Was anyone else besides me shocked to learn that America's newest super villain is only 18 years old?
I'm talking about Abdiwali Abdiqadir Muse, the pirate ringleader who briefly captured the American merchant vessel "Mersk-Alabama" last month, held the heroic captain hostage and was aboard a Navy warship when the Navy SEALS shot and killed his three comrades, thus freeing the captain and ending the standoff.
Muse's parents claim he is 16, but they have no documents to prove it and his mother is illiterate. His actual age is important because it will determine whether he is treated in the United States as an adult or a juvenile.
It was the juvenile status of three local Seattle villains that also caused a stir recently when the three teens convicted in the death of Ed McMichael, the "Tuba Man," were given surprisingly light sentences.
I wonder what would cause a Somali teen to turn to piracy and Seattle teens to turn to manslaughter.
No country for
young men
I confess that most of what I know about Somalia comes from the 2001 movie "Black Hawk Down." The film tells the story of an actual incident that occurred in 1993, when an American military operation to capture a prominent warlord in the Somali capital of Mogadishu failed, resulting in the deaths of 18 American soldiers. The American military had been participating in a U.N. peacekeeping operation, and soon after the incident the Clinton administration ordered their withdrawal.
"Black Hawk Down" depicts the bravery of the American soldiers by focusing on a handful of characters and their actions during the engagement. The movie simultaneously shows hundreds of nameless and faceless Somali characters getting mowed down by just about every weapon in the American arsenal.
Somalia has existed without a central government since 1991. It is ruled by warlords who continuously fight amongst themselves and against Islamic fundamentalist militants who want to impose Sharia, the Islamic fundamentalist law.
In an interview published in the May 4 issue of Newsweek, Abdirahman Mohamed Farole, the new president of the Somali state of Puntland, states that piracy started around that time because "foreign trawlers started to steal our marine resources. Some fisherman turned against them. They were paid ransom, and that ransom has encouraged that escalation."
Farole is against paying ransom to pirates, and Puntland's coast guard currently consists of two ships and 30 members belonging to a private company because there is no money to pay for more.
Muse has lived his entire life in this chaos, without electricity or running water. Now he is the first person to be charged with piracy in the United States in more than a hundred years.
Muse's parents claim that their boy was tricked into piracy by older boys, and the last time his mother saw him he was heading off to school one morning. He never came home.
After the dance
Meanwhile, half a world away here in Seattle, three other teens were recently sentenced to juvenile detention for manslaughter in the beating death of the "Tuba Man," known for joyfully playing his tuba outside of Mariners, Seahawks and Sonics games for two decades.
The three teens (all 15 at the time) assaulted McMichael at a bus stop around midnight on Oct. 25, 2008, after attending a teen dance near the Seattle Center. McMichael died of his injuries Nov. 3.
The three teenage boys remain anonymous in the press because their parents can read and have the documents to prove their ages.
Unlike Muse, who might spend the rest of his life in an American jail or be executed, two of the three teens who beat McMichael were sentenced to a maximum of 72 weeks in juvenile detention, and the third received 36 weeks. The exact amount of time will depend on how they behave in detention, and they will all receive credit for the time already served.
Two of the teens also pleaded guilty to second-degree robbery for attacking two other teens that night. According to a Seattle Times article about the sentencing, the defense attorney of one of the teens stated that his client's actions were "wholly uncharacteristic" and pointed out that the teen's mother dropped him off at the dance and picked him up after the attack.
So what caused these three teens to walk up to a stranger at a bus stop and start punching him mercilessly? What's their excuse? And more importantly, what's ours?
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