‘My name is Road-reegow Row-whaa Dow-terti’

“If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.”

—Orson Welles

 

By Alex P. Vidal

 

THE hoarse voice and a somber face and expression from a former strongman in that most viewed video appearance recently at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, Netherlands was cryptic.

“My name is Road-reegow Row-whaa Dow-terti.”

We’ve seen it only in the recorded films when captured members of rival Mexican and Colombian drug cartels were given the chance to say their last words before being brutally executed.

We’ve heard it only—the guttural voice—from many famous but helpless dictators in history before their barbaric deaths.

The so-called “last words” have always been enduring and epochal.

Thank God former Philippine President Rodrigo Roa Duterte wasn’t in the death chamber, or in the hands of ruthless captors wanting to maim and decimate him when he uttered those dingy words.

It was far cry though from his trademark, the loud and bone-jarring “papatayin ko kayo; p__tang ina ninyo” (I will kill you; you sonnobavitch) woofing where he became obdurately (in)famous.

 

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No one knew, however, if Mr. Duterte intentionally inveigled it to generate instant sympathy, or he was really scared like a rabbit now that he was isolated and only at the beck and mercy of the ICC that he had threatened and maligned when he was in power.

That monologue will forever be etched in the minds of those who saw it—Filipinos and non-Filipinos all over the world.

“My name is Road-reegow Row-whaa Dow-terti” no doubt was a euphemized appeal to emotion; it has now become a political catchword and could be used by the former president’s die-hards to rally support and gain sympathies, especially that Filipinos have been known to be suckers to underdogs—or those appear to be victims of bullying and persecution.

Media networks that regularly used the “Road-reegow…” clip to chronicle Mr. Duterte’s arrest and detention in the ICC and the updates for his forthcoming full-blown hearing are innocuously helping imbibe in the psyche of the people the perception of oppression and torment supposedly being inflicted on the hitherto hard-hitting ex-Philippine leader accused of the crimes against humanity.

 

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Here are some of the most memorable but enigmatic last words and bizarre endings of famous characters who, in one way or the other, had helped shape world history:

—Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini was ousted from politics in July 1943 when the country's prospects of victory in World War II soured. According to Live Science, the ouster was the beginning of the end for Mussolini; he was immediately arrested and imprisoned at the Hotel Campo Imperatore in central Italy until September, when German paratroopers rescued him. He was taken to Germany, and then Lombardy in northern Italy, but he seemed to know the end was near. In 1945, he told an interviewer, "Seven years ago I was an interesting person. Now I am a corpse."

In 1945, Benito Mussolini told an interviewer, "Seven years ago I was an interesting person. Now I am a corpse."

Just a few months later, he'd really be a corpse. In April 1945, Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci were trying to escape Italy for Spain when they were stopped by communist partisans, taken hostage and shot. Their bodies were taken to Milan's Piazzale Loreto, site of the execution of 15 anti-fascists the year before, and hung upside-down. Passersby spit on the bodies and pelted them with rocks, according to BBC news reports at the time. Photos of the corpses were widely circulated and even sold to American servicemen as grisly souvenirs.

—Adolf Hitler is a notorious exception to the trend of dictators surviving into old age. In the waning days of World War II, with the Russian Army closing in on Berlin, Hitler holed up in a bunker under the Reich Chancellery building.

According to the Top 10 Weird Ways We Deal With the Dead, as bad news poured into the bunker, Hitler made his preparations to die on his own terms. He heard of Mussolini's death and the desecration of the corpse and ordered that his own body be burned. He married his mistress, Eva Braun, and ordered cyanide capsules tested on a dog belonging to the children of German propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. On April 30, Hitler and Braun went into a lower room in the bunker. Braun apparently took cyanide, while Hitler shot himself in the temple. Hitler's lieutenants followed his wishes and burned the corpses, though the burning was not thorough. The Russian army discovered the remains, identified the bodies, and then destroyed what was left to prevent Hitler's grave from becoming a shrine.

 

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—Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong also made it to age 82. Like Franco, he suffered from poor health for a long time before his death; the last time he was seen in public was in May 1976. It's not clear exactly what ailed Mao, but he may have had Lou Gehrig's disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a degeneration of the nerve cells that control movement.

Stephanie Pappas, Live Science contributing writer, said Mao had a heart attack on Sept. 2, 1976, that proved to be his downfall. Over the next several days, he suffered various crises, including a brush with death from a worsening lung infection. On Sept. 7, Mao fell into a coma from which he never awoke. Doctors took him off life support a day later, and he died a few minutes after midnight on Sept. 9.

—Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier was elected to the presidency in Haiti in 1957 and immediately began consolidating power, exiling his opponents' supporters, supervising torture of political dissidents and ordering executions of those who crossed him. A practitioner of the voodoo religion, Duvalier occasionally communed with the severed heads of his victims.

Duvalier was plagued by health problems, however, including a heart attack in 1959. His chronic diabetes and heart troubles eventually killed him in 1971.

(The author, who is now based in New York City, used to be the editor of two daily newspapers in Iloilo.—Ed)