‘We are pawns’: Indian sea captain fears for other seafarers still stuck in Persian Gulf
As the US and Israel-Iran war escalated, Captain Raman Kapoor was stranded for 2½ months on an oil tanker in the Persian Gulf with 23 sailors begging to return home.
“Our families were shocked, the whole team was asking for relief, but we couldn’t get out of that place,” he told CBC in an interview. near Kasauli in northern India.
Kapoor was relieved of his duties in late May and returned to India, but feared for the safety of thousands of sailors waiting to pass through the heavily disrupted Strait of Hormuz.
“We are pawns, they treat us like pawns,” he told the CBC. “Every transport organization is angry at the moment.”
At least 14 sailors not affiliated with the warring countries have died in the war, according to the International Maritime Organization (IMO), a UN agency. Half of them were from India, said the Forward Seamen’s Union of India.
The most recent casualties occurred in mid-June, when three Indian sailors were killed after the US rammed their vessel, the MT Settebello, which it suspected was trying to evade a naval blockade.
“The world only talks about us when it sees a dead body, after that they keep quiet until the dead body arrives,” said Kapoor.
Captain Raman Kapoor and his crew were trapped for months aboard an oil tanker trying to get through the Strait of Hormuz after the US and Israel-Iran war broke out. Now safe in India, he spoke to the CBC’s Susan Ormiston about the missile scare and the isolation thousands of sailors still endure on one of the world’s most important shipping lanes.
At least 8,000 sailors from hundreds of ships are still stranded in the Persian Gulf, according to the IMO, while Iran, the US and Gulf states fight over the narrow elbow-shaped area of the sea that is vital to 20 percent of the world’s oil supply.
Shipping control has become a powerful force for Iran, which issued a new warning on Thursday that all ships must use Iranian-controlled routes or face “severe consequences.”
Some ships were trying to get out using a narrow channel near the coast of Oman.
When the war broke out on Feb. 28, Kapoor’s all-Indian crew was loading crude oil at Umm Qasar, an Iraqi port.
The port has ordered all taxis to proceed to the Gulf for safety reasons.
Kapoor’s ship anchored in the Gulf and closed.
‘We felt the panic’
In the early days, workers counted the missiles that flew, one day they saw more than 140 in half an hour, he said.
“We could hear that drama on the ship, we could hear the shock, it was a terrible thing.”
The crew were panicked, he said, with no place to hide and no way to get off the ship.
On March 11, about a kilometer away, Iranian seaplanes raided the Safesea Vishnu, setting it on fire.
“It was a very scary night” and the crew was “terrified,” Kapoor said.
The IMO launched an evacuation plan last week to try to find a safe passage for hundreds of ships still stuck in the Gulf.
“We need to look after the seafarers better and the ship should not be used as a pawn in any international conflict. [that] it affects innocent people,” said IMO Secretary General Arsenio Dominguez, speaking from London at a UN press conference.
But the IMO was forced to pause that plan last Friday after Iran rammed a container ship, the Ever Lovely, which was passing near the Omani side of the strait.
In talks in Doha on Wednesday, according to reports, Oman said it wanted to collect tolls, possibly voluntarily, from ships passing through its waters while Iran wanted compulsory tolls and the US wanted none.
“It will not be an easy task to remove all the ships from the region,” said Kapoor, estimating that given the conditions, only 30 to 40 ships a day could be removed from the Gulf.
Kapoor will be home in India for the next few months helping his wife, Sarika, manage the Voyage Resort and Spa, a hotel they run in Manali, in the northern state of Himachal Pradesh.
But with 28 years at sea and the ability to navigate oil tankers across the Persian Gulf, he will be asked to command another vessel.
Sarika Kapoor was certain about her husband’s return to the Gulf before the end of the war.
“No, no, no,” he said, shaking his head emphatically.
“I will never let him go there,” he told the CBC. “[During the war] I think he can work safely, but not inside a war zone.”
After 20 years of marriage, he has become accustomed to going to sea, guiding various ships on different routes.
“Now the situation has completely changed after the war,” he said. “There is always fear in my heart.”
