A photo of the crew of MV Albedo taken earlier this year. They have now been in captivity for more than two and a half years. Credit: IPS

By Amantha Perera
COLOMBO, Aug 2 2013 (IPS)

A listing ship taking in water and facing up to the treacherous Indian Ocean monsoon is hardly cause for optimism.

But that was precisely what Sriyani Perera felt when her husband Chandrasiri Perera informed her late June that the ship he was working in, the MV Albedo, would not survive the monsoon.

“Have hope, he told me. Maybe this is the break we have been looking for,” Perera told IPS, narrating her husband’s last phone call from the coast of Somalia.

The seaman with over 30 years of experience predicted the ship was likely to sink; in fact he wanted it to sink. The Albedo has been held by armed Somali pirates since Nov. 12, 2010.

A crew of 15, including six Sri Lankans, was kept in the rusting hulk as the monsoon rains and heavy seas battered it in the last weeks of June.

The ship finally sank on the night of Jul. 6. Since then families in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Iran have been on a long-distance endeavour to confirm whether the crew survived and whether they would finally be released.

Some, at least, are known to have survived the ordeal. But the answer to the second question is still in the negative.

Although the crew was in the sinking vessel as it was going under, the pirates had made attempts to move the men to another pirated vessel, the Naham 3, anchored close by, according to the Secretariat for Regional Maritime Security (SRMS) in Nairobi, Kenya.

Five days after the ship went under, the EU Naval Force for Somalia (EU NAVFOR) said its surveillance crafts had spotted two beached lifeboats from the Albedo about 26 km north of the ship’s last known location.

Giving the desperate families some hope, EU NAVAFOR released pictures of the stranded crafts on the beach.

It took almost two weeks since the sinking for SRMS head John Steed to make contact with the crew. On Jul. 18 he was able to speak with 11 seamen who had been transferred ashore from the Naham. The four missing, who are presumed to have made it out in the lifeboats, are all from Sri Lanka. And there has been no news from them.

“Those on shore are safe; now we need to get them released,” Steed said.

So far none of the families in Sri Lanka have made direct contact with the crew.

Families of crew members spread across Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Iran and Maldives tell IPS that bits and pieces of unconfirmed information are worse than no information at all.

Farhana Bisthamy, whose father is one of the hostages, got a call from someone claiming to be the leader of the pirates. She had received calls earlier from that number, so she listened despite being sceptical.

“He told me not to worry, that my father was safe,” said Bisthamy, a Sri Lankan residing in Maldives. “But I told him till I speak to one of the crew I will not believe him.”

It is this that will assure the families – hearing the voice of one of the crew members.

Jayan Panduka, whose brother Nalindre Wakwella is a hostage, was also trying to gain information. He was told by U.N. and other diplomats in Nairobi not to take anything the pirates conveyed to them at face value. But as the ship had been taking in water for some time, Panduka was told that there were probably measures in place to abandon ship.

“It is the way the pirates operate – they will keep everyone in suspense for long as they need to,” Panduka said.

The long wait that began in November 2010 for the crew and their families continues.

There have been occasions when their collective spirits rose. The most recent was about a year back, when efforts were underway to release the crew after paying part of the ransom, originally set at two million dollars.

Families of seven Pakistanis were able to make a payment of around a million dollars and get them released. Those freed included the ship’s captain Jawaid Khan. The Sri Lankans launched their own campaign, but it fell through due to the lack of support from the Foreign Ministry and others in government.

“We have never had any kind of government support to get the hostages released,” Panduka said. The Sri Lankans have also tried to enlist the help of a private negotiator – but that too failed.

Lacking any sort of international political and military clout, Perera says, countries like Sri Lanka can hardly negotiate with marauding pirates from a position of strength.

“I understand our weakness, our Foreign Ministry did not know of the incident till we started calling them,” she said. The Pereras first learnt of the hijacking from a television news broadcast.

After a silence of about three months, the victims began to contact the families over the phone. Both Wakwella and Perera used to call home every three months. The families even got a picture about three months back of the dishevelled, traumatised crew standing on the deck.

The last time he called, Perera told his family that things were so bad the crew was eating putrid rice mixed with sugar. “He said the ship was like hell,” his wife said.

The released Pakistanis came back with horror stories of trigger-happy pirates ever willing to shoot, and constantly high on narcotics. In one incident, the Pakistani captain Khan said he was tied with ropes and lowered to the ocean below while pirates fired automatic weapons.

Waiting in limbo is now normal for Perera. She has hardly stepped out of her house in the few last weeks, waiting for a call from her husband.

