17 - Pirates and Law Enforcement Agencies: Complex Relations Across the Malacca Straits

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The relationship between the pirate and the border is an old one. On one hand, the pirate has often been depicted as an anarcho-nihilist in Western literature, from Captain Johnson, a.k.a. Daniel Defoë (Johnson 2010), to Gilles Lapouge (2004). According to the literature, pirates flee from the law and states while ignoring borders and rules. However, archaeologist Jean-Pierre Moreau demystified seventeenth–eighteenth century piracy when he described the pirate community as one governed by strict hierarchy, discipline on board and social welfare for injured pirates (Moreau 2006). In Southeast Asia, based on the testimony of the Chinese customs inspector Zhao Rugua or Chou Ju-kua (1170–1228), seamen who attacked nearby ships sailing from or to rival entrepôts were deemed to be “pirates”. But from the seasmen's viewpoint, they were only “collecting taxes” from the boats sailing off the coast of the Sriwijaya thalassocracy, centred on the city of Palembang in South Sumatra (Coedes 1989). They may have been considered privateers as they operated in the name of a ruler. Just like the pirates in the Caribbean Sea in the sixteenth–eighteenth centuries, they were in touch with a political authority, especially in the nineteenth century when the pirates were linked to the Riau-Lingga sultanate and fought against both the British as well as American powers (Lombard 1979).

Today, in a post-Cold War era, pirates are also a symbol of the dark side of globalization. Deemed to be non-state actors, Article 101 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) (United Nations 1982) defines piracy as disassociated from political entities. According to UNCLOS, piracy consists of “any illegal acts of violence or detention, or any act of depredation, committed for private ends by the crew or the passengers of a private ship or a private aircraft, and directed … on the high seas …”. However, in 2013, about 79 per cent of piracy incidents in Southeast Asia occurred against berthed or anchored ships in territorial waters (ICC-CCS 2013). For this reason, an International Maritime Organization (IMO) circular completes the UNCLOS definition by adding “armed robbery against ships” (taking place in territorial waters) to the “piracy” strict sensu.