Pirates roaming the waters of Southeast Asia should be regarded as terrorists, Singapore’s Home Affairs Minister Wong Kan Seng said amid a rising number of attacks on ships and tankers. Wong told AFP in an interview last week there should be no distinction between pirates operating for personal gain and terrorists, with the motives of anonymous attackers impossible to judge until they are caught.
| He means if the results are the same, the motivations don't matter. Interesting legal theory, ain't it? |
"Although we talk about piracy or anti-piracy, if there’s a crime conducted at sea sometimes we do not know whether it’s pirates or terrorists who occupy the ship so we have to treat them all alike," he said.
"Mr. Ibrahim! Get a rope!"
"Aye aye, Cap'n!" |
"So in other words if it’s piracy we treat it just like terrorism because it is difficult to identify the culprits concerned unless you board the ship." Wong was speaking in the context of the growing piracy menace in Southeast Asia, with the threat particularly high in the waters between Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines.
| Defined, I believe, as the "most dangerous waters in the world." |
The region is also home to a range of Islamic terrorist and militant organisations, including the Jemaah Islamiyah groupand the Abu Sayyaf kidnapping gang of the Philippines. The London-based International Maritime Bureau, an industry watchdog, recently warned Indonesia’s waters were the most piracy-prone in the world, with 87 incidents in the first nine months of this year resulting in 85 people being kidnapped and two killed.
| "Martha! Cancel the cruise tickets, will you? We're going to the Grand Canyon." |
It last month detailed a range of piracy attacks in the region, including the hijacking of an Indian-registered tanker off Indonesia’s Bintan island, which is about an hour’s sailing time from Singapore. And a Singapore-owned tugboat, hijacked on September 19 while sailing from the city-state to Indonesia, was found more than a month later off Malaysia’s northern Penang state. In his interview with AFP, Wong warned of the danger of an incident that initially looked like a piracy incident escalating into a terrorist attack. "Terrorism camouflaged as piracy. That’s a bigger concern for us than just simple piracy," he said, giving an example of assailants boarding a ship laden with liquid gas and sailing it into their target.
| That'd make a bigger boom than I'd want to see... |
The International Maritime Board also reported last year an unusually high number of tugboats being hijacked and analysts have warned terrorists could load them with explosives to ram into ships or ports. The Straits of Malacca, which form the busiest shipping line in the world and run between Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia, rank number one on regional authorities’ lists of maritime piracy and terrorism concerns. The 1,000-kilometre-long (630-mile) straits are very narrow but link the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea and the Pacific, making them a tempting chokepoint for terrorists wanting to disrupt world trade. Indonesia and Singapore agreed on Friday to strengthen their efforts in combatting the maritime security threat in the Malacca Straits. Wong said Singapore had also introduced, or was implementing, many measures on its own to deal with maritime security threats, including investing 840 million US dollars on a global satellite-based ship identification system. He said the tracking of vessels and who was on them needed to be as accurate as in the aviation industry. "When you look at an aircraft coming in you know what the aircraft is, where exactly it is now and where it is heading," he said. |