“All I want is to hear his voice, then I will be ok. I have lived the last two and a half years pinning hope on each phone call.”

She waits anxiously for one more call.

Kurdish rebels in Turkey have released eight hostages after their jailed leader Abdullah Ocalan called for a prisoner exchange.

The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) freed the eight soldiers and civil servants on Wednesday as part of a peace process with the Turkish government that it hopes will lead to a ceasefire by August. The hostages were freed in Iraq and they were back in Turkey on Wednesday afternoon.

According to reports, Ocalan began secret talks with Turkey to end the 29-year conflict in October.

Al Jazeera’s Omar Al Saleh, reporting from Antakya in Turkey, said the deal to release of the hostages was considered a gesture of goodwill in a proposal made by Ocalan.

‘Ceasefire’

“Now this takes us to the more important step we could see by next week, this is according to Ocalan, we could see calling for the PKK to announce a ceasefire,” Al Saleh said.

The hostages met their families in Zakho, northern Iraq, and then entered Turkey from the border at Habur.

Al Saleh said Ocalan’s plan was for a ceasefire to begin in the next few months, up to the middle of August.

“Then the PKK will call on its fighters to leave the Turkish territory and withdraw and then lay down their weapons,” Al Saleh said.

Turkey has yet to announce what it has offered in return, but there has been speculation that it will make some changes to the Turkish constitution. These include recognition of the existence of the ethnic Kurds, which is one of the main demands by Kurds in Turkey.

The hostages have been named as Zihni Koc, Abdullah Sopceler, Kemal Ekinci, Nadir Ozgen, Kenan Erenoglu, Resat Cacan, Ramazan Basaran, Hadi Gizli.

The number of hostages held by the PKK have been disputed. Turkish media has reported numbers that vary from 10 to 20.

Delayed release

They had been kidnapped in various dates in Diyarbakir, Van, Mus, Bingol and Sirnak provinces in eastern and southeastern Turkey.

The release was expected to take place on Tuesday but was delayed because of “technical reasons”, according to the BDP.

A spokesman for the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), Cemal Coskun, told the pro-Kurdish Firat news agency that the BDP-led delegation had travelled to the northern Iraqi city of Arbil for the expected release.

“We hope the powers longing for peace and democracy will see the gesture and speed up the steps for peace,” he told Firat.

Representatives from the interior ministry and two non-governmental groups were also in Arbil for the release, which both sides say should be interpreted as a confidence-building measure in new efforts to end the 29-year-old Kurdish insurgency.

Leader’s call

The promised release follows a call the Kurdish leader Ocalan made from in prison in Turkey last month.

He said that both sides held prisoners and he hoped to see them “reach their families”.

Besir Atalay, Turkey’s deputy prime minister, said the initiative should be regarded as a gesture of goodwill in the ongoing process. But he ruled out speculation that the government made secret concessions for the release.

“There is big public support, expectation and hope,” Atalay told the state-run Anatolia news agency.

Peace talks resumed late last year between Ocalan and the Turkish state with the ultimate aim of ending the nearly three decades of violence that has claimed around 45,000 lives since the PKK took up arms against Ankara in 1984.

Ocalan has been in prison for 14 years for treason. He is expected to call on his outlawed PKK to abide by a ceasefire due to start on Mar. 21, the Kurdish New Year.

*Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

The simple sentences six-year-old Minadi writes on paper should delight her mother. Instead, Vilasini Wakwella despairs over their content.

Nalindre Wakwella has been held by Somali pirates for close to two years, without any sign of release. Credit: Wakwella family and Amantha Perera/IPS

“Thaththi Enna” the little girl writes, a short but painful message: “Daddy, come home”. Little Minadi has not had her father near her for almost one third of her life. Nalindre Wakwella has been held hostage by Somali pirates since Nov. 26, 2010.

“She does not talk much about him. I also don’t discuss his situation with her, but I know that she feels his absence a lot,” the mother told IPS. Sometimes Minadi writes the date of her birthday alongside these notes to her father, hoping he will return in time to celebrate with her.

Sriyani Perera is similarly distraught when she talks of her husband, Chandrasiri Perera, one of Wakwella’s fellow crewmembers who was also taken hostage. Her son, Danura, is much older than Minadi, but he is no less traumatised by the situation. At 17, he is getting ready to sit for the London Advanced Level exam in 2013.

“He is very anxious, he knows the situation we are in,” the mother told IPS.

The two families are not alone in their distress. Five more Sri Lankans are currently being held hostage by Somali warlords. Four are crewmembers from the vessel MV Albedo, on which Wakwella and Perera worked, while the other is from a different ship.

