Espejos de Aztlán; Carl Meyer and Kathleen Kelly

As we experience tribal celebrations and ceremonies through song and dance, mixed with occasional live playing and interviews with local and widespread personalities, global tribal music every Monday night from 10 to 1 on K1N 89.9 FF Kyula and very well welcome to Super programa Espejos y Aslan. I am Cecilio García Camerillo and last night we were doing an interview in English. We have invited very important people for the movement of the Pro-Pas, the movement of the new violence in the United States.

We are going to be visiting this night, we are going to be listening to his voices, Mr. Carl Mayer and Mr. Kathleen Kelly. Carl Mayer has been a carpenter for many years. He is also, I guess, he was born into a nonviolent environment and has been a practitioner of the nonviolent philosophy of his life. There are so many things to say about him but we will be hearing from him personally in just a few moments. In 1971-72 he spent 9 months in a Pharaoh prison for tax refusals. Kathleen Turner is a teacher by profession. In 1981 she was a member of the Gulf Peace Team on the Iraq Saudi Arabian border for the first 10 days of the Gulf War. She then spent 5 months in Jordan coordinating convoys of medical relief supplies to Iraq. She also spent some almost a year in Pharaoh prison

for her nonviolent beliefs. Carl and Kathleen, welcome to your program at Spay with the Slam. It is certainly a pleasure to have both of you here. Thank you Cecilio and likewise. Carl, I mentioned that you were born into a nonviolent environment. Perhaps we can hear your own words. How that came about? Well, my father was a conscientious objector to World War II and although I didn't know about it, I wasn't talked about much in rural Vermont where I grew up on the farm. But my mother early in my life when I was about 10 years old, which would be 1948, the year that Mohandas Gandhi was assassinated in India, called my attention to the work of Gandhi and to the life of Gandhi and to the idea of nonviolence. And I read about Gandhi and I began to understand very early there where I was 9 or 10 years old

but it seemed that the most important work that would need to be done in my lifetime would be to end the nuclear arms race and to bring about a peaceful world. Kathleen, could you share with us how you got involved into the nonviolent movement? Cecilio, I would have to call myself a late bloomer in relation to Carl. I think that although my heart may have been in the right place, I never managed to encounter serious peace activism all through the Vietnam War and even up until I had earned a master's degree in theology and studied Christian scriptures quite carefully. But fortunately for me, I moved to an area of Chicago you might remember at the Uptown neighborhood and that's probably the poorest neighborhood in the city. And there I think I finally, well things fell in place very clearly. I met Carl and others

who were putting into practice exactly what I had been studying for a long time. And I could no longer rest easy when my closest neighbors didn't have a place to stay, literally, no roof over their head and not nearly enough food. Well I knew that part of my income a substantial part would be going to pay for weaponry and for such destructive causes that I certainly didn't believe in. Eventually many Central American refugees began to come into our neighborhood and people that we knew well were going down to Central America and working there. And so again the analysis was very easy to make what we could believe in and could work for and what in fact we needed to steer very far away from. Absolutely. Carl you have been in prison for your beliefs and at the same time it keeps you isolated from your work but at the same time stay there probably gives you strength.

You went there in part because for what reasons I understand that for many years you haven't really paid what you call war texas. Well I've been actually, I've been arrested and been in prison a number of different times, probably 15 or 20 different times at least for nonviolent protests. A lot of them which were defenses of the fundamental freedom of speech and the distribution of leaflets and so on under the Bill of Rights. But in this particular case the longest sentence I've served nine months of a two-year sentence in 1971 and 72 comes about as a result of my refusal to pay taxes for war. I very early in my life realized that about two thirds throughout all of our lives, about two thirds or more of the federal income tax revenue has been devoted to the costs of the military and of wars past, present, and future. And then there's a lot of other federal expenditures which don't serve the common good either.

