As Ilich Ramirez Sanchez walked from court to begin his life sentence for the murder of two French police agents, he showed no signs of remorse. The man known to most people as Carlos or The Jackal raised his clenched fist into the air four times and shouted: "Viva la Revolucion."
His exit from the courtroom befitted a man who had, in an age in which image frequently outweighs substance, the supreme terrorist icon. Carlos was no ordinary assassin; he was, to the late 20th century mind, political murder's star performer. He was, in fact, the ideal type of person around whose personality such a mystique could be constructed. All the ingredients appeared to be present: the son of a wealthy Latin-American Marxist; educated in and, allegedly, expelled from the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow; responsible for a great deal of the most heinous terrorist acts in history as an employee of Muammar Gadafy, Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Baader Meinhof gang in Germany and of George Habash of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; the major character in a movie and a spy novel; a man whose face was seen by millions as an amorphous blob to which was attached a pair of dark glasses.
His performance in court served to bolster his image as the ultimate in so-called designer terrorism. Three times in the course of his trial he declared: ["]I admit and claim everything I am responsible only before history, the comrades, the martyrs, the Palestinian people.["]
The real Carlos, however, many have been radically different from the image he and others were so keen to portray. In some sections of the intelligence community he has been painted as a psychopath who liked shooting people in the face and whose successes were due to luck rather than precision. The image of Carlos the super-terrorist may have provided a convenient dumping place for the crimes of others. Certainly the killing of eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics is now believed to have been the work of the less flamboyant, more shadowy Abu Nidal.
Carlos, now 48, faces life in prison in a world in which the cold war has been won by the country he sees as his greatest political and cultural enemy. The cause of Palestine, to which he had devoted most of his perverse energies has, as a result of his actions, suffered rather than moved forward.
His bravado, his declarations and his posturing before the French court have failed to disguise the fact that The Jackal, far from being a glamorous revolutionary, was and is a dismal political failure.
Unfortunately glamour and charisma are more seductive and have a longer shelf life than the banal truth. The sending down of Carlos, therefore, is unlikely to deter those who wish to emulate what he has done or what he has purported to do.