Piracy, ports and failed states: organised crime's frontlines?

Although we now live in a world of instant communication,

one area that remains relatively slow moving is shipping.

But it is nonetheless crucial to our everyday lives.

Most of the products in our houses,

most of our food and most of our clothes

have been on a ship and through a port.

And it's not just everyday goods that pass through ports,

which is what make ports and shipping so attractive to organized crime groups.

Sometimes, we get reports from individual countries.

So the Canadian Hells Angels and other motorcycle gangs

have got some sort of input in the major container ports.

I think that there are also stories of Mafia influence at certain ports around the Mediterranean.

Known cases of entire containers being stolen possibly with the collusion of port workers.

Captain Rik Verhaegen is the manager of port security in the Belgian port of Antwerp

My specific team is mainly concerned with terrorism.

Obviously, we all are aware that some terrorist organizations also use crime to finance the terrorist organizations.

So it is also our concern what is going on with crime.

If you're looking for the frontline in the battle with organized crime,

then this is a good place to come.

This is the port of Antwerp, the railway leading into it.

And the port of Antwerp is the second biggest in Europe.

Ninety percent of the world's trade is carried by sea.

And organized crime syndicates need to trade their goods and so target ports.

But the port of Antwerp is already on the case as well as

having sophisticated technology looking for drugs and other items,

it also has the scanners behind me which are there to ensure

that any radioactive material coming in or out of the port is immediately detected.

It's a matter of putting a higher threshold.

Let's say doing your illegitimate business gets a lot more difficult with a proper security system in place,

because you have a lot more hurdles.

There have quite a few serious catches lately.

And that has also... I think there's another added value.

That's the fact that the judicial police and customs work more and more closely together.

And behind me is one of the main weapons in this war against organized crime

using ports for their trade. It's a container scanner.

It takes X-ray images of what's in containers and compares that image

with what's supposed to be in the containers.

It looks at the density. So it doesn't matter how well packed the goods are,

if they're not what they are supposed to be, this machine will be able to tell.

And it's already produced some major busts.

Look closely at the highlighted box in this X-photograph and you will see well hidden bags of drugs.

And in this X-ray, the scanner has detected that only the back of the container has legitimate cargo,

the rest is contraband cigarettes.

The next stage is to introduce a container scanner which can tell the difference between organic products and other products.

In other words, if somebody is saying that they are transporting flour when in reality they're transporting cocaine,

the new scanner will be able to tell the difference.

But it's not all about new technology.

One of the best ways to disrupt organized crime operations is joined up intelligence.

Obviously, it's an added value for us too... if this port is, let's say, safe, secure...

When you do not have coordination that's to the advantage of the crime.

If you do have coordination, if you can put all your data together...

if somebody can have all this data in the house and say: "Oh, oh, here's something";

then you're on the good track.

Though organized crime in port probably bigger business,

it’s piracy at sea which has grabbed more headlines recently.

We've got a Somali model in which low valuable slow moving ships get hijacked

and put up for ransom. Then you've got more organized crime in the Far East

which there is some evidence that the Triads have been involved in the past

where the attraction lie in high value ships and high value cargos.

And despite the headlines, piracy may be an even bigger problem than we realize.

Piracy is under reported by an unknown factor.

In many countries, people simply don't bother to report piracy.

Because what's the point of simply delaying your vessel for another few days?

There's no confidence in local police to actually be able to do anything effective about it.

Piracy attacks off the coast of Somalia rocketed from just two in 2004 to over 60 in 2008.

Could these attacks be linked to Islamist terrorist groups in the country?

The most active Islamist militia in Somalia was a group called Al-Shabab.

Some experts have suggested that they might be in someway benefitting from this.

But I don't think personally the evidence is conclusive.

There's evidence the other way as well that Islamists do not approve of pirate activity.

This is now probably the second or third largest foreign currency earner in Somalia:

ransom money from piracy. So groups like Al-Shabaab in the site and others

will once be looking at this and say:

"Is there a way we can make money from this?"

But I think it's likely that the vast, vast majority of piracy, if not all piracy,

will remain as profit-driven criminal enterprise rather than with political or religious matters.

Even without evidence of direct links, Somalia's failed State status has already proved a major security threat.

If we go back to the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya or in Tanzania,

there's some evidence that bases in Somalia were used for preparing those bombings.

In Somalia, where for example you have piracy coexisting along with groups such as the Al-Shabaab.

And even though there's very little evidence that the two groups cooperate and operate

on an operational basis, they certainly benefit from each other's presence in the sense

of destabilising the country and allowing piracy to operate almost unhindered.

But there may be an upside. Ironically, Somalia may be one of the countries

which is so much of a failed State,

that it's too chaotic even for the major organized crime and terror groups to operate in.

There's rather a compelling argument which suggests that Somalia

is actually too much of a failed State for al-Qaeda to operate successfully.

In other words, they require at least a minimal degree of infrastructure

and contact and network from the outside world.

And without a solution on land, there can be no solution to the piracy at sea.

Everyone I've spoken to, be they from the security sphere or the shipping industry sphere,

says the problem is getting a solution on land to the Somalia issue.

The straits of Somalia are too important to ignore.

They carry trade to and from the key economies of Europe, China and India.

Major international counter-piracy operations have been launched. But they can only go so far.

The problem is as it was put to me by a senior admiral once you need at 300 vessels

in the Gulf of Aden to guarantee that there wouldn't be any piracy attacks.

And you'd need probably twice that to protect the Indian Ocean.

There aren't six or nine hundreds naval vessels spare in the world.

Navy is from different countries, different backgrounds, NATO, the EU, China,

Russia are able to work together in an unprecedented way in naval history.

That actually looks quite encouraging to me.

There could be an effective deterrent:

what there can never be is a fool-proof deterrent.