When Somali pirates chose to board a Chinese cargo vessel flying they received more than they expected.

The captain of a Chinese cargo ship spoke proudly of the efforts of his crew to fight off Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden. “Armed only with only beer bottles, fire hoses and homemade incendiary bombs, the crew battled against the pirates  who boarded our vessel. After thirty minutes the pirates called it off.”

Fully aware of the threat to shipping in the area, the Chinese sailors made themselves as prepared as they possibly could, without having access to firearms, in spite of facing very heavy odds stacked against them.
In an incident early in the month, three British ex-soldiers were picked up from the water, after jumping over the side of a ship, because of the intensity of the attack they found themselves under.

A spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Liu Jianchao, confirmed, “Over twelve hundred Chinese mechant ships pass through the gulf this year. Seven have been attacked.”

Now the Chinese government will join the other international warships in the gulf in a concerted effort to stem the growing tide of pirate attacks in the area. A Beijing newspaper reported that the Chinese navy was likely to send two destroyers and a supply ship to the area.

It is great to read of some fighting people back against what is nothing less than highly organized high seas robbery and extortion. The renegades have to learn they cannot rule international waters and hold an entire globe to ransom.

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It has been revealed that the Somali Pirates operate a world wide information gleaning network. In particular they look for illegal cargo, such as the 33 tanks being carried on the MV Faina, hijacked a few months back.

A  Somalia expert at Purdue University in Indiana, Michael Weinstein says “The huge Somali world wide diaspora (200,000 living in Canada alone), have taken to piracy as they would to any other business enterprise. Just as you would buy shares in any syndicate, you get a cut of the ransom dollars, when you buy in.”

The world piracy capital, Eyl, an outback, run down fishing village in Somali, where numerous hijacked ships are docked, receives only a small portion of the millions being paid in ransom.

Suleyman, one of the pirates  said, “We have negotiators, translators and agents in many areas of the world.” Acting as money changers and agents for the pirates, they earn a percentage of the ransom payments. Many are Somali expatriates.

They have agencies in Mombasa, Piraeus, Naples, and Rotterdam.  Information is received through spies working at shipping and marine insurance firms in the Gulf, East African and European ports. Anywhere the merchant vessels heading for the Gulf of Aden, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean dock.  The pirates are briefed on the number of security guards and weapons available on board the vessel, a well as the cargo.

Though the pirate leaders are known by sight and by name, rather than exposing themselves and their exact location, they use their proxies to negotiate the ransom and terms for releasing hijacked vessels. These front men also are the buyers of the latest in navigation equipment, GPS, speed boats, communications gear, food, fuel and any other supplies needed by the pirate community.

As Somalia is a bank-failed state, only cash and an informal transfer network, called ‘hawala’ is used. In ‘hawala’ an operator receives the money at one end and then instructs a relative, friend or another agent to hand a like amount to someone else. This has created a paperless system, based merely on trust and oral agreements.

More and more however, the pirates are opting for cash settlements, in an attempt to bypass government surveillance. They warn strongly against anyone using false money on them. Early in the year the pirates asked for money delivered to the Gulf. Strangely, no one would volunteer to carry it.

The ultimatum for the ransom payment of $25 million for the MV Sirus Star, the Dubai owned oil tanker, taken on Nov 18th, carrying $100 million in crude oil, is drawing to a close. “We do expect a favourable reply,” said the leader of the group Mohammed Said.

Armed private-security agencies from Dubai see this as a once in a lifetime Blue Moon Opportunity to make a score. They are now offering their highly paid services to protect vulnerable shipping. However in a recent brazen attack on a Liberia-flagged oil and chemical tanker, three men jumped overboard and were fished out of the water by a German helicopter. They were former British soldiers providing security for the MV Buscagalia.

Crew aboard the MV Faina line the ships rails. Somali Pirates surround them.

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All is doom and gloom in the world of finance, yet things are vastly different to the days of the Great Depression in the 1930’s. On one hand we have Somali pirates holding shipping companies to ransom for millions of dollars, while a world away, million dollar rock stars are being recovered from the murky depths of the earth.

The world’s 20th largest rough diamond ever found, weighs in at a mere 478 carats. It was recently recovered from the Letseng Diamond mine, in the tiny South African kingdom of Lesotho.

This new gem is a baby compared to the Cullinan diamond that weighed in uncut, at 3,106 carats. From the Cullinan diamond the Great Star of Africa was cut, besides 104 other diamonds. The Great Star of Africa adorns King Edward’s scepter and can be viewed among the British Crown Jewels, in the Tower of London.

While the new found, still unnamed diamond, also remains unvalued, its sister stone,  the Letseng Promise sold for $12.4 million dollars. An early recovery from the same mine, the Letseng Legacy sold for $10.4 million.

