Pirates hijacked a Panamanian-flagged chemical tanker with 31 crew members, including four Filipinos, on Thursday in waters closer to India than to Somalia, the European Union's anti-piracy mission said. Pirates attacked the 24,105-ton tanker Hannibal II early Thursday, the EU NAVFOR said in a statement, adding the vessel was carrying vegetable oils from the Malaysian port of Pasir Gudang to the Suez Canal. The tanker’s captain reported that the attack took place “in an area some 860 nautical miles east of the Horn of Africa, which is considerably closer to India than it is to Somalia." The ship's crew consists of 23 Tunisians, four Filipinos, a Croatian, Georgian, Russian and Moroccan. The hijacking brings to 97 the number of Filipino seafarers on seven vessels that have been held by pirates since the beginning of the year, said ECOTERRA Intl, a group that monitors the maritime situation in the pirate-infested waters of the Gulf of Aden and the East African coasts of the Indian Ocean. The number does not include Filipinos on board the FV TAWARIQ 2 (INTMAS 6), which has been missing since March 2009. The ship had a multinational crew of 30 seamen, with an unknown number of Filipinos. ECOTERRA is a Dutch nature protection and human rights group that has been active in the fight against piracy in Somalia since 1986. Its data is used by the EU NAVFOR Operation Atalanta, the ongoing military operation launched by the United Nations Security Council in 2008 to protect vulnerable humanitarian aid and shipping vessels from pirates operating off Somalia’s coast. The operation, which has a mandate to continue until December 2012, consists of units from Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Luxemburg, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Norway, Ireland, Malta, Finland and Cyprus. The EU NAVFOR, citing ECOTERRA said that 10 vessels with 117 Filipino seafarers have been captured in 2010, but since pirates released two vessels recently, the number of Filipino seamen still in captivity has dropped to 97. On Monday, the Philippine Embassy in Kenya confirmed that Somali pirates released the Marshall Island-flagged MT Samho Dream and its 24 crew members, 19 of them Filipinos, seven months after the ship was hijacked. [See story: DFA confirms release of Korean tanker with 19 Filipinos] A month ago, the pirates freed the Panamanian-flagged MV Voc Daisy and its 21 all-Filipino crew, after taking them hostage in April.
The 2,993-km Somalian coast and the East African coasts of the Indian Ocean have become extremely dangerous for ships since warlords in Somalia ousted a dictatorship in 1991 and then turned against each other. Particularly dangerous is the Gulf of Aden, a transit point for ships navigating Egypt’s Suez Canal to the Indian Ocean. It is one of the world's busiest sea lanes, through which 20 percent of world trade is transported. The presence of foreign navies in the gulf has reduced the number of pirate attacks and hijackings there, but the pirates now roam the southern end of the Red Sea and even venture as far as the Maldives, the United Nations reported and cited by the
Africa news website. Somali pirates have since intensified attacks and expanded their area of operation from their own coast and by the end of September, they carried out 35 of the 39 ship hijackings worldwide, and were responsible for 44 percent of the 289 piracy incidents in all seas of the world, the International Chamber of Commerce International Maritime Bureau (IMB) reported. Apart from hijacking, modern piracy incidents include boarding, extortion, hostage taking, murder, robbery, sabotage, seizure of items or the ship and shipwrecking. Somali pirates used ocean-going fishing vessels to reach as far as the southern Red Sea, where they hijacked a chemical tanker in July 2010, the first such hijacking recorded in the area, the IMB reported. To view a live map of piracy created by the IMB,
click here. Piracy contributes to huge increases in shipping costs and impedes the delivery of food aid shipments — 90 percent of the World Food Programme's shipments to Africa arrive by sea and ships entering the Somali coast now require a military escort. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has called the pirates a "scourge." This year alone, there were 166 recorded “pirate-related incidents" around the Horn of Africa and 136 confirmed attacks by Somali pirates, ECOTERRA said. As of Nov. 8, at least 29 foreign vessels and a barge are still held captive by Somali pirates, with at least 510 hostages — including an elderly British yachting couple, five hostages from Somalians and 93 Filipino seamen. [See:
ECOTERRA piracy reports] A British couple, Paul and Rachel Chandler, whose yacht was captured near the Seychelles in 2009, recently marked a year in captivity, and negotiations for their release remain at a standstill. Somali pirates are trained fighters, the Associated Press noted in its reports. “They are often dressed in military fatigues, they use speedboats equipped with satellite phones and Global Positioning System equipment," AP said. They are typically armed with automatic weapons, anti-tank rocket launchers and various types of grenades. The bandits target passenger, cargo and fishing vessels for ransom or loot.
