Terror's Advocate

This long but enthralling film by Barbet Schroeder puts the radical defense laywer Jacques Verges in the dock.

Verges is a well known figure in France, not least for defending the Nazi Klaus Barbie. With his cigar and his smug civilized air he seems every inch the establishment figure, but the truth is far more complicated.

Verges first came to national and indeed international prominence in the 1960s when he defended several Algerian terrorists during the so-called �Undeclared War� (if you�ve seen Gillo Pontecorvo�s famous film The Battle Of Algiers you will recognise some of his friends and comrades).

Verges was the son of a Vietnamese woman and a French doctor. He grew up on the island of Reunion � and he approached the home country with an appropriate skepticism. He notes for example that while the rest of the world celebrated VE Day, 8 May 1945, between 10,000 and 45,000 Algerian demonstrators were butchered by the French (Verges� figures; some historians estimate 6000, still an appalling number).

This violence begat more violence. One of Verges� old friends talks about giving up planting bombs, not because he regretted the innocent civilian dead, but he couldn�t defend the mutilation and dismemberment of those who survived, a fine philosophical distinction to be sure.

The French came down on the terrorists so hard that even the defence lawyers were targeted for assassination. Verges, for his part, decided that it was futile to play by their rules and ask for clemency. Instead he devised �the Rupture Defence�, a policy of defiant non-compliance. His clients were sent to Death Row, as he knew they would be, but they were released within a couple of years (in fact he married one of them).

Verges� story doesn�t end there. He went on to defend some of the most notorious terrorists of the late 60s and 70s, including members of the PLO, Baader-Meinhof, the Red Army Faction and the infamous Carlos the Jackal (whom Schroeder interviews on the phone from his prison cell � and who doesn�t sound happy).

Even more intriguingly, Verges completely disappeared for eight years between 1970 and 1978. Friends speculated he was with Pol Pot � like Verges, a radical Marxist educated in Paris in the 1950s � but Schroeder comes up with a thesis that is equally disturbing, involving links between the PLO and the far right, even Nazis.

The lawyer himself evidently enjoys the mystique and ambiguity, but it�s pretty clear that somewhere in this era he lost his idealism � it�s implied he became an agent for the French security forces, and he certainly got rich defending the indefensible. (Recent clients include Slobodan Milosovic, Khieu Samphan and Iraq�s Tariq Aziz.)

Convivial and eloquent, Verges sees no reason to apologize, and it would be a mistake to condemn him out of hand. His reasons for defending Barbie bear thinking about, even if it seems obvious that his own ego was the prime motivation. Barbie was no innocent, he allows, but is he worse than the officers of occupying armies in Vietnam, or Algeria, or Iraq? Or is it just that history is written by the victors?

Verges is a complex character and you couldn�t say Schroeder gets the better of him � I�d love to see the director return to this subject in a dramatic fiction (his non documentary movies include Reversal Of Fortune and Single White Female). It would be a great role for somebody � Anthony Hopkins, perhaps? In the meantime, Monsieur Verges is playing it to the hilt. It�s a performance you really should see for yourself.

Tom Charity
tom.charity@lovefilm.com

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