Analysis at Antwerp revealed that new gem has the highest colour grade and because of its round shape has the potential of being cut to become the world’s largest round flawless diamond ever found. In a polished state it could be valued at tens of millions of dollars.

The potentially largest new round, flawless, diamond, weighing 150 carats, would dwarf the cursed, 103 carat Koh-i-Nor diamond, which is the centre piece of the Queen Mother, the Queen Elizabeth’s coronation crown. The Koh-i-Nor diamond is said to be a curse for anyone other than a woman.

“Preliminary examination of this remarkable now-found diamond indicates that it will yield a record breaking polished stone of the very best color and clarity,” says the CEO and  Chairman of Gem Diamonds.

From 1977 to 1982 the Letseng mine was operated by De Beers Mining Company. It is the highest diamond mine in the world, being 3,100 metres above sea level, though it only reaches to around 645 metres deep. Only reopened in 2004 in a joint venture between Gem Diamonds and the Lesotho government its yield is 90% of jewel quality. This makes the Letseng a unique mine.

Three of the world’s top diamonds have been recovered from the Letseng mine – the 601 carat Lesotho Brown in mid 1960, the 603 carat Lesotho Promise, August 2006 and the Letseng Legacy recovered in Sept 2007.

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If you book an ocean cruise that goes through the Suez Canal and the Gulf Aden, past the pirate-infested coastline of Somalia, you will find your ticket entails a lot of extra expenses.

Hapag-Lloy, the German Hamburg-based cruise operator, announced on Wednesday that its 246 passengers, from the MV Columbus, would now disembarked at the Yemeni port of Hodeidah. The passengers would be flown by charter plane to Dubai, where they will spend three days in a five-star hotel, waiting for their 150-meter ship to arrive. Should the MV Columbus manage to survive running the gauntlet of the pirate-infested waters, the passengers will re-embark at the Omen port of Salalah. They will then continue their around-the-world tour, which commenced in Italy. In this way the company hopes to minimize the piracy risk to the passengers.

Abdul Haasan has led the Central Regional Coast Guard, formed only three years ago. This group has unleashed a storm of terror and fear on one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes. They claim: “We are eco-warriors, or marines defending Somali waters from foreign exploitation.” Yet the Saudi Arabia, state-owned Sirius Star, the world’s largest oil tanker, was hijacked on November  18th 833 km off the Somali coast.

The remote decrepit Somali fishing outpost, Eyl, has become the piracy capital of the world. Secondary school kids education and head for Eyl, enticed by the alluring promise of making big dollars.

“Armed guards will now be posted on vulnerable cargo ships using the Gulf, in the first such deployment of military personnel, in the international fight against piracy,” says the European Union’s anti-piracy mission in a statement yesterday. Warships from Greece, Britain and France, plus two maritime surveillance aircraft from France and Spain will police the area. It is expected that a German war ship will join the anti-piracy mission mid December.

Merchant vessels owned by Indian shipping companies will place armed guards on vessels moving through the Gulf of Aden. “Once the ships are out of the danger zone, the armed guards will disembark. This will be a very expensive exercise,” stated Captain Anshul Rajvanshi of the Mumbai-based Ebony shipping company. “However, once the pirates have boarded a vessel, negotiation is the only safe way left open to us.”

Armed with information from relatives in custom offices, a typical ‘day-at-the-office’ for the 350 Somali pirates, with their mother ships and 100 small crafts, it is merely a matter of deciding which ship to attempt to hijack next. With the world in financial crises it seems the Somali pirates have created their own ‘pot of gold’.
40 ships have been hijacked, of the 90 attempted attacks this year. To view the full extent of world-wide piracy it is worth taking a few minutes to Google a live IBM Piracy Map.

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They say survival goes to the fittest, but it was survival of the fattest that saved a morbidly obese 12 year-old border collie-mix, weighing around 120 pounds.

Unfortunately Jiffy made the mistake of sitting his behind on the sidewalk in Wisconsin, USA, only to become firmly attached to the freezing surface.

Jiffy’s 59 year old owner said the dog refused to come inside. However, she says, she did check on the dog several times during the night.

As the temperatures continued to plummet, Jiffy sat alone, on the pavement outside his owner’s home. Carey Payne, a Sheboygan County Shelter manager said, “Few dogs could have survived the single-digit temperatures. Probably it was Jiffy’s layers of fat that saved the dog’s life, combined with the double coat of soft undercoat and top coarse hair.”

In the morning local Shelter workers had to pour warm water over Jiffy’s rear end, in order to unstick the dog from the pavement. “It is too soon to tell if the dog has any long term effects.”

