Within the Walls of Hell (9 page)

Carlos
: (
Mockingly
) And if I did that, it would have cleared All the problems you have just enumerated, I suppose?

Messenger
: I did not say that all problems would have been solved. But they would have been greatly reduced.

Carlos:
You are not different from that fool who called himself an opposition leader. He never saw anything good in what I did or in my government. He criticized everything and turned a good number of the people against me. Most of them started following him and did only what he said. I felt I was loosing control and had to take drastic measures. You are doing exactly the same thing. You disobeyed me and they (
pointing to Sandi, William and stone
) have followed your example. I have no authority here. If my military chiefs were here, you would have suffered the fate of that opposition fool. (
Stone, William and Sandi burst into laughter
)

Messenger
: I believe that opposition leader you are referring to was Khan Hill. Tell us what happened to him.

Carlos
: (
Mockingly
) you seem to know everything. Don't you know that one?

Messenger
: If I ask you to tell me something yourself, it is not that I don't know but I want to point out your mistakes from what you say. You are given the chance here to say something but you didn't give that same chance to your victims. You decided what their crime was and the punishment that was meted out to them. They had no say. Can you tell us what happened to khan?

Carlos
: That fool had the guts to eye my throne…my birth right. He wanted to replace me by inciting the population against me. I asked everybody to dream and aspire to any post except that one. It was mine alone but he disobeyed me.

Messenger:
Your country was not a monarchy but a republic. As a republic, there were rules which all republics came together and laid down. One of them was the organization of elections after a determined number of years. That means that the post of head of state had to be open to contest. If you wanted to be a ruler for life, why didn't you change the republic into a monarchy? That way, you would have been claiming birth right unopposed.

Carlos
: I couldn't do that. The reason was that times were changing too fast and if I wanted to be a monarch, I wouldn't have had absolute powers. The term ‘Constitutional monarchy' became too fashionable everywhere around the world. Turning my republic into a monarchy and not dancing to the same rhythm would have been out of place. It would have attracted criticisms and that was what I hated most. Besides, if I turned my country into a monarchy, I wouldn't have been the one in public in front of cameras and taking the major decisions. All constitutional monarchies gave that job to a prime minister who became the sole actor while the monarch was locked up in a palace feeling bored. That was not the life I wanted. I wanted to be in charge and to be noticed.

Messenger:
Then maintaining the country as a republic meant you had to open the post of president to competition. You ratified the conventions which were laid down to that effect.

Carlos:
In politics and international relations, accepting to do something is one thing and actually doing it is quite another. I was good at ratifying the conventions but my post was not to be opened to competition. I created a parliament which was there to do what I told them. Any motion which was tabled by individuals or opposition leaders had to be rejected especially if the motion was going to disfavor me in anyway. I put it in place because I didn't want to be brandished a dictator. I made all the decisions and the parliament was just there to endorse them.

Messenger:
You were good at ratifying conventions and making promises which you hardly honored. One of such conventions was the protection of refugees, mentally impaired people and underprivileged people. You left the refugees at the mercy of your uniform officers who exploited them in anyway they wanted. Whenever you had to receive a very important personality from abroad, you asked your uniform men to arrest all the mentally impaired people, beggars as well as all the young girls and women who were forced to sell their bodies for money in order to survive and lock them up somewhere. You considered them as dirt, dirtying the streets. Those were the people you were supposed to get closer to. Those were the people your way of doing things rendered in that state. You never asked yourself what role you plaid in their plight. You did not see them as human beings but rejected objects of the earth through which you could assert your importance. Tell me, how did you want people to know that you were that way and at the same time wanted them to continue entrusting their destinies into your hands?

Carlos
: I never asked anybody to entrust his or her destiny into my hands.

Messenger
: Any aspirant to the highest office does just that. Anyway, that is not the issue now. You still have not told us what happened to Khan.

Carlos
: He violated a fundamental law by having his eyes on my birth right throne. By doing that he had to face the full weight of the law and I had to make sure that it was well applied. He was arrested and handed to the judges who found him guilty of treason which carried a death penalty. Justice was done.

Messenger
: Did I just hear you mention the word justice? When you were down there, how much did you know about justice? Did you really mean justice or injustice? You saw Khan as an enemy. You asked your men to arrest him. You called your judges and instructed them to hand down nothing less than capital punishment. They took charge of organizing and acting out a piece of drama in the name of a trial, which was even behind closed doors. Those who tried him never knew him. They neither knew the neighborhood he grew up in nor came from. Those who tried him were total strangers. Is that what you call justice? There were some actors too there and the name you called them was ‘members of the jury'. When they could not be unanimous on a decision, they opened it to a vote as if somebody's life is something they can gamble with. Is that what you call justice? What was justice was what favored you. Once anything was not in your favor, it was injustice. The courts were never there to render justice in the real sense of the term but to help you put away those you saw as enemies. The courts existed just as a window dressing for the international community.

Carlos:
I thought there was some knowledge in that your head. How do you expect me to be the head of the Judiciary and then the courts pass a judgment which disfavors me? How did you expect the judges whom I personally appointed to disfavor me? I appointed them to serve me. I had the right to fire any of them at any time when I had the impression that they were not doing their job.

