A Life of Smoke and Mystery

The lawyer Jacques Vergès in his Paris office surrounded by artworks given to him by clients. (Photo: Helen Margaret Giovanello for The New York Times)

October 14, 2007
By ALAN RIDING
The New York Times (USA)

PARIS

SITTING in the gloom of his book-lined office near Pigalle, puffing as always on a Cuban cigar and watched over by African and Asian statues donated to him by clients during his half-century as a high-profile lawyer, Jacques Vergès looked very pleased with himself.

Three years ago, ignoring friends’ warnings that he risked being “ambushed,” he agreed to participate in “Terror’s Advocate,” a 140-minute documentary by Barbet Schroeder that explores his record defending terrorists and an array of other unsavory characters, including the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie.

Now he believes his gamble has paid off.

“I felt that if the film is about me, I will appear in a good part of it,” he said, a smile playing on his lips. “People will see that I don’t have two horns, a tail and forked tongue. What I say will be of my choosing. I will be judged by what I say, either to criticize me or agree with me, but not through rumors and mysteries. So I accepted. And, the film being as it is, I think I was right.”

Mr. Vergès (pronounced vehr-JEZ) has a point. In “Terror’s Advocate,” which opened on Friday in New York, he expounds at length on his beliefs and actions, all the while foiling Mr. Schroeder’s efforts to clarify those “rumors and mysteries” surrounding, for instance, his disappearance in the 1970s and his ties to the Venezuelan-born terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, known as Carlos the Jackal.

While Mr. Vergès performs — on screen and in person — with the confidence and theatricality of a veteran actor, he hardly emerges unblemished. It is not only the dubious company that he has kept over the years; it is also that, for all his decades in the spotlight, even in his early 80s, his opaqueness continues to inspire distrust.

“He’s a slippery man,” conceded Mr. Schroeder, 66, whose earlier documentaries include “General Idi Amin Dada: A Self-Portrait.” “You can never catch him. He loves the mystery. The reason is that there are certain things he cannot talk about. He would be in deep trouble if the truth came out. That’s why there is a mystery.”

Still, one of the strengths of “Terror’s Advocate,” which won plaudits at the Cannes Film Festival in May and was well received in France this summer, is that it goes beyond Mr. Vergès to offer a fascinating account of terrorism as a political weapon since Algeria began its fight for independence from France in the 1950s.

“What I wanted to do was not only to portray an extraordinarily ambiguous person,” Mr. Schroeder said in a telephone interview from Tokyo, where is making a new movie, “but also to tell the story of blind terrorism which started in Algeria and is with us now and unfortunately will stay for a few more years.”

For this he approached the project as he might a feature film, avoiding an explanatory voice-over, adding atmospheric music and cutting between interviews and archival footage with the pace of a thriller. But it is no accident that much of the story can be told through the shadowy life of one man.

In one sense Mr. Vergès’s very life began as a puzzle. Born in Thailand to a Vietnamese mother and a father from Réunion, a French-governed island in the Indian Ocean, he is unsure of his date of birth: either April 20, 1924, or (as he long believed) March 5, 1925.

“I’m totally indifferent,” he said, “but they tried to turn it into another mystery.”

Only 3 when his mother died, he was raised by his father on Réunion. In 1942 he traveled to England to join Gen. Charles de Gaulle’s Free French forces and eventually saw action in North Africa, Italy and France. After the war he stayed in Paris to study, and it was there that politics began to interest him.

“I saw that France was once again beginning colonial wars, in Indochina, in Madagascar, and I was disappointed, I was opposed,” he recalled, noting that French soldiers killed thousands of protesting Algerians on May 8, 1945, the day that the Allies were celebrating victory in Europe.

Mr. Vergès joined the campaign for an end to colonialism alongside other students from French colonies, including a Cambodian, Saloth Sar, later better known as the Khmer Rouge’s murderous leader, Pol Pot. Then, having finally become a lawyer in 1955, Mr. Vergès was drawn into Algeria’s escalating fight for independence.

From 1957 until independence in 1962, he won renown for defending Algerians whom the French called terrorists and he considered patriots, most prominently Djamila Bouhired, a beautiful young woman who was condemned to death for planting a bomb that killed 11 civilians. Mr. Vergès, who organized a successful campaign to obtain her reprieve, later married her.

One measure of the impact of a handful of pro-Algerian leftist lawyers like Mr. Vergès was that they received death threats and, in May 1959, one of them, Ould Aoudia, was murdered. In “Terror’s Advocate” a former member of the French secret police makes the remarkable assertion that Aoudia was killed on orders of France’s prime minister at the time, Michel Debré.

Mr. Vergès remains proud of how he used French courts to fight French colonialism and, even in France, his role in Algeria is no longer controversial. But he broadened his horizons in the late 1960s, defending Palestinian extremists involved in terrorist attacks on El Al aircraft in Athens and Zurich. Then, in February 1970, he suddenly vanished, abandoning Ms. Bouhired and their two children and embarking on what he calls his “long vacation.”

To this day he refuses to say how he spent the next eight years, with rumors placing him with the Khmer Rouge or with Palestinian liberation groups. Once back in Paris, he consolidated his reputation as a flamboyant media-savvy lawyer who is drawn to headline-grabbing cases.

“There is no bad cause,” he said, adding that he had been willing to defend both the former Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein. “Everyone has a right to be defended.”

“Terror’s Advocate,” however, dwells less on Mr. Vergès’s courtroom activities than on his own possible ties to terrorism. For instance, while he insists that he barely knew François Genoud, a Swiss Nazi who financed Palestinian terrorism, Mr. Genoud called him “an old friend” after he invited Mr. Vergès to represent Barbie, the so-called “butcher of Lyon,” in his 1987 trial.

Still murkier is Mr. Vergès’s relationship with Carlos, who led numerous terrorist actions in the 1970s and ’80s and was finally kidnapped by French agents in Sudan in 1994 and flown to Paris, where he is now in jail. Mr. Vergès insists that their first meeting took place at that time when he was named as Carlos’s lawyer. (They later fell out, with Carlos calling Mr. Vergès a traitor.)

But their ties date back to at least 1982, when two of Carlos’s followers: Magdalena Kopp, who was his wife, and Bruno Bréguet, were arrested in Paris. Mr. Vergès, who defended Ms. Kopp and Mr. Bréguet, said that the French government asked him to contact Carlos in the hope of averting fresh terrorism but that they never met in person. And a wave of reprisal bombings still followed.

Challenging Mr. Vergès’s account, “Terror’s Advocate” presents East German secret police files showing that he traveled to East Berlin to meet close associates of Carlos. The film also includes a telephone interview from jail with Carlos, who says he met Mr. Vergès “20 or 25 times,” first in Hungary, later in Syria.

Unsurprisingly, Mr. Vergès stands by his story, again denying being an accomplice of Carlos’s terrorist network.

So, he was now asked in the quiet of his office, having supported terrorism in Algeria 50 years ago, does he still justify terrorism?

“I cannot judge individual cases,” he said. “But I think the war against terrorism is a fiction. Terrorism is a weapon, not an entity unto itself. During World War II I was in the artillery. There was French artillery, there was also German, Russian, American artillery. There was no single enemy called artillery. To declare war on terrorism is simply stupid. It’s like going to war against the artillery.”

As so often before, then, Mr. Vergès had an interesting answer. It was just not to the question that had been posed.