Brow Beat

What You Won’t Learn About Somali Pirates From Captain Phillips

Faysal Ahmed, Barkhad Abdi, Barkhad Abdirahman, and Mahat Ali in Captain Phillips

Jasin Boland/Columbia Pictures

Last weekend I had the disconcerting experience of watching a Navy SEAL raid off the coast of Somalia reenacted onscreen while trying to surreptitiously sneak looks at my iPhone to check on the progress of a real Navy SEAL raid in Somalia taking place that very night.

There may be little proven connection between the Somali pirates depicted in the new film Captain Phillips and the al Shabab militants targeted last Saturday, but the new Tom Hanks movie, directed by Paul Greengrass, comes out at a time when the international security threats posed by the world’s most unstable country are very much in the news. Recent events will likely color U.S. audiences’ perceptions of the events portrayed.

And while Captain Phillips works well as a fast-paced thriller, it doesn’t try to provide much context for what’s happening on screen. The film is as tightly focused on the saga of Richard Phillips (Hanks) as one of director Greengrass’s many behind-the-head handheld shots. Unlike other reenactment films—such as last year’s Argo, which featured an extensive prologue on the history leading up to the film—Captain Phillips drops viewers right into the action, beginning just before the fateful encounter between Phillips and the pirate crew led by Abduwali Abdukhadir Muse (Barkhad Abdi). This may have been the better choice from a narrative point of view, but it means that viewers may leave the movie not knowing much more about modern piracy than they did when they walked in.

For instance: In the film, Muse briefly mentions foreign vessels coming to take away the fish off the Somali coast. Viewers new to the subject may not know what to make of these remarks, but they refer to what many observers believe was a precipitating cause of the uptick in Somali piracy roughly 20 years ago. When the regime of longtime Somali dictator Siad Barre collapsed in 1991, the country was plunged into ongoing violence between rival armed groups and left without a central government capable of defending the country’s economic interests—including the “exclusive economic zone” off the Somali coast. Fleets from Europe and Asia quickly moved in, depleting the supply of fish.

As an African Development Bank report from 2011 put it, “Fishermen, dismayed at the inability of the central government to protect their country’s EEZ, and at the number of foreign fishing vessels illegally exploiting their traditional fisheries, took matters into their own hands. Initially arming themselves to chase off the illegal foreign fishing vessels, they quickly realized that robbing the vessels was a lucrative way to make up for lost income. Seeing their success, land based warlords co-opted some of the new pirates, organizing them into increasingly sophisticated gangs.” (There have also been periodic reports of toxic waste being dumped off Somalia’s shores, including by the Italian mafia.)

Unlike pirates in most parts of the world, who specialize in stealing goods on board ships, Somali pirates nearly always hold ships for ransom, sometimes for months at a time. (The Maersk Alabama incident depicted in Captain Phillips was unusual in that the crew fought off the pirates after they had already boarded.) Shipping companies were generally willing to write off pirate ransoms as the cost of doing business. This ransoms could reach as high as $9.5 million though they were generally around half of that. So it’s not surprising that the pirates in the movie aren’t impressed by Phillips’ offer of the $30,000 in the ship’s safe.

By 2008, piracy had grown into a $50 million per year industry in the country. In 2009, the year of the Maersk Alabama hijacking, pirates carried out 214 attacks, leading to 47 hijackings. By 2011 it was up to 237, though the number of successful hijackings decreased.

But that year also marked a turning point with the establishment of Combined Task Force 151 Combined Task Force 151, the multinational naval unit tasked with protecting shipping from piracy off the Somali coast. If nothing else, Captain Phillips gives a good sense of the firepower mismatch between western naval vessels and the pirates they were sent to hunt.

While initially met with skepticism, the task force, combined with improved security on board ships—many merchant vessels now carry armed military contractors on board when passing through—does seem to have had an impact. The improving security situation on land in Somalia also likely played a role.

The number of attacks lummeted in 2012, and so far this year, there have been only 10 reported attacks by Somali pirates and two hijackings. In an ironic development, some pirates have now gone into a new line of business, protecting illegal fishing boats.

This isn’t to say that the problem of piracy has gone away. In fact, the number of attacks off Somalia are now exceeded by attacks off the coast of West Africa, particularly in the oil rich Gulf of Guinea. But the situation where Richard Phillips sailed has changed drastically.

Captain Phillips may feel particularly current given the events of the past week, but it’s more of a historical document than audiences are likely to realize.