False Perceptions of Piracy in Asia

by Bruce Maxwell on 14 Jul 2006 Issues affecting cruising yachtsmen in Southeast Asia are of concern to quasi-government groups in the region, and this has led to the formation of Sail Indonesia, under whose auspices the present Darwin-Kupang-Flores-Komodo-Bali-Makassar-Kalimantan Rally is organised, leading on to Sail Malaysia, including the popular island-hopping Port Klang-Pangkor-Penang-Langkawi Raja Muda Regatta, and then to the King's Cup in Phuket, Thailand, in early December.

One of these issues, 'False Perceptions of Piracy', was the subject of an address by long-time Asia-Pacific yachting magazine editor and publisher Bruce Maxwell, at an Asean Marine Tourism Forum called 'Yangon to Manila Bay' held in Kuala Lumpur in May, 2005. The text is reported below.

Google the words 'Piracy Pleasure Boats Asia' and an astonishing 15,000 references come up on the computer screen, many of them quite recent entries. Yet there have been hardly any cases of piracy involving pleasure boats in Asia for the last decade or two. Herein lies the problem.

The world has an almost totally false impression that it isn’t safe for pleasure boats to sail or motor through the prime passages of Asia’s exotic seas and straits, and the region is losing millions of dollars, perhaps even billions, as wealthy marine tourists are at least partly discouraged from coming.

Because there are very few real robberies on pleasure boats in Asia these days, let alone physical attacks on people aboard them, I would like to begin by giving a closely related example of how this perception process works abroad. Think back to the haze problems that affected Singapore and the southern part of peninsula Malaysia in the late 1990s.

The haze was caused by farming burn-offs, particularly in Sumatra, and it attracted widespread adverse publicity. In 1997, when the haze was at its height, I was helping the former chief of the Royal Malaysian Navy, Tan Sri Abdul Wahab Nawi, organize Asia’s first superyacht gathering at the Langkawi International Maritime and Aerospace show, also known by its acronym LIMA.

About 15 big boats eventually turned up, mostly belonging to savvy Asian owners such as the Sultan of Brunei, but a number of others from Europe, which had booked and paid deposits, cancelled at the last moment.

I told their agent, Nigel Burgess of London, that Langkawi on the Malaysia-Thailand border was far removed from the haze-affected areas further south, and that cruising in pristine waters of the Andaman Sea between Langkawi and Phuket was perfectly clear.

'It doesn’t matter', the agency’s Jonathan Beckett said. 'There is a perception among owners and their guests that the whole region is covered by haze, and they won’t come'.

I had myself seen front page pictures in the International Herald Tribune in France showing people wearing gas masks, with a general story about 'haze enveloping Southeast Asia', so it wasn’t hard to see what Jonathan meant, but equally, it was very frustrating, and an enormous loss to the local economy.

One superyacht worth say US$30 million spends a tenth of its value every year in running costs, and that money, earmarked for this region, would now go somewhere else. Multiply this by at least 15-20 similarly-sized vessels that increasingly come through today, and add an estimated 1,500 private pleasure boats of various lengths that normally roam Asia’s seas and straits, and the disastrous effect of the negative and generalized haze publicity becomes starkly evident.

The perception of piracy in Asia, in this submission, has exactly the same effect as the perception of haze. The idea gets around that security is a serious issue, and marine tourists affluent enough to have their own vessels tend to stay away from perceived 'trouble'. Any travel agent will tell you that the American market, in which only 14 per cent of people actually have passports, is especially susceptible.

A minor coup attempt in Manila, reported in the New York Times, can and does cause American tourism to the Philippines archipelago, a former US protectorate, to drop off drastically for perhaps a year or two.

In recent months I have been based on the Gold Coast in Australia, and attached here some cuttings, reported in the national newspaper The Australian and the Gold Coast Bulletin, about piracy in Asia in the last eight weeks alone.

The headlines read 'Tanker Crew In Dire Straits', 'Pirates Seize Tanker', 'Pirates Take Over Tugboat' and 'Piracy Deaths Up'. In every case the source of these reports is the relatively new Piracy Reporting Centre of the International Maritime Bureau based in Malaysia, and twice the dateline is given as Kuala Lumpur, thus identifying the city with the headline and content of the story.

The 'Piracy Deaths Up' account tells us that, and I quote, 'the number of seafarers killed by pirates surged last year, although armed robbery at sea fell, an international watchdog said in its annual report due out today.

Thirty mariners were killed, mainly off Nigeria and in the Malacca Strait separating Indonesia from Malaysia, the Piracy Reporting Centre of the International Maritime Bureau said'.

You will notice that there is absolutely no distinction in this story about piracy attacks on commercial shipping, which do continue to occur but within a well-documented range of circumstances and geographic areas, and piracy attacks on pleasure craft, which in Asia are virtually non-existent now.

So a vessel owner based in say the Americas or Europe, where such reports are circulated by international news agencies – as well as to Australian and New Zealand and East Asia print and electronic media – would be perfectly justified in thinking that private vessels are coming under heavy attack, and that loved ones and friends could be at considerable risk if venturing into such unsettled waters. I’m also not too sure, incidentally, about the accuracy of the report itself, as it applies, presumably, to commercial shipping. If, and I quote again, 'thirty mariners were killed, mainly off Nigeria and in the Malacca Strait separating Indonesia from Malaysia' last year,

I don’t recall hearing about Malacca Strait casualties of anywhere near this order.

Knowing the subject was coming up at this symposium, last month I asked my fellow speaker, Captain Pottengal Mukundan of the Piracy Reporting Centre, whether he would be kind enough to let me know of any cases involving pleasure craft – sail or power – that had come to his attention.

He instanced only one, involving the yacht Okla, from which
probably land-based thieves stole some cash and personal belongings when it was at a Thai island on 19 February 2004. There have, of course, been very substantially more robberies ashore, in all countries, in the same interim period.

He commented further: 'There were ten attacks against yachts reported to us in 2004. Most were off Somalia, or in South America or the Caribbean'.

Other isolated cases crop up. Earlier this year, for example, somebody pinched a yacht in Melbourne and sailed it to Tasmania’s north coast, chased amusingly by the owner in a light plane when he realized straight away his vessel was missing from its marina berth. He got it back in good shape. But with respect, these shenanigans and petty theft cases simply do not justify the emotive headlines about 'piracy', and the damage that causes.

Personal experience also suggests that piracy against pleasure craft in Asia is decidedly on the wane. I have lived in East Asia and Southeast Asia since 1970, run boating magazines such as Asian Boating, Asia-Pacific Boating and Yachts Asia-Pacific in Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur since 1976, sailed across the South China Sea 98 times, took part in the inaugural mid-1980s Phuket-Pangkor races organized by another speaker here, Vincent Tabute