The wretched of the sea: piracy's 600 anonymous hostages

Last month's release of British yachting couple Paul and Rachel Chandler grabbed the headlines but the hundreds of Filipino, Yemeni or Ukrainian seafarers who are going to spend New Year as hostages are causing a storm of indifference.

The Iceberg, captured on March 29 in the Gulf of Aden, is a typically average catch: a 4,000-tonne vessel flagged in Panama, owned by a Dubai-based company and carrying a cargo of generators.

Its crew is almost a perfect sample of the most represented nationalities on the thousands of merchant vessels plying the world's trade routes; they hail from Yemen, India, the Philippines, Ghana, Sudan and Pakistan.

"Diseases have appeared among crew members, some have hemorrhoids, one has lost his eyesight and another has serious stomach problems," the ship's Yemeni captain Abdirazzak Ali Saleh told AFP by phone.

"The water we have is unclean and we have only one meal a day, boiled rice, that's it. The crew is suffering physically and mentally," he said, adding they had been locked up in a room of five metres square for close to nine months.

In October, the Iceberg's 3rd officer Wagdi Akram, a father of four, jumped overboard in a fit of dementia. The pirates fished him out dead. A video shot last month and obtained by AFP shows two crewmen unzipping an orange plastic casing to reveal the Yemeni sailor's body kept in a freezer with a few bags of ice to keep it cold.

"The body is still in the freezer but we have no diesel to run the generators," the captain said. Saleh said the crew was banned from calling their families. The dead seaman's relatives cannot receive inheritance benefits without a death certificate and their demands for financial assistance have been rejected by the owner's agent in Aden.

While pirates are not politically-motivated and have tended to spare the lives of their hostages, the crews' detention is no less traumatic and often lasts longer than needed to conduct a successful negotiation.

"The longer a hijacking lasts, the more money shipowners with the right insurances and their intermediaries can get paid," said Ecoterra International, an environmental and human rights NGO monitoring piracy in the region.

"If no party with the interest of the crew at heart is applying pressure, negotiations that could be conducted in a matter of three to four weeks can last many months," an Ecoterra spokesman told AFP.

In the case of the Faina, a Ukrainian ship hijacked in September 2008 with a controversial cargo of weapons and on which the captain also died, the ransom paid after four months was the exact amount demanded after two days.

Adding to the trauma, crews are often still onboard when hijacked vessels are used by the pirates as "mother ships" from which to launch fresh attacks. Few seamen have access to counselling when they get home.

The MV Iceberg's crew is confined to its hold and no contact has been made with the ship owner for six weeks, the captain and one of the pirates said.

"When a yacht is caught, the sailors are worth more for the pirates than the boat. But in most piracy cases, the value of the vessel itself and its cargo is what guarantees to the captors that a ransom is paid," Ecoterra explained.

"The crew's welfare becomes a very low priority, with pirates wishing they didn't have more people to feed and shipowners sometimes wishing they didn't have a crew preventing them from pulling off an insurance scam and sinking the vessel," the spokesman said.

On Thursday, relatives of Kenyan seamen held on three different hijacked vessels organised a vigil in the coastal city of Mombasa to demand news of their loves and financial support.

Families are often kept in the dark by governments hiding behind a "no negotiation with pirates" policy and by the complex onion-layered ownership structures of many vessels.