It is disappointing and somewhat anticlimactic to see what a real pirate looks like. A skinny African teenager in handcuffs is not a “pirate,” he’s a tragic human interest story waiting to be written. A proper pirate should be a dead pirate, preferably a majestic villain in corpse form hanging in a gibbet, as a lesson to other malefactors.
The spectacle of Abdiwali Abdiqadir Muse — all sixteen- or eighteen-years’s worth of him, depending on whether you believe his mother or his father — being hauled off to FBI headquarters in Manhattan doesn’t fit any satisfying buccaneer narrative.
The kid was all swaggering menace when he had an AK-47 tucked under his arm, but that was before Navy snipers blew the life out of his three companions and before the long arm of U.S. law scooped him up.
That young Mr. Abdiqadir Muse burst into tears in court on Tuesday ruins our theatrical expectations of how a pirate ought to behave. It also, unfortunately, may have been sufficiently touching that it will make it harder for Americans to deal with the piracy menace as ruthlessly as we should.
Even the name “pirate” seems a bit off the mark, since, for us, piracy is something rather sexy. We’ve been culturally conditioned since long before the days of Robert Louis Stevenson (of “Treasure Island” fame) to think of pirates as strutting, princely swordsmen – gritty and bad and bloodthirsty, of course, yet with a whiff of dangerous appeal.
We know from history that 18th century English-speaking pirates operated along curiously democratic lines, with captains chosen from amongst the crew and subject to the ultimate no-confidence vote, the “black spot.” Furthermore, we know from Hollywood that pirates are among the most desirable men alive, with their swashbuckling ways and their strong resemblance to the actors Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom.
So it wasn’t surprising that Americans felt a little frisson at the thought that pirates had returned from the sepia-tinted pages of the past to plunder modern seas.
It’s less exciting, alas, to reflect that pirates have been plaguing commercial vessels for decades –and that there’s nothing glamorous about them. Some may be dewy youngsters like the Somali brigand now in U.S. custody. Many, though, are vicious, greedy men who have seldom flinched at killing their captives.
In the 1990s, there was a spike in piracy in the South China Sea. At the very end of the decade, in 1999, water-borne rogues dressed as Chinese officials seized a cargo ship near Hong Kong waters and murdered twenty-three crewmen. The ship was never recovered, but the Chinese authorities caught thirteen of the pirates and executed them.
By amazing coincidence, after this pitiless demonstration of non-leniency, incidences of piracy in the waters off Southern China dropped dramatically.
It was also in the 1990’s that piracy really got going again off the Horn of Africa. That was when Somalia as a functioning state dissolved into civil war and mass starvation and re-coalesced as a jostling system of clan-based warlords.
In 1992, the first President Bush dispatched U.S. Marines to protect convoys of food being delivered to famine-stricken Somalis. That year, somewhere in the country, a little boy was – depending on whether you believe his mother or his father — either about to be born or already toddling about. The child would, of course, grow up to be the lone Somali survivor of the pirate boat that was holding hostage Richard Phillips, the kidnapped American captain of the Maersk-Alabama.
Yet now here the pirate is, weeping in a New York courtroom. Within minutes of his appearance, Mr. Abdiqadir Muse’s case began slipping neatly into the well-oiled grooves of the faux-redemptive American cable-tv narrative. “He is extremely young, injured, and terrified,” said the youth’s lawyer, Dierdre von Dornum, as if warming up for a guest appearance on Larry King.
Out in the Indian Ocean, pirates equipped with sophisticated tracking hardware and armed with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades are still holding more than a dozen ships and two hundred people hostage.
It’s hard to imagine any of them trembling at the prospect of the terrible vengeance soon to be meted out to their captured comrade in American custody, because they must know there won’t be any.
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