 The Piracy Reporting Centre is headquartered in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
It tracks piracy incidents worldwide, and tries to persuade governments to be more active
in policing their countries' waters. Each week, the centre publishes a Weekly
Piracy Report on the Internet. At the end of 2001, the centre summarized the year's
incidents in Piracy Summary for 2001 Worldwide.Rich Wilson, understanding that there have been numerous incidents of piracy in Far Eastern waters, wanted to have a factual basis for anticipating the risk. Since January 2002, Rich has been printing the Weekly Piracy Report. He has entered the incident data in a spreadsheet and sorted by country. In this way, he has been able to determine where the hotspots are, and plan a route to avoid them. Rich has found that in Indonesia, most of the incidents are in the Straits of Malacca, which runs between the large northwestern island of Sumatra and mainland Malaysia; and in the anchorage of Jakarta, the capital at the northwestern end of the island of Java. Other incidents have been in the eastern portion of Indonesia; near the ports of Vietnam; and along coastal Kalintanam, the huge island which borders the South China Sea to the east, and is both Indonesian (south) and Malaysian (north). Most incidents have been robberies against ships at anchor, with pirates boarding ships to steal ship's stores and equipment. Only one incident occurred in the middle of the South China Sea, where Rich and Rich will be sailing. |