On Sunday Abu Sayyaf militants released 10 Indonesian sailors but, at the time of writing, are still holding four others hostage. The southern Philippine terrorist group captured the crewmen in two separate piracy attacks on their boats.

Piracy has become a growing concern in Southeast Asia, as evinced by the frequency of the criminal acts in the region’s waters.

The International Maritime Bureau reported 134 actual and attempted attacks between January and June 2015, up from 116 incidents in the same period in 2014. Interestingly, 92 out of the 134 incidents in the first half of 2015 took place in Southeast Asia, with Indonesia witnessing the greatest number.

More interestingly, not a single incident of piracy was reported off the coast of Somalia, in the Gulf of Aden, the Red Sea or Arabian Sea in the same period.

The questions are why maritime piracy is on the rise in Southeast Asia and how Southeast Asian countries, especially the littoral states, have responded to the growing piracy threat in the region.

Maritime security has become one of the most salient issues in the 21st century. This is because the ocean has become a vital component of global trade and economic growth. Roughly half of the world’s container ships worth around US$ 5.4 trillion of trade and two-thirds of the world’s oil shipments pass through the South China Sea from the Malacca Strait and the Indian Ocean.

Nevertheless, the oceans also possess strategic uncertainty because of the number of both traditional and non-traditional security threats. Constant attention and management is thus needed to secure peace and stability in the oceans.

Piracy is defined under Article 101 of the 1982 UN Law of the Sea Convention (UNCLOS) as “illegal acts of violence or detention committed for private ends on the high seas”. Under this definition, attacks within the 12-mile territorial waters cannot be regarded as piracy, but “armed attacks against a vessel” and thus can be dealt with only by the coastal state.

This gap was filled by the Convention on the Suppression of Unlawful Activities against the Safety of Maritime Navigation (SUA) Convention, which includes such acts in territorial waters or even in ports.

The extended definition is particularly important because piracy often occurs in congested and narrow chokepoints.

This is why places such as the Horn of Africa, the Hormuz Strait and the Malacca Strait appeal to pirates. The bottlenecks require ships to reduce speed significantly to ensure safe passage, only to increases their exposure to attacks.

Further, a combination of factors, including weak political authority and poor socio-economic conditions, contribute to the re-emergence of piracy activities. Somali piracy was attributed mainly to abject poverty and the protracted civil war in that country. The Somali pirates were mostly ad hoc gangs from coastal villages, characterized by their methods of taking hostages and the quest for ransoms.

These crimes were eventually deterred by active anti-piracy operations and the increased presence of private armed guards on board ships. The rate of piracy in Somalia finally witnessed a significant drop in 2012-2013.

However, unlike the Somali pirates who operate mostly on the high seas, Southeast Asian pirates work mostly in the crowded waterways of the Malacca and Singapore Straits. Around 79,344 vessels passed through the Malacca Straits in 2014, making it easier for pirates to blend in.

Asia’s dense map of territorial waters also complicates the use of military vessels as well as armed guards aboard the ships. Further, Southeast Asian pirates are more organized as opposed to the Somalis. They are in the business of stealing cargoes of liquid fuel and selling those to big, pre-arranged buyers.

As the Malacca and Singapore Straits are home to key shipping routes, with more than half of the world’s oil going through these waterways, this increases the attractiveness of piracy in the region, making Southeast Asia the new hotbed for pirate groups.

Considering the growing cases of maritime piracy in Southeast Asia, countries in the region cannot afford to let it go unchecked. To date, the major achievement of Southeast Asian countries in reinforcing anti-piracy countermeasures has been the trilateral Malacca Straits Sea Patrol (MSSP) involving three littoral states (Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore). The MSSP provides the mechanism for conducting coordinated sea patrols and aerial surveillance (under the “Eyes-in-the-Sky”). In 2008, the MSSP was further strengthened as Thailand was formally admitted.

Despite the positive progress of the MSSP, gaps in the regional response remain. Neither Indonesia nor Malaysia are involved in the Regional Cooperation Agreement on Combating Piracy and Robbery Against Ships in Asia (ReCAAP), limiting collaboration among countries in the region.

Moreover, none of the Southeast Asian countries is party to SUA 2005 and its protocol. Therefore, in practice, the cooperative response in addressing piracy in territorial seas is inapplicable.

To tackle the maritime piracy threats, Jakarta should not depend only on joint patrols. Sharing information among littoral countries is urgently needed to address the rising threat of piracy in the dense waters of Southeast Asia.

There are reasons to be optimistic. The involvement of Thailand in the MSSP and the increasing membership of ReCAAP show the possibility of expanding regional cooperation. In the future, Indonesia and Malaysia could possibly join ReCAAP or the SUA protocol. Maritime piracy is trans-boundary in nature, and therefore countries in the region must promote a cooperative mindset to eliminate maritime security threats.
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The writer is a PhD scholar at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, Tokyo.

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