As leaders of the NATO military alliance head for a summit at which new measures against shipborne terrorism will be on the agenda, there are worries that world trade may be disrupted by new anti-terror rules for ports and ships that are about to come into force
A QUARTER of the world’s entire maritime trade, including about half of all seaborne oil shipments, passes through the Malacca strait in South-East Asia, which at one point narrows to as little as one and a half nautical miles. The strait and the seas around it are infested with well-organised, armed and ruthless pirates (see map) who hijack ships and kill or maroon their crews before repainting the vessels at sea and sailing into port under a new, “phantom” identity. If pirates can do this so easily, why not terrorists? Imagine the devastation to world trade if one or more giant tankers were captured and used to block the straits. Or the possible casualties if a hijacked phantom ship were used to carry a nuclear “dirty bomb” into one of the world’s main ports or to launch missiles at a coastal city?
These are nightmare scenarios worthy of a Hollywood disaster movie. But they are also the sort of threats that are being taken seriously by the world’s governments. On Monday June 28th, leaders of the NATO military alliance will begin a summit in Istanbul, Turkey, which will discuss a package of measures against terrorism, including seaborne threats. (To guard against just such threats, the nearby Bosphorus strait, another busy shipping route, will be closed to hazardous cargoes during the summit.) Three days later, new international security regulations for ships and ports will come into force, along with measures under America’s new Maritime Transportation Security Act.
The new measures specify what security equipment each ship and port must have, and oblige them to draw up and enact adequate security plans, and to designate officers to ensure these are complied with. But while the new rules are intended to prevent serious disruption to world trade due to terrorist attacks, in the short term they risk causing exactly such disruption: many ports and shipping lines are still not up to the new security standards and thus, if America and other countries impose them strictly from day one, many ships may be arrested or denied entry to ports.
The United States Coast Guard says it intends to board every ship that does not comply with the rules on its first entry to an American port from July 1st. This will be quite some task, given that there are 60,000 calls at American ports each year by ocean-going ships. Nevertheless, the American authorities are confident that this will not cause serious hold-ups to trade (especially in oil, given the current worries about maintaining supplies).
However, those elsewhere are not so confident. Christoph Brockmann, an official of Germany’s main maritime agency, told Reuters news agency this week that, if European Union countries insisted on strict compliance, there would be disruption to trade. Mr Brockmann said only 60% of the roughly 200 ships that call at German ports each day have the International Ship Security Certificate that will be compulsory from July 1st. The US Coast Guard said that, by last week, only 57% of foreign-flagged ships entering American ports were in compliance with the new international and American regulations, though the numbers were rising quickly.
The world’s ports may be even less prepared than its shipping lines come July 1st: on Monday the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), which drew up the new International Ship and Port Facility Security Code, said that only 16% of ports in 39 countries that responded to its inquiries had the officially approved security plans that the code requires.
Maritime terrorism is not a new phenomenon. In 1985, Palestinian terrorists hijacked an Italian cruise liner, the Achille Lauro. A passenger was killed during the ensuing hostage crisis. Muslim militants in Yemen blew a hole in an American warship, the USS Cole, in 2000, and another in a French oil tanker, the Limburg, in 2002. Abu Sayyaf, a terrorist outfit from the Philippines, bombed a ferry in Manila Bay earlier this year. Singapore’s authorities recently said terrorist suspects arrested by them had confessed to planning an attack on visiting American ships. And they are worried about a puzzling hijack last year, when supposed pirates seized a chemical tanker in the Malacca strait only to abandon ship after an hour. A dry run for a future floating-bomb attack?