So in conscience I've refused to pay federal income tax for 32 years since 1960 when I was 23 years old. And during the, and I've been an open and public a refusal of taxes and during the Vietnam War I was an organizer of the war tax refusal movement and the internal revenue service did come after me and did prosecute me. And asked for the maximum penalty against me. I got the maximum penalty because of my activities. But I would say that that nine months in prison is not an interruption of my work or of our work. Because first of all central to some of the problems of American society is the fact that we have a prison growth industry in which people who are unemployed unable to make a living are basically being forced into prison. And we have the largest percentage prison population in the world I believe.

And so we have an opportunity there to visit people and work with people in prison also. And it was an educational opportunity for me because I'm so busy in the outside we're all organizing and working for peace that sometimes I don't have the chance to read as much and as in depth as I did have while I was in prison. Carl, somewhere you wrote that some of the things that one has to overcome is fear itself and then something about conformity. When you decided to not start paying those taxes, did you personally have to overcome fears too? I didn't. And probably the reason is that I was deeply influenced when I was the first time I was arrested when I was 20 years old in 1957. I was arrested with Ammon Hennessy, a tax refuser who had spent a lot of his life here in the southwest in Phoenix as an agricultural laborer.

And he had been conscientious objector who spent two years in Atlanta prison, federal prison during World War I for refusing to register for World War I. And then when the taxes, war taxes came along during World War II, he refused those. And then the withholding system was set up but it didn't apply to agricultural labor. So he left his job as a social worker in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and came into the southwest and became an agricultural laborer irrigating and picking crops and going down every year on the air anniversary of Hiroshima and picketing in front of the Internal Revenue Service in Phoenix, Arizona, all alone. We're talking about the period of Joseph, Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Red Square. And he was all alone. He was picking the IRS, telling me he wasn't paying his taxes. So this was the person who influenced me and he had such a relaxed attitude about it that I wasn't afraid of the IRS and I wasn't afraid of jail because he also communicated to me this lack of fear of...

And this is at the heart of nonviolence. It's overcoming fear of the oppressor. And it's when you're working, I've been fired a couple of times for union organizing, when you're organizing unions, that's nonviolent action. But when you're organizing the community wherever you're organizing, that's nonviolent action. And at the heart of it, the first thing is overcoming fear of the oppressor and daring to speak up. But when you do it, very quickly you learn that you don't have to be afraid of them. Hopefully I'll get there. Kathleen, you're originally just one little side like to this. When I'd be organizing a union or trying to organize a union, the first thing I do is go and give a leaflet to the boss in the presence of the other workers. This is essential to overcoming the fear of the oppressor.

That's how you set the tone. That's part of the strategy. Kathleen, you're involvement in nonviolence is taking you to different parts of the world. But I was wondering if you could start by sharing with us something about the types of work that you do in your own communities in Chicago. I've been a teacher in Chicago for the past 13 years. And I would like to say that in the most recent years, I don't think I've ever departed from education. It's just that there have been many broader ways of educating other people and educating myself that have become important to me. And so I would say that my income earning work has most often been teaching. The vocation in this world that I feel I have is that of being a peace activist and not feeling the least fit of apology for that. I think, however, that education is central and it is key.

I've worked with gang kids in my neighborhood in Chicago for several years. After my third year of teaching those youngsters and realizing how at risk they were of imprisonment and also death, I decided to find a stronger way to say no to the weapons expenditures in our country by entering into nuclear missile silo sites with other people. And I spent a year in prison and like Carl, for having planted corn on a nuclear missile silo site, I was given a government sponsored sabbatical more or less in federal prison. And I found that extremely educational. And then since that time, I've had a chance to do more of an itinerant type of teaching around the Chicago area going into other people's classrooms, but encouraging young people to sink together through role plays and simulations about different means of nonviolent behavior. Did you see your prison experience similarly to Carlos, not an interruption of your daily life, but a continuation perhaps a more intense form of the work you were doing outside? Oh, surely. Yes. And also for my own personal formation, maybe one of the most important results or benefits of that time was overcoming fear because I think I had had a sort of a fear of the unknown.

