Malacca Strait Pirates
October 2007
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Malacca Strait Pirates
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By Peter Gwin
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Since 2002, the International Maritime Bureau (IMB) has recorded 258 pirate attacks in the Malacca Strait and surrounding waters, including more than 200 sailors held hostage and 8 killed. The insurance arm of Lloyd’s classified the strait as a war zone in June 2005. Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia responded by bolstering security in their respective waters, and Lloyd’s suspended the rating in August 2006.
But counting pirate attacks is murky business. Noel Choong, head of the IMB’s Piracy Reporting Centre, estimates that half of all pirate attacks go unreported. “In some cases the ship’s owners dissuade the captain from reporting an attack,” he says. “They don’t want bad publicity or the ship to be delayed by an investigation.” As a result, no one knows for sure how many pirates remain active in the Malacca Strait.
Ocean Predator
Which brings us back to Ariffin, who is serving a seven-year prison sentence. A lawyer hired by the Indonesian consulate has been his only visitor. The closest the guards let me get to him is the other side of a scratched, bulletproof window looking onto an interview cell. When the guards bring him in, he isn’t the imposing figure I’d envisioned. He stands barely five feet (one and a half meters) tall, and his open collar reveals a faded heart tattooed on his sagging chest. He looks more like a weary pickpocket than a pirate, confused that a foreigner has requested to see him.
He and my interpreter pick up telephones on either side of the window. I explain that I have read about his case. That I have traveled from the other side of the world to hear his story; to ask him why he became a lanun; to hear how it is possible for a handful of men to hijack a ship as large as the Nepline Delima.
Ariffin sits silently, the telephone pressed to his ear, his eyes shifting between the interpreter and me, his shirt damp with sweat. “The lawyer took all my money,” he says finally. “I have no soap. I haven’t brushed my teeth since I got here.”
I offer to leave some toiletries for him with the guards. His demeanor brightens, and slowly he begins his story, or at least one version of it.
The plot was hatched in a Batam coffee shop, Ariffin says, when a Malaysian shipping executive approached an Indonesian sailor named Lukman and inquired whether he could organize a crew to hijack the tanker. Ariffin, who went to sea in his teens and rose through the maritime ranks to become a mechanic, had served with Lukman on a few crews. Lately both of them had struggled to find work, and Lukman asked if he wanted in on the heist. It would be an easy job, he promised, because a member of the tanker’s crew was in on the plan.
As a young crewman, Ariffin says he was once on a ship attacked by pirates. They waved parangs (machete-like knives), threatened to kill everyone, and took cash and food. He smiles wryly at the irony. “It is very hard for Indonesian seamen. We all need money.” He told Lukman he was in. “All we had to do was board the tanker, tie up the crew, and sail to open sea,” Ariffin says. They would meet a tanker coming from Thailand, transfer the fuel, and abandon the Nepline Delima. Lukman promised Ariffin $10,000 for manning the tanker’s engines.
The plan began smoothly. Posing as tourists, Ariffin, Lukman, and two other seamen from Batam pretended to snap photos as they rode a ferry up the strait to the Malaysian port of Pinang. There they met six other men Lukman had recruited from Aceh, Sumatra’s northernmost province. “They weren’t seamen,” said Ariffin. “We needed their muscles.”
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