Strait of Hormuz

The Strait of Hormuz, which connects the Persian Gulf with the Gulf of Oman and the Indian Ocean, and thus the rest of the world, is once again a source of conflict. The United States and the West struggle to keep this oil route open while Iran threatens to close it down in retaliation for the West’s interference with its nuclear program. One Iranian official said last week that closing the Strait would be “as easy as drinking a glass of water,” but in thirty years of tensions in the area, the oil has kept flowing.

Strait of Hormuz traffic scheme.

The Strait is only 21 miles wide at its narrowest. It falls well within the exclusive economic zones of Oman, the United Arab Emirates, and Iran. Under a provision of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, called the transit provision, ships of all nations may pass through the Strait, as long they adhere to the regulations governing the traffic separation scheme (TSS) laid out on charts of the area. The TSS consists of an inbound and outbound lane, each a mile wide, with a two-mile buffer zone on either side. Ship traffic is supervised by Oman.

More than a third of the world’s seaborne oil supply– more than a fifth of the total world’s oil traffic – passes through the Strait. An average of 14 tankers up to 150,000 tons each pass through the Strait in each direction every day. Forty-percent of the world’s tanker traffic passes through the Strait.

The countries of Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE have no sea routes that don’t pass through the Strait, and Oman, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran itself all rely heavily on traffic passing through the Strait.

Conflicts. Since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the Strait has been the site of conflict between Iran and several other countries

• Iran first threatened to close the Strait in 1984 after Iraq attacked several Iranian ships in the area.
• The US and Iran came to blows there in April 1988 after an Iranian mine damaged an American frigate. Several Iranian ships were sunk and damaged in retaliation. In July that year, an American ship shot down an Iranian airliner, killing 290 people.
• Iran and UAE have both claimed possession of the islands of Abu Musa – said to contain large deposits of oil – Greater Tunb, and Lesser Tunb. Iran occupies the islands militarily at the moment.
• The US and Iran again ratcheted up tension in 2007-2008, when several armed Iranian speedboats had close encounters with ships from the American Fifth Fleet.

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The Good Samaritan Requirement

The USS Kidd comes to the rescue of the fishing boat Al Molai. US Navy photo.

Twice in the last week, US Navy ships have rescued crewmembers from Iranian fishing vessels in the Persian Gulf. In the latest incident, 13 Iranian fishermen who had been attacked by pirates were rescued in what Iran called a “humanitarian gesture,” this despite the rising tensions between the US and Iran in the area.

There is a long tradition of one ship going to the rescue of another in distress. In more recent times, this tradition has been codified. Under Regulation 33 in of the International Convention for the Safety of Life At Sea (SOLAS) Chapter V:

The master of a ship at sea which is in a position to be able to provide assistance on receiving a signal from any source that persons are in distress at sea, is bound to proceed with all speed to their assistance, if possible informing them or the search and rescue service that the ship is doing so. If the ship receiving the distress alert is unable or, in the special circumstances of the case, considers it unreasonable or unnecessary to proceed to their assistance, the master must enter in the log-book the reason for failing to proceed to the assistance of the persons in distress [and] to inform the appropriate search and rescue service accordingly.

A captain who fails to respond to a distress call can face fines and even jail time. The Moscow Times recently reported an incident in which a captain faced two years in prison for failure to give aid:

     The captain of a vessel that passed by the sinking Bulgaria cruise ship without stopping to help rescue drowning passengers was fined, but avoided jail time, Interfax reported.
     A district court in Tatarstan ruled that Yury Tuchin failed to provide help to victims of the July disaster on the Volga River, in which 122 people died when the 55-year-old Bulgaria foundered in a storm.
     Tuchin, skipper of the Arbat dry cargo ship, pleaded guilty to not stopping to collect survivors, but said he had only done so because his ship risked crushing the lifeboats.
     The prosecution asked to jail the 60-year-old sailor for 14 months and ban him from working on ships for three years afterward, but the court only fined Tuchin 130,000 rubles ($4,200), the report said.

No one is obligated to put his or her own vessel in danger to assist someone else. In my own case, I went to the aid of a small craft stranded on some rocks on a falling tide. The captain there wanted my ship to tow his boat off, but I considered it too dangerous to get that close to the rocks. Instead, I sent the Chief Mate and some crew members to stand by in a skiff in case the stranded boat needed to be evacuated. While the captain of a vessel in distress  -- or, often, the search and rescue authority in a given area – has the right to “requisition” other vessels for emergencies, a captain’s ultimate responsibility is to his or her own ship.

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