But now I feel quite strongly that the ability of a government to say, well, we will put you in prison if you don't change your ideas or change your behavior is not something that will necessarily deter me. In fact, probably not. Do you find scary living in the US, Carl, being the military power that this country is globally speaking? How do you feel being a citizen of this country that perhaps is the most powerful, has the most powerful war machine on the earth? Well, I regard this as my country, but I do not regard myself as a citizen because the United States government is an organization that I have never joined and would not consent to join because of this kind of neo-colonial imperial domination that it attempts to project particularly throughout Latin America, but also now projecting it beyond Latin America all over the world.

And it's been scary because within my adult lifetime the possibility of nuclear war has been very real and very threatening. I think that threat is being reduced. Right now perhaps the great threat of the arms race is the fact that having spent the Soviet Union into collapse, we are now spent, we also at the same time spent ourselves near to the brink of economic collapse. And many people have suffered very deeply because of the waste of our resources, total waste pouring them down the rat hole of military weapons and neglecting our homes, our schools, our farms, neglecting to adequately compensate our farmers, providing the finest homes, most technologically advanced homes possible for nuclear missiles in these silos throughout the plains and so on, but providing no housing for our people.

That's right, that's why the streets are full of people. Kathleen, your activities have taken you to so many places, recently you were in the Middle East, I wonder if you could share with us what your mission there was and what you happened to have seen and experienced. Well, surely the reason that I went was because I wanted to join a group of international who had formed a team on the border of Saudi Arabia and Iraq just before the war broke out. We were called the Gulf Peace Team and our reason for being there was to place ourselves between the warring parties and through our bodies and with whatever voice we could give, say that our lives weren't worth any more than those of any of the competence involved. Or of any of the civilian victims and so we were an international nonpartisan, non-aligned group of people.

Kathleen, where along the line did you lose your fear? Where did you stop being just really scared about the safety of your body and mind? Can you remember that? Well, maybe just through a brief metaphor, probably all of us can remember the first time we were on the diving board and ready to jump off and maybe somebody was behind you saying, come on stupid jump, it's your turn. And being very afraid and then once you jump in, you climb out of that pool and you're right back in line and can't wait to jump in again. That's been my experience. I had once been in the war zone in Nicaragua during the Contra War and I was terrified. My imagination had run completely wild. But this time being in a war zone that was perhaps much more risky and in fact after having been evacuated to Baghdad in late January and staying there until February 1st, I felt deep dismay as I'm sure many of the people in your listening audience tonight felt over the wastefulness and the horror of the war.

But I truly never felt afraid. And I don't think I would say that I can lay claim to great courage but I've begun to understand that courage is the ability to control one's fear. And that is in part being a pacifist. And we, but we both had the opportunity to do this in community with the people who came before us. For instance, the people that I worked with were the conscientious objectors of World War II. The men who spent time in U.S. prisons during World War II because of their refusal to fight in that war and Dave Dellinger and AJ Musty and people like this. And to work with those people who had faith and confidence in themselves and it communicates itself to one another. I'm glad Carl said that because in a sense you might say we catch courage from one another.

I catch an awful lot of courage from Carl. Even if we're miles and miles apart, I can kind of imagine to myself, now if Carl were here, where would his heart be? What would his sentiments be? And there's also a sense of freedom even if you're in prison. There's a tremendous freedom that comes with knowing that now you're in link with those spiritual people whose lights you really do trust, and that you're acting in accord with what you believe. I'm listening to the Spanish language program. We're talking about Carl Mayer and the Catholic Catholic. Carl Mayer is a carpenter. For over 34 years he has been a part of the nonviolent movement for peace and social justice globally. Catholic needs a teacher by profession, but she has also been a part of the nonviolent movement for many years. She has visited Central America in the Middle East as part of her work and mission in life.

