Free Within the Walls of Hell by Taniform Martin Wanki Page A

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