Experts at UVa address shifting piracy

It’s not yet clear if the hijacking of the yacht Quest and subsequent deaths of its crew is a blip or a change in the way piracy happens in Somalia, said an expert Thursday.

Brad Kieserman, who helped oversee the rescue operation that freed the captain of the U.S. ship Maersk Alabama, made the remarks while speaking at a University of Virginia panel on the rescue.

The Quest’s February hijacking wasn’t just about ransom, Kieserman said. There were many pirates there: some with jihadi influences, some chasing money, others after excitement, he said. The four American hostages on the Quest all died.

The Maersk Alabama rescue was perhaps the most successful U.S. intervention with the piracy that had become typical in the waters off of Somalia.

When, in 2009, Somali pirates seized the Maersk Alabama, which flew the American flag and had an American crew, Kieserman was, essentially, the man told to deal with it. (Many other ships taken by pirates are flagged in other nations, for reasons of convenience and expense.)

In the past, hijacked ships had been ransomed to freedom.

“In some ways, I think the shipping industry would prefer not to treat these cases as a crisis,” said Eric Stern, director of the Swedish National Center for Crisis Management Research and Training.

The pirates didn’t know the ship had a U.S. flag, but conceptions among Somali pirates about what the U.S. is are rather hazy, and it’s not clear if they would have cared, Kieserman said.

But in this case, the crew ended up fighting back, capturing some of the pirates and then cutting a spur-of-the-moment deal, Kieserman said. The pirates’ own boat had sunk in the Maersk Alabama’s wake, so they went into one of the ship’s lifeboats, taking the captain with them.

That changed the game. Where most hijacking in the region had bordered on business transactions, the departure of the captain in the lifeboat with the pirates turned the situation into a political and criminal crisis, bringing the intervention of the federal government, he said.

In dealing with such crises, countries are highly concerned with how other people will perceive their performance, particularly what it says about how powerful they are, experts said.

“There’s body language here,” Stern said.

In a place like Somalia, which has effectively been ungoverned for years, the situation is even dicier, Kieserman said.

“There’s nothing that scares the U.S. decision-maker more than ungoverned space,” he said.

Negotiators drew the situation out. They used their normal procedures, which draw on the commonality of everyone having a story to tell, even though the situation was starkly different from incidents they had faced in the past, John Flood, chief of the FBI's Crisis Negotiations Unit, said.

Officials were worried about the state of the pirates due to their tendency to chew qat, a popular pastime in that region. Qat is a plant with effects like those of amphetamines, said Dr. Christopher Holstege, director of UVa's division of medical toxicology. It also begins losing its effect as soon as it’s picked, meaning that the pirates’ supply would soon lose its potency even if it didn’t run out, which meant officials were worried about pirates in withdrawal.

When the buccaneers began gesturing threateningly with their guns, navy snipers nearby shot the three pirates in the life raft. One pirate who had already boarded a navy ship seeking medical treatment was later tried, convicted and sentenced to decades in prison.

The bodies of the dead pirates were, after great effort, returned to their clans in Somalia, Kieserman said.