The hostage saga began for the Wakwella family  on Nov. 28, 2010. His wife received a phone call out of the blue informing her that her husband’s ship had been hijacked and the crew now held for ransom.

Nalindre Wakwella was on a routine assignment as the chief engineer of the Albedo, traveling between Dubai and Nairobi. The experienced seaman had hoped his assignment would be a short one, so that he could quickly return to his young daughter.

Perera’s family, on the other hand, did not even get the courtesy of a phone call. His wife Sriyani was watching TV when, to her horror, the newscaster began to report on the Sri Lankan vessel being hijacked. The vague details were enough for her to call the local agent who confirmed her worst fears.

Since then the families have been making every effort to get the crew released. When they first approached the local agents they were given encouraging news: that the ship and its crew were likely to be released as soon as the owner paid the ransom, which was initially as high as 10 million dollars.

“We were naïve, we just believed their word that everything would be ok,” Sriyani Perera told IPS. As days stretched into months with no breakthrough, desperate family members approached government authorities.

The message they got was the same – not to worry, the crew will be released soon.

But the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Colombo gave indications from the beginning that it was sometimes clueless as to what to do. Soon after the hijacking, family members received a hand-written letter from the ministry providing a telephone number to call for information on the sailors held for ransom.

But when the number was called some family members were stunned to find out that the official on the other end was not even aware of the incident.

On another occasion, after a family member contacted the Office of the President, families received yet another round of calls from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs seeking information. Later, they were bewildered when a letter came from the ministry detailing the same information that they themselves had provided as the latest status report.

“We have been getting the same refrain, that they are working on it,” Vilasini Wakwella said.

A ray of hope came when the families of Pakistani hostages among the crew, including captain Jawaid Khan, launched a public appeal to raise funds. The ship’s owner,  reportedly a Malaysian citizen of Iranian descent, had indicated a willingness to pay half the demanded amount. The Sri Lankans were given the impression that they too would be released if the deal went through.

It did, but much to the disbelief of the Sri Lankans, only the seven Pakistanis were released after a payment of one million dollars was made to the pirates, according to Pakistani media. The Pakistanis arrived back home on Aug. 2 and the Sri Lankans were informed that the owner had subsequently backed off from the deal.

“Something fell thorough somewhere, we don’t know what it was,” Jayan Panduka, Wakwella’s brother, told IPS. The families have now run into a wall trying to open communications with the owner who has refused to deal with anyone but Malaysian authorities.

In between the failed attempts to secure their release, crewmembers have contacted their families intermittently.

Wakwella calls home once every three months or so since he first contacted the family about three months after the hijacking. But the calls leave the family more nervous than before. “He does not say much, but I know that he is very anxious,” his wife said.

The released Pakistanis told Wakwella’s family that he had lost about 25 kilos in weight and suffered a finger injury.

With all other efforts falling flat, Sri Lankan families have now decided to take the same path that secured the release of the Pakistanis – the launch of a public appeal.

They have formed an organisation that includes all seven families of the hostages. They plan to seek the assistance of religious leaders, civic groups and others  to raise money and awareness.

Their aim is to secure their families’ release through a ‘private negotiator’, the same route the Pakistanis used to secure their freedom. Wakwella’s brother Panduka told IPS that because the families had placed so much hope on official measures they had not taken up the invitation by the Pakistani families to join the fund raising.

The campaign is still in its infancy and it is yet unclear if it can garner public support. Till it does, little Minadi’s long wait to see her beloved father will continue.

(END)

French reporter Romeo Langlois is returning home today with an injured arm, after surviving a firefight and spending a month in the hands of the FARC guerrillas in Colombia’s southern Amazon jungle region.

After he was handed over to international negotiators in a remote spot in the rainforest Wednesday, he told reporters he had been treated well.

On Apr. 28, Langlois boarded an army helicopter on an assignment for the France24 TV station to cover a raid on cocaine laboratories. The military had him put on a bullet-proof vest and a helmet.

The army mission was attacked by the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), and in the fighting, the journalist’s arm was wounded. He took off his vest and helmet, identified himself as a civilian and a reporter, and turned himself over to the rebels, who gave him medical assistance.

The FARC initially declared him a prisoner of war. Later they apparently conditioned his release on the holding of a public debate on journalistic coverage of Colombia’s decades-long armed conflict.

They also called on France’s new socialist president, François Hollande, to send a personal representative, who received Langlois Wednesday along with former Colombian senator Piedad Córdoba, who negotiated the FARC’s earlier release of 30 hostages and a commitment by the insurgent group to stop kidnapping for ransom.