Carl, can you share with us something about your experiences and what those experiences were like? Being associated with the Catholic... Were Catholic workers? Well, the Catholic worker movement was founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Martin during the Depression in the United States around in 1930. I think Dorothy Day is the most influential Catholic in America, although her name is not known to many mainstream Catholics, but it had a great influence on many people who are today in the hierarchy and priests, and particularly women in religious orders who do work for social justice and peace. But the Catholic worker ran shelters and soup kitchens and houses of what they call houses of hospitality for the poor during the Depression, and today they still do.

As soon as I graduated from college I started a little house of hospitality, taking homeless people into my home on the near north side in the slums of Chicago. And parallel with this work for social justice, nonviolence is an integrated way of life. It involves work for social justice in your own community, it also involves consciousness about the world around you. And Dorothy Day was the first American Catholic to speak out as a pacifist, to refuse to kill, and today, at the time when I came into the Catholic worker movement in 1957, there were hardly any Catholics speaking out on the peace issue and hardly any Catholic pacifists at all. And yet as a result of the influence of Dorothy Day in the Catholic worker movement, today Catholics are in the forefront of all struggles for social justice, and particularly in radical struggles in behalf of peace.

Absolutely. Kathleen, one of the things that you were personally involved with is a peace walk to Jerusalem. Could you expand on that please? Sounds very, very important for that part of the world. You know, when we were evacuated out of Baghdad in early February, we decided to stay on in the city of Amman, Jordan, in order to help coordinate humanitarian relief convoys. And at that time, we were able to grow close to a good number of Palestinian people in Amman. And as they got to know us better, they understandably asked us why couldn't our group give a voice to some of the concerns that they have for a long time? Try to express to the world. And we recognize that really any kind of lasting peace in the region would have to be predicated both on a sincere expression of remorse and reconciliation to the people of Iraq who have been so harmed by what I can only term desert slaughter. But also to an international recognition of the Palestinian Israeli question and an international demand for a peaceful future in the region.

And we wanted to do what we could and we realized that one thing we could do would be to walk through the occupied territories and bear banners and signs carrying a message asking for peace. We in fact were arrested when we did that on two separate occasions by Israeli defense forces. But at the end of that experience, both the Palestinian friends that we'd met in Jerusalem and in Amman and through the occupied territories and people in the Israeli peace movement strongly urged us not to drop this idea. So in June of 1992, our group will reconvene, but this time with a much broader base of support and far more planning. And our plan is to walk from a city called Haifa, but specifically the town of Atlet where members of the Yash Gavool are imprisoned. There are people who are Israeli conscientious objectors. They refuse to go and participate in the repression of people in the occupied territories and for that they are imprisoned. So we would like to vigil there and celebrate their presence as peacemakers and then carry that spirit on along the green line.

And that's a line that separates Palestine and Israel and represents our hope for a two-state solution. And then following that, we'd hope to walk into the city of peace into Jerusalem. Great. Carl, what was your relationship with the Vietnam War? I guess I'm thinking concretely of your activities and what did the draft mean to you at that time? Well, with my experience and behalf of peace spanning beginning with the Ban the Bomb Movement and the second great issue that we confronted in the 60s was the coming of the Vietnam War. And I had already returned my draft cards and refused participation back in 1959 before the Vietnam War, but I was active in organizing behalf of draft resistance and tax resistance in the Vietnam War. And I went with a delegation in 1966 of a American pacifist, six of us went to Saigon and met with the Buddhist pacifist movement in Saigon and then conducted a protest outside the U.S. Embassy in Saigon and we were expelled from Saigon.

