FILM: A Lawyer Almost as Notorious as His Clients

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Dan Geist

NEW YORK, Nov 16 2007 (IPS) - “That guy is me.” With this flash of recognition, 30-year-old Jacques Vergès knew he had finally found his calling: the law.

It was a small-time Parisian hood in whom Vergès, a freshly appointed public defender, saw his soul reflected. The year was 1955. Barbet Schroeder’s documentary, “Terror’s Advocate”, trips down the path by which Vergès has since found himself – or something – in clients such as celebrated Algerian revolutionary Djamila Bouhired; the inaugural wave of Palestinian airplane hijackers; Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon and subject of France’s great 1987 Holocaust show trial; and Carlos the Jackal, the world’s most gossiped-about terrorist for hire.

Vergès was born to a Vietnamese mother and a white Creole native of Réunion, then serving as a French consul in the kingdom of Siam. After Vergès’s parents married when he was three years old, his father was dismissed from his position and the family moved to Réunion, where Vergès was raised.

He served with De Gaulle’s Free French during World War II, then was active in anti-colonial politics amid desultory studies in the liberal arts. Presidency of the Paris-based Association of Colonial Students in the late 1940s brought Vergès the lifelong friendship of a young Cambodian, Saloth Sar, who would later achieve some notoriety as Pol Pot.

Relocating to the Eastern Bloc in 1950, Vergès assumed the leadership of a youth front organisation, and apparently won a personal audience with General Secretary Stalin himself. Then it was back to Paris, and destiny. If the law at first gave Vergès merely a steady income and a street-criminal soulmate, it soon delivered him a life of adventure and fame.

Employed to defend Bouhired and others involved in the Algerian liberation movement, Vergès successfully employed what he dubbed the “rupture defence” – challenging the legitimacy of the trial itself and transforming his clients into international cause célèbres. It is a method he would use repeatedly in later years, often with less happy results for the individuals he represented.

Vergès and Bouhired married, a union that did not survive his disappearance for eight years in the 1970s. In attempting to establish the lawyer’s whereabouts during this time, Schroeder also delves into the links between various militant movements of nominally leftist bent and such ironic allies as Swiss Nazi François Genoud. He assembles an impressive array of interviews, including at least three extensive on-camera sessions with Vergès himself.

The largest section of the film is devoted to Vergès’s professional and sentimental relationships with Carlos and his partner, the once famously photogenic Magdalena Kopp. The filmmaker has spent much effort in trying to determine just how well Vergès and Carlos knew each other before the brief period in which they were officially legal representative and client. And it is certainly amusing to speculate, as the film prompts us, on whether Kopp cheated on Carlos with the lawyer.

This focus, however, seems based more on marketing strategy than on historical and philosophical interest when we consider some of the other notables whom Vergès has represented and who appear in the film only as momentarily glimpsed snapshots near its end.

In 1992, Vergès sued Swiss parlimentarian Jean Ziegler on behalf of former Malian president Moussa Traore, accused by Ziegler of having defrauded Mali of over two billion dollars via transfers to private Swiss bank accounts. In 1999, he represented the government of Togo under President Gnassingbe Eyadema in a lawsuit against Amnesty International for its reporting on widespread atrocities surrounding Togo’s recent elections.

In 2001, on behalf of three African presidents -Omar Bongo of Gabon, Idriss Déby of Chad, and Denis Sassou-Nguesso of the Republic of the Congo – he oversaw a suit against author François-Xavier Verschave for similar reportage. The facts and legal custom suggest that rather than criminal defence, it is civil advocacy on behalf of African strongmen that for a good time now has ensured Vergès’s conspicuous sense of contentment. Some information on these cases appears on the movie’s French-language website; none appears in the film itself.

Carlos the Jackal is responsible for the deaths of as many as 80 people (he has credited himself with 1,500), he transfixed the Western media for a time, and – as a recent telephone interview with him from jail demonstrates – he is still ready to provide fodder for any interested scandal sheets.

Vergès’s African presidential clientele affected the lives of millions. A fair legal system requires that even the worst villain be competently represented when in the defendant’s dock. But what does justice require in the realm of the civil suit? What might be learned by exploring the record of legal cases brought against the partisans of human rights? Vergès’s work raises such questions, but not in “Terror’s Advocate”.

Schroeder begins his story with the bond between Vergès and Pol Pot. To hear Vergès’s rationalisations on behalf of one of history’s most industrious mass murderers is certainly an effective curtain-raiser, but as the film proceeds it appears to be an opportunity lost. If any purpose might be served by the headline treatment of his comments, downplaying Khmer Rouge atrocities, surely it is to investigate their motivation.

(At the time of the film’s production, Vergès had never officially represented the Khmer Rouge or any of its leaders. Since its completion, Khieu Samphan, former president of Democratic Kampuchea and one of Pol Pot’s top commanders, has taken Vergès up on the lawyer’s offer to defend him in his forthcoming genocide trial.)

How are we to understand Vergès’s statements? To find them appalling offers the comfort of reaffirming the viewer’s decency, but such an effect hardly requires the power of documentary cinema. What strange but perhaps instructive brew of empathy, lunacy, sinister humor, and simple legal habit does Vergès draw upon? The film pursues no such insight. The gentleman’s psyche may indeed be impenetrable, but Schroeder barely seems interested in taking a crack at it.

“Terror’s Advocate” opens with a portentous pair of title cards: “This film is the director’s point of view on Jacques Vergès, which may differ from the opinion of those interviewed in it.” It is remarkable that any filmmaker should need to preface his work with so obvious a declaration; it prompts us to expect a most vividly stated point of view indeed.

In the end, Schroeder delivers little beyond artfully muted disdain, a perspective whose ease belies the extensive work that evidently went into making the film but which suggests its essential failure. In never subjecting Vergès’s own well-rehearsed deadpan to the rupture technique – in never risking the loss of the movie’s star – the film avoids grappling with the many moral and intellectual challenges his life and career pose.

It is not the questions unanswered that make “Terror’s Advocate” a frustration. It’s the questions unasked.