Messenger
: Let's leave out Khan, what happened to Wang Mills?

Carlos
: That was the biggest fool who ever lived. He was an important committee member of my party and had many followers who were of his tribe. His tribes' men numbered over a million and that was an important figure to me when it was elections time though elections were just a formality. I made him minister and he used his position to open many businesses of his own. As a good tool, I exempted him from all taxes and gave him exclusive rights to supply certain goods. His people loved me just for the simple fact that I made one of theirs minister though they were not benefiting much from him. That made Mills to think that he was indispensable and grew horns. He dared to challenge me when I asked him to resign from his post of minister so that I could bring in someone else. The intention was not to offend his tribes' men who might have hated me for firing their son. He was too greedy and did not want to do it. I asked one of my servants to prepare a resignation letter on his behalf and he was forced to sign. The reason for his resignation was read on national television. As punishment for challenging me, I decided to have the amount of money he had to pay as taxes for the number of years he was exempted calculated. He was given a deadline to pay. He couldn't and I decided to seize all his businesses. In one of his business premises, there was resistance. There was exchange of fire between my men and his guards which resulted in the death of three of my men. He had no right to kill and I decreed that anybody who killed had to die.

Messenger
: Did you investigate to find out if Mills was the one who killed your men?

Carlos:
It was not necessary. If his guards opened fire, he certainly gave the order. Even if he didn't, give the order, the deaths occurred on his property and he had to go in for. Besides he had a lot of money which was enough to sponsor a rebellion against me. I had to keep him away by all means.

Messenger
: Let's say he actually killed your three men and by law he had to face the death penalty. “Anybody who killed another had to die” that is what you've said. But you killed thousands. Why didn't you hand in yourself for execution because that was equally a violation of the law?

Carlos
: Are you crazy? How do you want me to set a trap only to turn around and fall in it? Do you sometimes reason before asking those your questions? I ordered people to be executed. I didn't go out cutting people's heads or putting bullets in their heads myself. So, I can still say that I didn't do anything and be logically correct.

Messenger
: Mills supposedly killed three people and had to face the death penalty. You and your likes, who killed thousands remained free or in cases where you were toppled, you were sent on exile with huge material and financial benefits. Even your ministers who were accused of committing atrocities got promoted instead. That was the culture of impunity you promoted and it helped to push millions into the alms of poverty. Your men in uniform took advantage of it and committed all sorts of atrocities like summary executions, armed robbery, rape and extortions from those they were supposed to protect. When there were outcries against the impunity, you created commissions of enquiry. Those commissions rarely handed in any reports. Even when they were handed in, they remained in drawers. The commissions of enquiry were just there with their long cutlasses to cut long stories short. Those that were killed or were victims of extortion were people that did not matter or were those in the opposition. Their woes benefited you and you will still call it justice if I ask you. But that kind of justice where the net catches only the small fishes and let the big ones go through remains down there. Here, the story is different. Now, tell me something… did the killing of Mills bring your three men back to life?

Carlos
: Not at all. I had to have him killed so that he couldn't be a threat to me and to others.

 

Messenger: Was he really a threat in the true sense of the word? Yet he had to face the death penalty. If you ordered the death of thousands only to end up entering the grave yourself, where was the sense or benefit in killing in the first place?

Carlos
: The benefit was that those I killed did not disturb me anymore or anybody else.

Messenger
: There you are right…a dead man does not disturb anybody. What happened to Goodwill Johnson?

Carlos
: Ahh! That one too was a case. He was making a turn on the road with his car when my convoy was approaching. I was obliged to slow down because of that. I had so many enemies and they would have seized the opportunity where he was turning his car to kill me. I had to get out of my car and have him punished. He was supposed to bow as soon as he saw me. But he did not and that was crime number two. I asked my men to give him ten lashes of the cane after which I asked him to bow as the law specified. He still refused and told me that I was not his Master and he could only bow to his Master who was far greater than I was. He even added that his Master was omnipotent and omniscient and I was not qualified even to be His shoe cleaner. That was too insulting because I was the giver and taker of life and no one could possibly have been greater than me. I was head of everything like army, administration, judiciary, associations….in short everything. I spent billions making all sorts of portraits of myself which every home in my country was obliged to have one. My portrait was in every office whether private or public. No minister dared to say anything in public without mentioning my name. That way, my omnipotence was felt and my status of the giver and taker of life could not be challenged. I had to send him to go and meet the one he claimed was greater than me. What insubordination!

Messenger
: There were some three hundred people who ran away from a neighboring country into yours because they were being persecuted because of their minority status and religion. What happened to them?

 

Carlos
: My eastern powerful and rich neighbor communicated me that the three hundred people you are referring to were criminals. They were a minority group quite alright but they tried to fight for their rights the wrong way. They instigated violence which resulted in the death of hundreds. They got involved in unholy acts of suicide bombing and planting of explosives which killed many.

Messenger:
Did you try to find out if what your neighbor said was true or why they had to resort to such ‘unholy acts' as you call it?