A week before an attack on an oil tanker in the Gulf of Guinea, French soldiers were training in Benin’s territorial waters to track down pirates.
It is 9 a.m. in the port of Cotonou, the foghorn signals the imminent departure of the patrol boat Chief Petty Officer l’Hera French Navy ship dating from 1981. “Check battle stations!” It’s all over the place for the 95 crew members. The average age is 26 and the features are drawn after three months of mission and three days of stopover in Cotonou.
About 7 nautical miles from the coast, a fast skiff swooped down on the French vessel and came alongside. Six Beninese marines, formed into a visiting team, board the French ship. “We pretend to be a boat suspected of piracydetails Lieutenant Commander Sébastien Lometti, deputy commander. The idea is that they will come to inspect the boat. We call it a flag inquiry, that is to say that they will already check if all the papers are in order and then if the cargo complies with what was declared. They arrive as a team and are well organized. Within their team, they have several mini groups and each one has a very specific task.”
The uncooperative French sailors are grounded and shackled on the upper deck, while the rest of the team searches the boat. “In the scenario, it is also normal that, as a boarded boat, we act recalcitrant because we want to know what their reactions are to do the minimum of collateral damage”explains Thibaut Sinanian, ensign.
The most dangerous maritime zone in the world
In 1990, France launched Operation Corymbe to help reduce maritime insecurity. Since then, and faced with the skyrocketing of acts of piracy in the 2000s, the system and partnerships with local armies have continued to expand. The French army thus deploys one to two vessels on a quasi-permanent basis in the Gulf of Guinea as well as a maritime patrol aircraft. While the number of attacks has fallen dramatically over the past two years, the Gulf of Guinea – from Sierra Leone to Angola – remains the most dangerous maritime area in the world.
Faced with this maritime insecurity, such as illegal fishing, human trafficking or acts of piracy, joint exercises have multiplied in recent years in the waters of the Gulf of Guinea. France shares its know-how and defends its own interests in the freight sector. Piracy contributes in particular to the explosion of ship insurance costs. Hackers are mostly from Nigeria. “These are first of all very poor people who no longer have much to support their families and who are looking for moneydevelops Ludovic Foernbacher, commander of the First Master L’Her. They very often also work for the benefit of slightly more constituted groups which work at sea on opportunities, on information, on prepositioning, on what are called sea vessels which are large dhows alongside small, fairly motorized fast boats, which allow them to deploy on the targeted unit.”
“We are on a decline in this kind of facts, but without declaring victory, we know very well that it could come back overnight.”
Ludovic Foernbacher, commander of the Premier-Maitre L’Herat franceinfo
A few days after this statement, on March 25, the Chief Petty Officer l’Her intervened in the search for a Danish tanker flying the Liberian flag was stormed by a group of five armed men off the coast of Congo-Brazzaville. Communications with the ship were disrupted and all 16 crew members were reported missing. Six days later, on March 31, the French Navy located and rendered assistance to the ship. The pirates had time to escape by kidnapping six sailors.
It was thanks to a two-meter wingspan drone catapulted and equipped with a radar system and high-performance cameras that the Danish boat was found off the coast of Congo-Brazzaville when it had set course for Nigerian waters. “A drone gives us an additional extension in the detection of what surrounds us and possibly in the detection of illicit acts”, explains the commander. According to the Mica Center in Brest, an institution of the French Navy responsible for coordinating responses in the event of attacks, the number of acts of piracy has fallen by 75% in two years, due in particular to the rise in power of the marines. African. But this incident with the Danish tanker shows that maritime crime is far from over.