How Modern Day Pirates Treat Their Hostages
In case there was any doubt that moder pirates are simply misunderstood, this article describing the deplorable conditions of their hostages from Agence France-Presse should be sobering. Pirate enterprises are businesses. They ransom their cargo or the vessels. The seamen operating the ships are of little practical value, so they are treated according to what their expected price in the negotiation process--low.
Note this account from the captain of the Iceberg, a Panama-flagged cargo ship captured in March 2010:
"Diseases have appeared among crew members, some have haemorroids, one has lost his eyesight and another has serious stomach problems," the ship's Yemeni captain Abdirazzak Ali Saleh told AFP by phone.
"The water we have is unclean and we have only one meal a day, boiled rice, that's it. The crew is suffering physically and mentally," he said, adding they had been locked up in a room of five metres square for close to nine months.
In October, the Iceberg's 3rd officer Wagdi Akram, a father of four, jumped overboard in a fit of dementia. The pirates fished him out dead.
A video shot last month and obtained by AFP shows two crewmen unzipping an orange plastic casing to reveal the Yemeni sailor's body kept in a freezer with a few bags of ice to keep it cold.
"The body is still in the freezer but we have no diesel to run the generators," the captain said.
The issue is that humans hold little value in this negotiation-drive form of modern piracy.
"When a yacht is caught, the sailors are worth more for the pirates than the boat. But in most piracy cases, the value of the vessel itself and its cargo is what guarantees to the captors that a ransom is paid," Ecoterra explained [an international human rights nonprofit group monitoring piracy].
"The crew's welfare becomes a very low priority, with pirates wishing they didn't have more people to feed and shipowners sometimes wishing they didn't have a crew preventing them from pulling off an insurance scam and sinking the vessel," the spokesman said.
Pirating remains a nasty business when it comes to human.
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