On Thursday morning, Jiffy’s owner was arrested by the Sheboygan police, on grounds of animal neglect.
Border collies are widely accepted as the most intelligent of all dog breeds.  Normally highly energetic, they play hard and work hard. Most border collies are well behaved dogs, eager to please their human handler. They are reserved with strangers and very protective of human family members.

The actions of Jiffy’s owner leaves many questions unanswered. If she had gone close enough to Jiffy surely she would have seen that the dog was stuck on the pavement? What about the dog’s behavior when he was called but couldn’t come?  Neighbours must have heard the distressed dog barking?

Perhaps the obese size of Jiffy tells us all we need to know about the knowledge and ability of the owner. Let’s hope that Jiffy will get a once in a lifetime Blue Moon Opportunity and find a new and better home for the New Year and doesn’t get left in the cold again.

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In May 2002, Robert Ballard led a National Geographic expedition, that found the sunken remains of John F Kennedy’s PT-109. It has taken six years for the US Navy experts to declare that the wreck found in 360 metres of water is actually the boat JFK’s skippered.

American troops were based on various islands of the South Pacific, after the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbour during World War11, including a base of Santo in Vanuatu, where 100,000 Americans arrived in May 1942. A second base was on Efate, Vanuatu, where 25,000 troops were stationed. The task of the American troops was to halt the Japanese advance down the South Pacific chain of tropical islands.

Nearly 60 years ago a Japanese destroyer appeared suddenly out of the dark around 2.00a.m. in the morning. It ploughed over the top of a PT-109, skippered by 26 year old JF Kennedy, millionaire heir, ambassador’s son and soon to be US president. The Japanese destroyer sliced through a PT-109, killing two crew members and leaving the rest clinging to the still-floating bow section.

Fearing that there would be no rescue for them, the sailors decided to make a several-hour swim to a nearby deserted island. Kennedy was suffering from a back injury, but managed to assist one of his crew by holding onto the sailor’s vest with his teeth.

Exhausted, thirsty and starving, the men were eventually rescued by some Solomon Islanders in dugout canoes. The Islanders were able to move around in the daytime, undetected by the Japanese. They had discovered a coconut carved with a rescue message from Kennedy and passed it onto a coastguard.

Kennedy and his crew were finally hauled aboard a sister ship, six days after their boat was destroyed. The coconut that saved the men’s lives sat on the Oval desk at the White House during Kennedy’s presidency, reminding everyone that in life there are Blue Moon Opportunities, if you have the courage to act on them. Opportunities that change lives.

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It used to be the waters of the South China Sea and Malacca Straits between Malaysia and Indonesia. were the dangerous waters for shipping. This is now changing in the light of the ever increasing hijackings along the Kenyan Coast, in the Gulf of Aden.

These hijackings are nothing more than high-seas robbery with the terrorist intent of demanding millions of dollars in ransom money.

Photograph: Veronique de Viguerie/Getty Images

The pirate group, formed just three years ago is known as the Central Regional Coast Guard and is led by Abdul Hassan.  It has 350 men in its ranks and about 100 speedboats.  However, there is an increasing rise of the use of ‘mother-ships’, that release fast attack skiffs along with pirates brandishing automatic weapons and grenade launchers. This allows the pirates to move further and further off shore, attacking ships many miles out to sea.

The pirates must have thought they hit pay dirt when in September they captured a Ukrainian freighter, the MV Faina, which was carrying military hardware, including grenade launchers and 33 Soviet-made T72 tanks. When the Sirius Star, the largest crude oil tanker in the world, was hijacked in November 18th, it was the biggest such incident of terrorism in the history of the sea.

Somalia has been without a central government since 1991 and the country is overrun with feuding politicians with private militia. Many of the pirates have personal connections to the politicians’ militia.

The pirates are preying on the lucrative grounds of the Gulf where thousands of ships pass through each year. It is estimated that up to $30 million has already been paid out in ransoms in 2008 alone.

Should the pirates start to scuttle fully loaded oil tankers, because their demands are not met, this would cause an environmental disaster, adding to all the other shipping woes of the area.

Two UK frigates, managed to stop pirates attacking a Danish cargo ship. Russian, US and Danish ships patrol the area, yet still the piracy continues. At least three more ships were hijacked hard on the heels of the Sirius Star being taken.

More than 12 vessels are still in pirate hands with over 200 crew. Ships are boarded and the crew held hostage until such time as the ship owners pay up the ransom.

Pirates have been portrayed as romantic, swash buckling heroes in movies and books. Today we have a group of terrorists, acting as 21st century pirates, which plan to keep the world at ransom in a tiny section of the vast oceans of the world. The difference perhaps is the speed of transport and the power of their weapons, the value of the cargo and the amount of ransom they demand, that has dramatically changed the face of piracy.

