Does anyone care?
If there are but a few words to sum up the thoughts of the 20,000 seafarers trapped aboard their ships by the respective blockades of the Strait of Hormuz, these will serve admirably.
Their loved ones certainly do care, worried sick as weeks translate into months with little apparent signs of their restoration, miserably alerted to reports of drone and missile attacks and the Iranian military firing indiscriminately into any ship that has contravened their rules.
The owners of the ships care, of course, and the responsible ones do what they can to make the lives of their beleaguered crews a little better, keeping them watered and stored if they can, and organising reliefs, if anyone can be persuaded to volunteer for a job in a war zone.
The situation is not helped by the widespread use of open registers and the convoluted connections between flags, beneficial ownership and all the interposing third parties.
But the plight of the crews is no longer headline stuff in the world’s media, with the emphasis on the shortages that are going to be felt in the supermarkets and garage forecourts and the effects upon everyone’s cost of living. Seafarers and their welfare under fire are well down the priority list, behind the price of refined fuels and the shortage of fertiliser and whether the airlines will be cancelling the summer holiday flights.
Do governments care about their nationals who are trapped in these grim and uncertain circumstances? Probably not enough, although a few of those supplying seafarers to the world fleets, such as the Philippines and India, have made their displeasure known, with the former prohibiting its nationals from the area.
It might be suggested that the situation is not helped by the widespread use of open registers and the convoluted connections between flags, beneficial ownership and all the interposing third parties involved with a ship and those aboard. Which interest is there who can make real waves in these diplomatic fandangoes, when the need is for firm action and tough talking?
Does the Trump administration, which along with that of Israel began open hostilities, care at all about the maritime consequences of their action of two months ago? The worry must be that the restoration of the strait as a maritime corridor has always been incidental to the US strategic aims, focussed as they are on achieving a non-nuclear Iran.
The US president could just lose patience and walk away, leaving the rest of the world, which uses the strait far more than the US ever does, to come to some sort of compromised accommodation.
Iran, with its newly crafted Persian Gulf Strait Authority and its “maritime oversight zone” now being overprinted on navigational charts, sees the waterway as a valuable prize, which they can announce as a victory in their war. Those 20,000 seafarers – who never went to sea with the aims of becoming pawns in some sort of mass hostage transaction, from the accounts of many of them – are now fully aware that they have indeed become just bargaining chips in a potential “deal.”
The strait is not real estate to be bartered away by parties who are wholly oblivious to the human consequences of their deal-making.
The real risk is that with every month that passes, and the Iranians are in no hurry to reach any decisions, the power of this unilateral declaration of authority over the strait becomes legitimised.
Already we can see a dribble of ships in which a government friendly to Tehran has come to some sort of arrangement, obtaining the necessary permissions for a transit (even if money does not change hands), effectively acknowledging the regulatory oversight of this spurious authority.
Those aboard ships without these under-the-counter liaisons to assist them are likely to remain ad infinitum, their transit conditional on the general bureaucratic nastiness of a ruthless regime.
The freedom of an important international waterway cannot be permitted to become subject to such hostile oversight, possibly to be traded away in some dubious bilateral negotiation involving two parties who hate and mistrust each other.
The strait is not real estate to be bartered away in some back room in Islamabad, by parties who fail to comprehend the importance of international maritime law and are wholly oblivious to the human consequences of their deal-making and those 20,000 seafarers trapped in the rising heat of the gulf summer. But does anyone care?