Word: strait
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...Scenarios of a terrorist strike in the strait vary, but they usually involve hijacking a tanker carrying chemicals, oil or liquefied natural gas. Blowing up an entire tanker is difficult?crude oil does not catch fire easily, for example?but it's not too hard to blast a hole in one so that its cargo is released, creating a maritime disaster. There's also the economic impact. When the oil tanker Limburg was attacked off the coast of Yemen in October 2002, insurance costs for calls to the country's ports rose by some $150,000 per ship. Such...
...Even without such scenarios, piracy in the Strait of Malacca is already exacting a human toll. "It's becoming more and more violent," says Noel Choong, director of the IMB's Piracy Reporting Centre. The cause is an outbreak of kidnapping for ransom by pirates in the strait, which most recently saw four sailors spirited away from a tugboat in October (two of the men are still missing). In the worst such incident, off the coast of northern Sumatra, four crew members were killed in January after negotiations between their kidnappers and the ship's owners broke down. "We have...