The Pirate Whisperer

Via John McCartney comes this article written about a negotiator who deals with the Somali pirates to secure the release of the ships and crew:

Andrew Mwangura has the underground world of African piracy wired. Somali pirates trust him. Warlords respect him. And human-rights activists admire him for putting his neck on the line to keep sailors safe on the lawless high seas. “Andrew gets vital first-hand intelligence,” says Cyrus Mody, who runs the London-based Maritime Bureau of the International Chamber of Commerce. “If a ship is running low on food or there’s been some disaster, he often knows about it first.”

Unfortunately for Mwangura, an ex-journalist who lives in a shack without running water on the beach in Mombasa, the Kenyan government doesn’t see him as a hero. On February 4, prosecutors put the 45-year-old Mwangura on trial for exposing the secret of a Ukrainian freighter that was hijacked last fall while carrying $30 million in Russian arms. Although the shipment was part of a secret, back-channel deal to arm Sudan in violation of a United Nations arms embargo, Mwangura is the one accused of breaking the law. The government has charged him with releasing “alarming information.” Says the activist, “They have no evidence. What I said was the truth.”

It takes quite the testicular fortitude to go into the den of thieves as Mwangura has done to negotiate the release of the crews and ships, and he agrees that the problem resides in the fact that the maritime industry believes that paying off the pirates is acceptable costs of doing business rather than the lawless act that deserves military justice under the Law of the Seas. Pirates are no different than terrorists, and yet they're getting a regular diet of ransoms that fund their continued operations.

In the beginning, we went to the shipping companies and said, “Please don’t give them money.” But the ship owners did not understand and kept giving them money. Back then it was less than $100,000. Now they’re taking big money. And we cannot stop them.

Meanwhile, Mwangura provides details I have not seen elsewhere - namely that there are seven clans of Somali warlords involved in the piracy and that the pirates have become more sophisticated in their attacks on shipping, including the use of decoy boats.

That comes as Somali piracy netted their biggest haul to date; $3.2 million for the release of another ship. The US Navy took no action for fear of putting the more than 100 other crewmembers still held by Somali pirates.

The situation in Somalia continues close watching.