And I was also chairman of the coalition in Chicago, the Chicago Peace Council, which was a coalition of organizations working against the Vietnam War. So it was a period of time during which we just, for a number of years, we just put tremendous amount of energy in trying to end that war. Something a little bit more personal, Catholic knife. I'm wondering what sort of, because of your activities, what sort of values or how you have explained to your children, I'm wondering if they too have followed the nonviolent path. What it has meant to you sharing with them and whether they have heard your philosophy. I really must direct that question to Carl because I am a stepmother of Carl's children and I feel perhaps more of a sisterly relationship to them.

I admire all of their values because they live in accord with what they believe, but I cannot say that they are ready to embrace exactly the kind of lifestyle that Carl and I have carved out. Well, my children all, they all respect and like down and out people that we lived within the Catholic Worker House of Hospitality. All three of my children refuse the payment of taxes for war. Both of my sons refuse to register under the current registration. My oldest son eventually did register because of this problem of the denial of student loans and student aid to people who haven't registered for the draft. My children, none of my children I think are as radical as I am, but they are all committed to these same kind of philosophy and ideas.

Kathleen, you are touring the country, the heart of America, and now you find yourselves here in New Mexico. Sort of maybe not promoting is the right word, maybe that's not quite the right word, but you are sharing with the people you run into, you happen to cross paths with a very beautiful concept and it revolves around the Peace House. Could you share with us in more detail what the Peace House is all about? The Peace House is an effort to present to people and an alternative both in terms of lifestyle and in terms of education. It's Carl's in my belief that in a sense a major religion has taken hold of this country and I don't mean to be flippant the best way to describe it as a religion based on shopping, to consume and buy and buy and buy. And we don't have much hope or faith in that religion ourselves and so we'd like to present as attractively as we can another route and that's a route that's based on what you could really read on the side of the Peace House, simplicity, reverence for Earth, sharing, nonviolence.

That these are the kinds of values we want to hold forth to younger people and also to tap into people's imagination. Perhaps you don't have to own your own home and have two cars and be assured of a certain level of prestige in your neighborhood in order to experience freedom and fulfillment. There's in fact a much more free and fulfilling life to be found by engaging in activities that are considered so very counter-cultural but in a culture at our time that we want to question so deeply. Carl, did you construct that very beautiful house that sits on top of a truck? Yeah, I designed it and built it myself starting early in 1990. It took me about a year to plan it and to build it about seven months in the building and it's the fruit of my 35 years of activism in behalf of Peace and nonviolence.

It's conceived that it is a house on a truck. It's very colorful. It has display windows in the side of it. It's a very pleasant little house living space. It also has my carpentry tools. It's stowed there so it's my carpentry workshop and it has a library of books about nonviolence and tapes. When the sun comes in through the four skylight windows through the prisms that we have in the windows and cast rainbows all over the house, it's a very delightful and pleasant place to sit and talk to young people about nonviolence. I designed it to appeal to our imaginative world and I think of myself sort of as I'm reading Don Quixote. I read volume one of it last year and I want to say to young people, as I did all my life, I followed the ideals that my mother presented to me and I never gave up the idealism.

I followed my dreams and I've had a happy and fulfilling life so far and I want to say to young people, dream and have your ideals and follow those ideals and live by doing something in the world, not by just buying things in the world. And that's what the peacehouse is about. And you were telling me that indeed, whenever people see this beautiful house on wheels, they immediately gather around it as Don Schrader was telling me that you visited a reservation and immediately the young people came in. We went out to Sandia to Pueblo today and we'd no sooner parked it along the roadway than a couple of young children came running over and they looked at it and they went away and they brought four more back with them. We're running out of time, Carl Meyers and Kathleen Kelly.

One last question with the new changes that are happening globally, do you feel that there is a greater opportunity for a more peaceful plan? Yes, because I have a perspective of 35 years of working for peace and when I started, we were really lonely and isolated in America and particularly in states like New Mexico and Arizona and so on. Now wherever we go, the peace movement is, I know from my own experience that this network is much broader than it was when I started 35 years ago and in the 35 years that I still have to work, if we grow in the same way that we have in the last 35 years, we will have passed the threshold where we will be able to realize this kind of attitude for our country. Well, I share Carl's optimism and hope but I would like to say that I think that key to achieving, to turning many of our dreams into reality will be a much more aggressive demand on the part of everyday ordinary people to hear the truth, both from our media and from the people who assume leadership roles in our country to be more aggressive, especially coming upon the anniversary of the desert slaughter that occurred last year.