The release operation was coordinated by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

Four soldiers were killed in the attack on the helicopter in which Langlois was riding, according to the military.

Although the reporter was injured, it did not represent a violation of international humanitarian law (IHL), because he was travelling in a military vehicle.

“If you survive, like in this case, they capture you. They have the obligation to give you care if you are wounded. Later they verify that you are a civilian, and they must treat you as one,” and civilians cannot be arbitrarily detained, ICRC spokeswoman in Colombia, María Cristina Rivera, told IPS.

Many press reports described Langlois as a “war correspondent”. But Rivera warned that it is wrong to use this term in the case of an internal armed conflict.

She recommended “using terms that do not have legal connotations,” such as “journalist reporting on the war.”

“In IHL terminology, it’s ‘journalist on a dangerous mission’,” the head of the ICRC Colombia legal department, Marisela Silva, told IPS.

The “war correspondent” label appeared in IHL around the year 1950, when the treatment that prisoners of war must receive in international armed conflicts was regulated.

“If a POW flees, he cannot be tried for escaping, because he was representing his country and has the right to fight. And when the conflict ends, he must be released,” Silva summed up.

IHL thus established that reporters accompanying troops to cover military operations must receive, at the very least, the same treatment as prisoners of war if captured.

War correspondents are not necessarily members of the armed forces, and are accredited to report on the conflict.

But under IHL, different rules apply to internal armed conflicts. A number of terms, and the concepts they represent, apply to international wars but not to internal conflicts like Colombia’s.

“IHL norms for non-international armed conflicts have been drafted with great care,” lawyer Alejandro Valencia Villa, a consultant to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Office in Colombia, commented to IPS.

The aim was to avoid differences with countries that they might use as an excuse not to apply the rules.

“In effect, a war correspondent is covering operations by one of the sides. But in legal terms, in a non-international armed conflict, it would never make sense to use that term,” Silva said.

Colombia’s internal armed conflict is reported on from the court rooms, the prosecutor’s office, and the economy, politics or culture desks of newspapers. It is also covered from war zones, and, of course, among the victims.

Journalists in Colombia, then, are basically civilians protected by IHL.

“But that protective status also requires that reporters act in a responsible manner,” Silva said. “They are going to risk that protection if they get too close to the theatre of operations or if they accompany any of the sides in the conflict, which could be targeted in an unexpected attack.”

She stressed that “It is impossible to ask the adversary to guess that inside a tank or helicopter, which could be attacked, is a civilian who should not be the target of an attack.”

The ICRC’s main recommendation for journalists in dangerous places is to read up on IHL rules on armed conflicts. The second is to keep in mind that they are civilians.

Reporters who take the risk of exposing themselves to a firefight must “help the adversary distinguish them” from the combatants they are accompanying, Silva said. “They have to try to make it as obvious as possible that they are civilians.

“A first practical recommendation is for journalists not to wear green. The colours of their clothes should be completely different from those of the soldiers. They should identify themselves as press workers, perhaps with a logo on some garment,” whenever they are near a conflict zone, she said.

“But there will always be risks, it’s inevitable, and I think it’s important for journalists to be fully aware of that,” she underscored.

Under the Colombian army’s security regulations, anyone on a helicopter in a military operation must wear a bullet-proof vest and helmet. The media, meanwhile, tend to evade their duty to provide their reporters with bullet-proof gear clearly marked “press”.

But the issue goes further than that.

Silva mentioned “obligations for the different sides in a conflict when there are civilians nearby.

“The essential rule is that the parties to the conflict must avoid, as much as possible, the proximity of civilians to military targets. That is, in the strictest interpretation of IHL, a civilian should not be inside either a tank or a helicopter,” she said.

“Before allowing (a reporter) to accompany troops, the parties to the conflict should take into account how complicated things are in the area where they are heading, whether there are hostilities or a risk of attack, and how high that risk is. And they should, at the very least, reduce it to a minimum,” she said.

That “implies a great deal of prior intelligence work” by the armed force that the journalist is accompanying, she added

If all goes well, French journalist Romeo Langlois will return home on Wednesday May 30, after spending just over a month in the hands of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

In the video broadcast Monday by Telesur, French reporter Romeo Langlois appears to be in good health. Credit:Courtesy Simone Bruno

On Monday, Venezuelan TV channel Telesur broadcast a video proving that Langlois was alive. In the footage he appears well, although tired, and he has a bandaged arm.

