Defending the devil

>>Barbet Schroeder’s Terror’s Advocate is a fascinating documentary about controversial
French attorney Jacques Vergès

HE FOUGHT THE LAW:
Vergès (R) with client Omar Radad

by MARK SLUTSKY

You couldn’t make up a documentary subject as good as Jacques Vergès. Born in Thailand to a French father and Vietnamese mother, Vergès travelled to France in WWII to fight in the resistance. Afterwards, he became a lawyer and took up the cause of the Algerian independence struggle, representing bomber and folk hero Djamila Bouhired, who he later married.

This would be the beginning of his career as Terror’s Advocate, as the title of a new doc by director Barbet Schroeder dubs him (Vergès prefers to refer to himself as “The Devil’s Advocate”). Vergès—a school chum of Pol Pot—would later represent a rogues’ gallery of international villains including celebrity terrorist Carlos the Jackal, Nazi officer and “Butcher of Lyon” Klaus Barbie, Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy and Slobodan Milosevic, to name but a few.

In this incredibly comprehensive doc, Schroeder details Vergès’s notorious “rupture defence,” an audacious strategy where he literally puts the system on trial, arguing, for instance, that the French government has no moral authority to prosecute Barbie when it’s guilty of similar crimes in Algeria. It also covers the mysterious eight years in the 1970s when Vergès went missing, a time when most of his friends speculate he was in Cambodia with Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.

Vergès’s story is fascinating because he seems to occupy a position at the centre of much of the creeping horror of the late 20th century. It’s easy to sympathize with, say, the Algerian resistance movement, but the doc shows how the left-wing insurgencies of the 1960s led to a complicated and terrible moral labyrinth that would result in mass murder. (Of course, he’s happy to represent clients on the left or right, as long as, it seems, they upset enough sensibilities).

Some have criticized Schroeder for not taking a judgmental enough stance on Vergès, but the truth is, he strikes just the right tone. If you don’t know already that ex-Nazi officers, arms dealers and genocidal tyrants aren’t on the side of the angels, you’ve got bigger problems. Schroeder’s job isn’t to condemn Vergès; the man does it well enough himself.

Terror’s Advocate opens this
Friday, Dec. 21

>> Movie Listings