Sky1 chatted with Ross Kemp about his investigations into piracy. Just before Ross' return to Djibouti to meet a Somali pirate.
Why pirates...
We thought we’d move Gangs on a bit, and after investigating and meeting gangs on land the natural progression seemed to be gangs at sea. And that’s what pirates are.
It’s very difficult to police the vastness of the oceans because the globe is 70 per cent sea. There always has been, and probably always will be, a problem with pirates. We’ve been working on this for a year and I think we have three fascinating programmes. I think it’s an interesting subject and the news reports we get never go in to the reasons behind piracy in the way we do.
About pirates...
The essential things you need to be a pirate are a boat, information on the ships’ cargo and you need a way of accessing the vessels. In Somalia they use ladders as away of boarding cargo ships.
Whether a pirate is stealing for profit, political reasons or using political reasons for his own profit, he can’t spend the money he makes on board a ship. He has to come back to land to spend it and he has to have somewhere to live.
If you capture a pirate, what do you do with him? In the old days you’d make him walk the plank, but now you either take him back to the country he comes from, which means he’ll end up with a clan that’ll take him back into piracy, or he’ll end up with a clan that’ll kill him. In Yemen, I think you can still be crucified for piracy.
In Indonesia we met a pirate’s wife and she told us that all the pirates’ wives worry and live together when their husbands go off to work. She was pregnant so her husband had stopped seeing his other girlfriends and whoring, but he was still taking drugs. She was very intelligent and extremely worried about her husband. He wants his son to be a pirate too and she finds that hard to live with, but at the same time she quite enjoys it. It was a bit like doing an interview with the wife of one of the Sopranos.
Somalia...
Somalia is a lawless country, there’s no government and it’s a clan operated system. The pirates operate out of the Puntland and they refer to the place where they dock the boats they steal as the ’garage’. It’s become an incredibly lucrative business. The escalation of piracy has come from the fact that a lot of the waters around Somalia don’t have a coast guard any more.
The Somali people aren’t great fish eaters, but they had a fishing industry and they had a coast guard when they had a government. It’s said that most of the pirates are ex-fishermen or former coast guard workers. A lot of the pirates refer to themselves as coast guards not pirates, even though they’re stealing ships.
According to Lloyd’s List (maritime newspaper) there were 16 hijacked vessels and 250 seafarers being held by pirates off the coast of Somalia this week (11 May). The MV Saldanha was hijacked while we were on HMS Northumberland and the pirates were reported to have received $1.9,000,000 as ransom for the crew.
