Dire Straits

The

y came at three o'clock on a moonless morning, a dozen men dressed in black, faces covered by balaclavas, hurling ropes and grappling hooks up onto the decks of the Dewi Madrim and swarming up the ship's sides. As his cohorts smashed in the windows of the bridge with their automatic rifles, one of the men pinned the sole officer on duty in a corner and pressed the barrel of a pistol to his head. "They asked him to tell them where the rest of the crew were," recounts the chemical tanker's captain at the time, Surahmat Johar. "I was sleeping in my cabin. All of us were then gathered in one room. They tied our hands tight behind our backs with a white, plastic wire—the kind that tightens even harder if you try to loosen it." Concerned that the 3,900-ton vessel would have no one at the helm, Surahmat pleaded to be allowed onto the bridge. "But they told me to shut up, saying, 'Don't worry, our commander is fully capable of taking care of your tanker.'"

Later, says Surahmat, the pirates escorted him to the bridge. "Up there I realized that they were completely familiar with all the equipment. Someone was expertly steering the vessel, reading the radar very well. I remember thinking: 'My God, he can handle the ship better than I can.' I'd thought pirates were just a bunch of petty robbers who jumped onto a ship, robbed the crew, then disappeared. But these pirates were totally beyond my imagination. They were professionals."

The March 2003 attack on the Dewi Madrim in the Strait of Malacca is typical of a rising tide of crime that has turned one of the world's busiest waterways into one of the most dangerous. About 800 km long, the strait is traversed each year by some 50,000 ships carrying one-third of the world's trade and half its crude oil, including 90% of Japan's oil needs. Its narrowest point, near Singapore, is barely 2 km across, making passing ships easy targets. In its latest report released last month, the London-based International Maritime Bureau (IMB), whose Piracy Reporting Centre is headquartered in Kuala Lumpur, notes that although piracy decreased by a third worldwide in the first nine months of this year, the Strait of Malacca alone yielded 25 incidents—almost as many in the area as in all of 2003. In all, says the IMB, 111 reported incidents took place in the waters of the three countries—Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia—bordering the strait. That number accounts for 56% of global piracy, up from only about 30% as recently as two years ago. And these are just the known cases—the IMB reckons that at least half the total attacks go unreported.

More alarmingly, in a post-9/11 world, the Strait of Malacca is a tempting target for terrorists. "A terrorist attack [here] would have the kind of high-profile impact on the world economy which terrorists want to achieve," Singapore's Deputy Prime Minister and national security czar Tony Tan told TIME. The case of the Dewi Madrim, Tan says, is particularly worrying: "The Dewi Madrim pirates had fast boats, vhf radios, machine guns. They disabled the ship's radio, took over the helm, and steered the ship for an hour before their escape." All of which, Tan concludes, point toward the possibility that the episode was a dry run for a terrorist attack.

That's a frightening thought, particularly given that regional security officials say there is little chance the growing trend of pirate attacks will be reversed anytime soon. While Singaporean and Malaysian authorities do their best to police their parts of the strait, in Indonesian waters pirates roam virtually unchecked, using the hundreds of islands and bays as bases and sanctuaries. Indonesia's navy, says a senior officer based on Sumatra's east coast, is "poorly paid, poorly equipped and poorly motivated. The government can't even pay our wages on time or in full, and often we can't go out on patrol anyway because we don't have enough money for fuel. The pirates have faster boats, plenty of cash and better intelligence. We don't stand a chance." Hari Sabarno, until recently Indonesia's Security Minister, admits, "We do not have enough resources." The IMB's director, Captain Pottengal Mukundan, sums up: "Indonesia is the problem."