Iran Drones and Mines Attack 15 Ships in Strait of Hormuz

There are, by any honest arithmetic, several hundred seafarers in the Strait of Hormuz who have spent the past ten days working above a cargo that someone has decided to set on fire. At least fifteen container ships have been struck. A container vessel of ordinary size carries a crew of roughly twenty. They are rarely Iranian and rarely from the country whose flag flies at the stern. The Second Geneva Convention of 1949, the Eighth Hague Convention of 1907, and the San Remo Manual on armed conflict at sea all exist to protect them. Is any of it being followed?

I want first to know what the weapons were, because the law treats them differently. The reports name drones, mines, and a rocket-propelled grenade. Each implies a different kind of decision. The grenade needs a man in a small boat close enough to see the faces on the bridge wing. The drone needs an operator who chose this hull from among the dozens in the channel. Both are choices, and choices can be examined. Was the vessel carrying military cargo? Was it under convoy, or acting for a belligerent? Under the San Remo rules a merchant ship becomes a lawful target only when it contributes to the enemy’s military action. A box ship carrying refrigerators and textile machinery through an international strait, exercising the transit passage guaranteed by the Law of the Sea Convention, does not meet that test merely by existing.

The mine is another matter, and it is where my real complaint lies. A mine does not choose at all. The Hague Convention of 1907 was drafted by men who had just watched the Russo-Japanese War leave contact mines drifting for years. It requires belligerents to notify shipping of minefields and to use mines that become harmless once they break loose or once control over them is lost. Those requirements are the whole of what makes the weapon tolerable. I have seen no notice to mariners. A mine laid without warning in the busiest oil passage in the world is a sentry who cannot read a flag and will never be relieved. It does not distinguish the tanker bound for an enemy port from the feeder vessel carrying rice to Dubai, or this month from next year.

The strongest objection deserves an answer. It runs as follows. Tehran regards itself as under economic siege. Commerce through Hormuz finances its adversaries. Shipping companies accepted the risk when they sailed, and their insurers price that risk. On this view the harm is economic, regrettable, and paid for. My answer is that it is the wrong people who are paying. The war-risk premium falls on the shipowner, who passes it to the shipper, who passes it to the consumer. None of it falls on the second engineer from Manila who goes down to the engine room at four in the morning. He knows that a mine strikes below the waterline, and that his station is the compartment that floods first. The premium is charged to his employer. The risk itself stays with him.

Accountability is the next question, and the institutional failure is plain. The injured party in law is the flag state, and the flag is very often that of Liberia, Panama, or the Marshall Islands. Those registries have no navy to escort their ships and little diplomatic weight to spend on a protest. The crew’s own governments have no standing as flag states. Each of the fifteen ships therefore belongs to everyone and is defended by no one. At this moment the most careful records of these attacks are probably held by underwriters at Lloyd’s, not by any commission of inquiry. I spent my life arguing that a violation must be named before it can be punished. An insurance ledger records the event and assigns its cost, but it never names who is responsible.

The Second Geneva Convention also obliges parties after every engagement to search for the shipwrecked and wounded without delay, whoever they are. Has Iran offered rescue to the crews it struck? Have the Gulf states opened their hospitals to the injured sailors? Has any neutral body been given access to count them? These are questions of operations, and they can be answered by anyone who chooses to look.

What is needed is unglamorous. An impartial maritime monitor should log every strike by weapon, position, and casualty, so that the mine and the grenade are not blurred together in the word “attacks.” Flag registries that collect fees from these ships should be required to lodge formal protests. Iran must issue notices to mariners, which the Hague Convention required a hundred and nineteen years ago.

Until then, the only document that reliably follows each of these ships into the strait is the crew list, folded in the master’s drawer. Its purpose in an emergency is to tell rescuers how many people they should expect to find in the water.