Pinoy seamen at risk Every six hours, Somali pirates seize a Filipino seaman, the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism estimated in a
report published on its website on Nov. 26, 2008. The report was written by veteran journalist Roel Landingin and cited the official running count of the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) at that time. It was written on a particularly busy month for Somali pirates: November 2008 was the month that pirate attacks peaked. “The unpleasant statistics — the worst ever recorded in a month — underscore not just the surge in piracy off the largely lawless East African coast. The numbers also underpin how feeble Philippine government measures are in keeping Filipino seafarers from harm’s way," the report said. Since then, the number of Filipino seamen captured by Somali pirates has been almost halved, from 213 for the January to November 2008 to 113 from January to November 2010. But the number of Filipino sailors going aboard to work on foreign-flagged ocean vessels continues to grow. The country has been the world’s leading supplier of seafarers since 1987, the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration said, and today we still count among the world’s top sources of shipping crews. Filipino seamen account for about one-fifth to one-fourth of the 1.2 million international ship workers, the Apostleship of the Sea, a U.K.-based advocacy group said. “The shipping industry has long been considered one of the most dangerous in the world. Recently, however, piracy has risen up in the list of menaces faced by seamen," the 2008 PCIJ report read. In 2008, the Philippine government considered banning the deployment of Filipino seamen in vessels plying the Somalia coast, but Filipino seamen still choose to go to sea, because seafaring offers a more lucrative pay than other overseas jobs. In 2007, a total of 266,553 Filipinos left home to work in international passenger ships and cargo vessels under employment contracts lasting about a year. Seamen are the highest paid Filipino workers: the average Filipino seaman is paid from $1,000 to $2,200 monthly, while officers are paid around $2,500 to $3,000 a month, the Filipino Seafarer’s Forum said in its
Facebook page. According to the Trade Union Congress of the Philippines (TUCP), Filipino sailors sent home a total of $2.461 billion in the eight months to August this year, up $250 million or 11.31 percent from the $2.211 billion that they remitted over the same period in 2009. A Reporter’s Notebook report by Jiggy Manicad entitled “Captive in Somalia" and aired on July 14 depicted the difficult decision faced by Filipino seamen, such as Billy Valenzuela. Valenzuela chose to return to sea despite being held hostage for weeks by Somali pirates earlier in the year.
“Nakakatakot pa rin akong matsambahan ng mga pirata, pero kasama na siguro sa buhay iyon, dahil sa kahirapan ng buhay," Valenzuela said. (I’m still afraid of encountering pirates, but perhaps that’s just part of life, considering how hard life is.)
For the latest Philippine news stories and videos, visit GMANews.TV Piracy drop Pirate attacks worldwide fell 18 percent in the first half of 2010 from a year ago, as patrols by several navies in the Gulf of Aden curtailed raids, the IMB's piracy reporting center in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
said in July. The decrease was a small sign of improvement after years of steadily deteriorating safety at sea, the IMB said. Last year, sea attacks worldwide surged by 39 percent to 406 cases, the highest in six years, with Somali pirates' raids on vessels accounting for more than half of the incidents. But observers and experts alike say that the lasting solution to piracy needs to go beyond beefing up the naval presence in the Indian Ocean. The United Nations has suggested in many reports that unabated illegal fishing and the dumping of toxic waste in Somali waters by foreign vessels has driven Somali fishermen, severely constrained to earn a living, to turn to piracy instead. From 2003 to 2004, Somalia lost about $100 million in revenue due to illegal tuna and shrimp fishing in the country's exclusive economic zone by foreign trawlers, the Department for International Development (DFID) of the United Kingdom said in a 2005 report. Poverty is widespread in Somalia, with millions depending on food aid. In 2008, the World Bank reported that as much as 73 percent of the population lived on a daily income below $2. The UN has described the level of human suffering and deprivation in Somalia as "shocking." Acute malnutrition rates across most of south and central Somalia are above the 15 percent emergency threshold, and only 29 percent of Somalia's population has access to clean drinking water, according to UNICEF. Somalia's civil war must be dealt with to beat piracy, The Agence France Presse reported UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon as saying. "The severity of the problem off the coast of Somalia is a relatively recent phenomenon," Ban said in a recent report on Somali piracy. “Yet I am afraid that the problem will not only be with us for a long time to come, but also has the potential to become worse unless both Somalis and the international community address its root causes."
— LBG/RSJ/HS, GMANews.TV 
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