I think we need to ask people to analyze why was that war fought in the first place and what possible goals were actually accomplished and were they in the interest of the United States and its people or were they in the interest of a small group of people intent on war and the preservation of weapons making as our major industry. So we have some hard, clear tasks that we must approach and not flinch from. We can't be afraid of them and if we muster up the ability to persevere, I really do believe that our children, the children of the world, will find a much more peaceful place in which to live. I think that's what we all want. Carl Meyer, carpenter for over 34 years, a member of the nonviolent movement and Kathleen Kelly, a teacher and also a member of the nonviolent movement originally from Chicago and Carl originally from Vermont.

Thank you both for being here tonight and for sharing such very beautiful and meaningful thoughts. Thank you. The Cold War is over and now the nation must deal with its legacy, nuclear wastes.

Some of them will be hazardous for 200,000 years. Now that's longer than recorded history. In the town where the atomic bomb was conceived, people say nuclear waste has poisoned their community. Nuclear scientists say there's no health problem. Los Alamos tells of an atomic city. A special program Monday, January 13th at 4 p.m. on KUNM. It's 35 minutes past 8 o'clock. This is KUNM in Albuquerque. Thanks for listening to Espejo's There's Slun. Stay with us. We still have one and a half hours more of raasis. Start off by whistling our way into the 9 o'clock hour, 25 till this is KUNM, Albuquerque. This is KUNM in Albuquerque. Start off by whistling our way into the 9 o'clock hour, 25 till this is KUNM.

Start off by whistling our way into the 9 o'clock hour, 25 till this is KUNM. Start off by whistling our way into the 9 o'clock hour, 25 till this is KUNM. Start off by whistling our way into the 9 o'clock hour, 25 till this is KUNM.

Start off by whistling our way into the 9 o'clock hour, 25 till this is KUNM. Start off by whistling our way into the 9 o'clock hour, 25 till this is KUNM. Start off by whistling our way into the 9 o'clock hour, 25 till this is KUNM.

Through corruption and mismanagement. After the United States and Europe cut off millions in foreign aid, Mabutu finally allowed his political opposition to act openly. But donors say that's not enough. They want him out of power. And Pira's rename on tame reports. A quarter of a century after installing himself as the supreme ruler of Zaire, Mabutu Sacy Seiko changed his mind. Wisdom comes at 60, the president said, as he announced sweeping political reforms aimed at transforming Zaire from a one-party state to a multi-party democracy. Within weeks, dozens of opposition parties sprang up opposition newspapers hit the streets. The government was still ready to crack down hard on opposition, but now it was monitored and publicized by groups like the Zairean League of Human Rights. Bonnie Cobwe is a former journalist who came back from exile to run the League of Human Rights. He says they formed the group last spring after army troops shot and killed protesting students.

He's still a little surprised himself, says Cobwe, that he can operate so openly. A year or two years ago, we would have put in prison if we have this kind of activity. Or if we speak to foreign journalists, it was completely forbidden. There are now 250 opposition parties in Zaire. Many of them have come together under the name the Sacred Union, a coalition aimed at resting power from Mabutu. And now most evenings in Kinshasa activists gather under graceful trees and spend hours debating Zairean's political future. Yet little seems to come of all the talk. Last August, a national conference demanded by the opposition and aimed at getting a new government and constitution in place was scuddled, because Mabutu packed it with his own delegates. It has taken the opposition until now to get another conference off the ground. This failure has allowed President Mabutu to stay in control,

