew are held on mother ships, they’re used as human shields,” said Kaija Hurlburt, the report’s lead author.
Jon Huggins, one of the authors, said pirates had shifted out into the Indian Ocean after international naval forces started to patrol closer to the Somali coast to prevent pirates from taking to sea. An increase in average ransoms had also drawn new, more violent groups into piracy, he suggested.
“These new players are not under the same constraints as before,” he said.
Ms Hurlburt called for a single international organisation to collate information about seafarer mistreatment.
“It’s important that seafarers, shipowners, flag states and the public all understand the full extent of the risks posed to seafarers by piracy,” she said.
Jon Whitlow, general secretary of the seafarers’ section of the International Transport Workers’ Federation, said it received regular queries about members’ rights to demand extra pay for entering the highest risk areas or refuse to go at all.
“Anyone who is in regular contact with seafarers knows that there are crew members who just can’t face the daily risk any longer,” he said.

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