The FARC set Wednesday as the day they would release the correspondent for France 24 television, who has lived in Colombia for 12 years, and who gave himself up to the guerrillas in the midst of a firefight on Apr. 28.

The insurgents said they would hand Langlois over to a humanitarian mission that must include a delegate representing French President François Hollande and former Liberal Party Senator Piedad Córdoba.

Córdoba is head of Colombians for Peace, a civil society organisation that since 2008 has achieved the release of 30 civilian and military hostages held by the FARC, as well as the rebel group’s pledge to stop kidnapping people for ransom.

The draft security protocol for the release was discussed Sunday May 27 by deputy Defence Minister Jorge Enrique Bedoya, the French ambassador to Colombia, Pierre-Jean Vandoorne, and the head of the Colombian delegation of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Jordi Raich.

After consultations with two Colombians for Peace delegates, the draft text was published “for the consideration of the FARC” at 22:30 local time Sunday in the hope that the guerrillas will approve the protocol so that the operation will go smoothly.

“On Tuesday May 29, by 1:00 p.m. (18:00 GMT) at the latest, the approximate release location should be communicated to the humanitarian mission,” Raich announced to journalists.

The area envisaged is 20 km by 20 km, the size of an entire municipality.

As soon as the FARC provide this information, “starting at 18:00 (23:00 GMT) on Tuesday, military operations (in the release area) will be suspended until May 31 at 06:00 (11:00 GMT),” Raich told reporters.

He said “the second important deadline is May 30 at 07:00 (12:00 GMT), by which time we must be told the exact spot where the release will take place.”

“In order to guarantee the security of all participants in the release operation, the Defence Ministry will suspend all military and police operations in the municipality or area specified,” says the draft 11-point protocol.

All troop movements on land, rivers and by air are to be suspended, and the police may act in urban areas only to maintain order.

The protocol also suspends “flyovers by military and civilian aircraft in the geographical area” of the handover, and expressly prohibits planes from circling the area.

The handover will be coordinated by the ICRC using its own land and river transport vehicles, identified with the Red Cross emblem.

On this occasion no help has been requested from Brazil, which in previous release operations has provided military helicopters and pilots. “We do not feel it is necessary, because the area is one that the ICRC visits frequently, overland or by river,” Raich explained. “And it would greatly delay the operation.”

The ICRC said it is “making headway on all the logistical steps, and working with all parties so that Langlois’ release can happen on the announced date.”

On his second day in office as president, Hollande named his personal envoy to attend the release of Langlois. His identity is not yet known, but “he will be on time,” Ambassador Vandoorne told reporters Sunday night.

“I know him personally. He is fluent in Spanish and is familiar with the country,” he added.

It is not Noël Saiz, Vandoorne told IPS, who asked him about the French envoy sent on missions between 2004 and 2008, together with Swiss national Jean-Pierre Gontard, to seek freedom for then presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, a French-Colombian citizen.

Betancourt was freed in the Colombian army’s “Operation Jaque” in July 2008, which disguised itself as a fake humanitarian mission that illegally used the ICRC emblem and involved troops impersonating journalists.

During other release operations, intelligence aircraft have circled the places where FARC guerrillas were taking their hostages.

It is unusual for the ICRC to publish, as it has now, the text of a memorandum of understanding for the security and coordination protocol for a handover.

This “has been done when there has been a specific request, as with the last two releases,” said María Cristina Rivera of the ICRC. “In this case, it is because the deadlines are tight,” she told IPS.

The last two releases of FARC captives were on Feb. 11-16, 2011 and Apr. 2, 2012, both mediated by Colombians for Peace.

A local lawmaker, six soldiers and eight members of the police were freed on those occasions. Several of the members of the security forces had spent more than a decade in FARC’s jungle prisons.

Rivera said the memorandum of understanding “is an agreement with the Defence Ministry,” and was made public “because it deals with security matters that concern the other party” in the release process.

In this case, the agreement is between the Colombian authorities, army and police and the French government and ICRC.

Langlois fell into the hands of the FARC on Apr. 28, when the military helicopter he was riding in to cover an anti-drug operation was attacked by rebels in the southern province of Caquetá.

The journalist was “lightly wounded” according to the FARC, who said they had tended his wounds.

At the time of the attack, Langlois was wearing a bullet-proof jacket and a military helmet issued to him by the army. This put him in a compromising position with the FARC, who apparently took him for a U.S. military adviser.

The local FARC unit, Front 15, declared at first that he was a “prisoner of war.”

According to soldiers who survived the attack, in the middle of the battle Langlois removed his jacket and helmet, identified himself as a journalist and surrendered to the rebels.