and that has left Zairean without a functioning government since last September's riots. Clearly, Mabutu has put up every obstacle to sharing power, but observing the opposition in action makes it clear that these diverse political parties are easily sidetracked from the business of ousting Mabutu to their own inter-nissing struggles. One evening, for instance, activists spent an entire meeting for full hours debating whether to expel one of the smaller parties from the Sacred Union coalition. Its sin, its leader had gone on television the night before to criticize the Sacred Union for being disorganized. This debate, by the way, took place while the local currency was losing value literally by the hour as gas lines snaked around entire blocks and basic foods were fast disappearing from the market. U.S. Ambassador in Kinshasa Melissa Wells said recently that the delay already may have caused the opposition a chance to get Zaire moving again. I am disturbed, and I started saying this when I arrived in June,

at the lack of realism among many opposition leaders in terms of the economy. I would say to them, all right, you're going to get to this national conference. You're going to be out there discussing democracy, see how we're going to organize a constitution and my nightmare is that you will be overtaken by economic chaos. And unfortunately, this nightmare is coming true. Opposition leaders say they too would like things to have moved faster, but they put a lot of the blame on the U.S. They say the CIA helped install Mobutu, viewing the moderate pro-Western leader as useful in fighting Soviet expansion in Africa during the Cold War. And they say Mobutu has become thoroughly entrenched over the past 26 years, thanks, in part, to U.S. support. Frederick Kibase is among several opposition leaders who openly call for the U.S. to do the job for them by force, if necessary. You took out Marcos and Noriega, he says, now come and get Mobutu.

This is America. I'm talking about military intervention. We think this won't be the first time for America to intervene in some problem when people are under a certain dictatorship. Cuban rights activist Boni Cobwey looks more to his own countrymen for a solution. Cobwey puts much of the blame for his country's dismal political state on what he calls the Zairean system, which he says has worked against producing a really stellar lineup of leaders. Cobwey describes the system simply as 25 years of dictatorship mixed with a political culture steeped in corruption. Because this system is a year, if the president proposed the money, we have a choice to accept money or to go to jail, and I know a lot of people who have accepted money. Whether money changed hands or not, President Mobutu has been so adept at co-opting the opposition that virtually no one has escaped the taint of being associated with his regime.

Mobutu's newly appointed prime minister is an extreme example in Guza Carl E. Bond, first served as prime minister in the late 70s before he turned dissident. He was arrested, tortured, sentenced to death. Exile to Belgium, he wrote a book about Mobutu's rule, detailing massive corruption and a willingness to do away with political enemies. In Guza Carl E. Bond testified to as much to the U.S. Congress. Four years later, and Guza was back in Washington, Mobutu had appointed him Zairean's ambassador to the U.S. In the last year, and Guza Carl E. Bond has once again thrown in his lot of opposition until that is he accepted Mobutu's latest offer to become prime minister, and the opposition coalition expelled him and his party. The sacred union has said repeatedly that it will accept only one man as prime minister, Zairean's best known activist and Mobutu's arch enemy at T.N. Chisiketti. 30 years ago, shortly after independence, Chisiketti became Zairean's first lawyer. Long before others dared speak out against Mobutu, Chisiketti did.

When jailed, beaten, and forced into exile in the countryside, but even Chisiketti carries some political baggage, he helped write the Constitution that gave Mobutu his one-party state, a Constitution Chisiketti later renounced. And diplomats and others privately worry that Chisiketti is driven by a thirst for revenge against Mobutu for all he's been through. He recently denounced the president as a human monster. And that is home in Kinshasa, Chisiketti insists through an interpreter that he doesn't hate Mobutu. I think they are unjust in their judgment. They think that there's a personal problem between me and Mr. Mobutu. I fought his regime, not him, not the person, but his regime. Chisiketti says it is quite simple. Neither Mobutu nor the West can dictate to the opposition who should be its choice as Prime Minister, which is why he says...

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