It is a pity the pirates don’t look for real Blue Moon Opportunities. (opportunities to change lives for the of mankind). Surely they have enough profits from past highjackings to to something worthwhile now. The problem is that crime and the promise of easy profits becomes addictive.

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Many shipping companies are abandoning the shorter sea route through the Suez Canal in favour of the safer, longer and rougher  sea- route around the Cape of  Good Hope. This will not only add 12 extra days to the typical voyage, it will increase the freight rates by 25 – 30%. Add to this, the steep increase in insurance for shipping firms.

In the biggest ship hijacking in history, of $100 million worth of crude oil, the hijackers have warned against being offered fake money for any ransom payment. It is still unconfirmed they have demanded $25 million, after having seized the  Sirius Star, a 318,000 tonne crude Saudi oil tanker, one of the largest oil tankers in the world, off the coast of Kenya, on November 18th. The fate of the 25 crew is still unclear. The hijack took place in spite of the fact there were was a NATO warship in the area, protecting commercial shipping.

“The Sirius Star is said to be anchored about 17 miles east of the port of Haradheere, 10 miles out to sea, with 30 Somali pirates on board,” said Ahmed, an associate of the pirates. Three more ships have been hijacked since the Sirius Star was taken.

In 2006 there were 31 attacks on shipping, 60 in 2007, with 20 crew members killed and over 150 injured. There have been 199 recorded attacks in 2008 to September, earning the sea pirates millions of dollars in ransoms. At least 12 of the 2008 ships and more than 200 hostages,  are still under the control of the pirates. Previously the South China Sea and the Malacca Strait between Indonesia and Malaysia had been considered the most dangerous waters. However, recent figures confirm the greatest increase in incidents have occurred off the coast of Somalia, in the Gulf of Aden.

The international community believes there can be no end to piracy, in spite of increased sea patrols,  until there is peace among the feuding politicians, with their own militia, in Somalia. Yet Somali security forces threaten to attack and release a Yemeni cargo ship, if the pirates won’t release it without the $2 million ransom being paid. Minister of the semi-autonomous northern Puntland region said, “We have friendly relations with the Yemeni people.” In mid-October the Puntland forces raided and retrieved a Panama flagged ship, the Wail, arresting 10 pirates during a gun battle.

It is a tragedy that the Somali pirates cannot find more rewarding Blue Moon Opportunities, instead of resorting to gangland style piracy on the high seas. It is also an amazing fact that the nations of the world are unable to stop a tiny band of 350 terrorists with their 100 small boats.

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Children from a local village, on the tropical island of Vanuatu, recently enjoyed a ‘Black Islands Custom and Conflict’ black and white photographic exhibition held, in the Cultural Center, Port Vila.

The exhibition of black and white photographs is part of the collection taken by the world renowned Australian photo-journalist, Ben Bohane. Ben has sensitively captured custom and conflict images of the South Pacific and South East Asia region since 1989.

Ben has been a witness to most of the major conflicts in the area of the South Pacific, East Timor, West Papua, Moluccu, PGN, Solomon Islands, Bougainville, Vanuatu, Fiji and New Caledonia as a Blue Moon Opportunity, (an opportunity that changes lives).

Ben has had the opportunity to spend expended periods of time, living with a wide variety of tribal, custom, cult and rebel groups. He travelled with Guadalcanal guerrillas, as well as photographing the opposing Malaita Eagle Force. Ben was able to secure the only interview and pictures of Guadalcanal warlord, Harold Keke, before he surrendered to Australian troops.

Ben lays claim to what is deemed to be the largest contemporary photo archive, of the South Pacific, in the world. His highly emotive, but sensitive photographs hang in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art and the Australian War Memorial, as well as being owned to maintain an independent record of any conflict.

“I like to go home to Port Vila, Vanuatu and take a break whenever I can,” Ben told us. He continues to specialize in Australasia and the Pacific region. His exhibitions have included displays in Australia, Washington, Holland and Cambodia, besides appearing in magazines ranging from Newsweek, The Guardian, (UK), Geo in France, Aera (Japan), Pacific magazine(Hawaii), plus numerous Australian publications. His documentaries have been viewed on the ABC, SBS Australia, BBC and ARD, Germany andNHK, Japan. He is also a regular producer for the ABC’s Foreign Correspondent program on Pacific issues.

In a nation where education is not free and 25% of the young generation never go to school, it is exciting to see the interest the children displayed in the exhibition.

For further information on Ben or the photographic exhibition contact the cultural centre pima@vanuatu.com.vu, or look up their website

Vanuatu is the ‘Must See’ travel adventure destination of the South Pacific. You can check out more about this exciting nation at Win A Resort