Curtain raises again on Jacques Verges By Stephen Kurczy
PHNOM PENH - He requests French wine - which can cost up to US$162 a bottle at
the Raffles Hotel Le Royal in Phnom Penh - but the legendary and controversial
French attorney Jacques Verges has to settle for $8 glasses of house red when
he stays at impoverished Cambodia's swankiest hotel.
He's a celebrity lawyer whose fame now equals that of some of his most
notorious clients; and he gained it by defending the indefensible. His abysmal
win rate might embarrass a lesser personality - before France abolished the
death penalty in 1981, he had earned the nickname "Monsieur Guillotine" - but
not Verges.
The man nicknamed "the Devil's Advocate" is a walking
contradiction. Verges earned a reputation as a war hero with Charles de
Gaulle's Free French resistance during Word War II, but was jailed in and
disbarred in 1960 for openly supporting terrorists. He wrote a book titled The
Beauty of Crime and once admitted to a "passionate interest in evil" -
but he has also changed the course of legal history.
And precisely because he embodies such conflicting narratives - notably with a
puff of a fine cigar and a sip of red wine - he is able to defend the world's
most infamous figures.
Literally and legally, Verges is on stage once again. In Paris, he is currently
performing a self-penned, one-man play three times a week at the Madeleine
Theater. And in Phnom Penh he's become the star attraction of the ongoing
United Nations-backed trial for the former leaders of the Khmer Rouge - some of
whom were his close friends and Parisian classmates.
At present, the stop-start tribunal - or the Extraordinary Chambers in Courts
of Cambodia (ECCC) as the court is known - is at a standstill amid swirling
charges of internal corruption and heated arguments over how many suspects to
bring before the court. Into the vacuum of substantive progress have come
histrionic courtroom antics from Verges.
Ever the showman, Verges has recently lambasted the ECCC for wasting money and
lacking ethics. (See
Killing time at Cambodia's 'show trial', December 12, 2008.) He has
called the entire three-year, $50 million enterprise a lamentable "show trial"
and challenged court officials to an open debate.
Verges claims he can't defend his client and fellow Sorbonne student, former
Khmer Rouge head of state Khieu Samphan, until all evidence against is
translated into French. But Verges' membership in the Paris Bar states he is
comfortable working in French and English. Critics have called this, and other
legal maneuvers, blatant efforts to stall the court.
The 83-year-old denies that genocide occurred in Cambodia during the Khmer
Rouge's rule from 1975 to 1979, when approximately 1.7 million perished,
arguing that most died of starvation and disease as a result of an American
embargo. But Verges has refused to visit the Documentation Center of Cambodia
(DC-Cam), an archive of the crimes committed by the ultra-Maoist regime in 200
prisons and 20,000 mass graves across Cambodia.
He has befriended terrorists and mass murderers across the globe, but so far
has avoided victims of the Khmer Rouge.
"He's afraid of me," Youk Chhang, director of the DC-Cam, says of Verges. "He's
afraid that my reaction would damage his argument."
Excluding Verges, every defense attorney at the ECCC has met with Chhang and
utilized DC-Cam, the world's largest repository of documents on the Khmer Rouge
with more than 650,000 papers and 6,000 photographs from the Khmer Rouge's rule
between 1975 and 1979.
Chhang witnessed his sister's disembowelment after she was accused of stealing
rice. He says Verges is reticent to face someone like himself, who has come to
terms with his family members' murder and can calmly and convincingly discuss
the regime's atrocities.
"He uses emotion as an argument. I don't. I use facts," Chhang told Asia Times
Online.
Verges, however, has proven that tapping into emotion can be effective in
court. By appealing to public opinion, he brokered the release of his first
well-known client, Algerian terrorist Djamila Bouhired. It was 1956 and Verges
was 31. A year earlier he'd graduated with a law degree from the University of
Paris, passed the Paris Bar, and come to realize his passion during his first
case defending "some small-time hoodlum", as he says in the 2007 documentary Terror's
Advocate. He looked at the felon and thought: "'That guy is me. I could
have done what he did if I'd been in his shoes.' It was then I knew my
calling."
A year later, when young Algerian student Bouhired was accused of planting a
bomb in a cafe in Algiers that killed several French military officers, Verges
volunteered to defend her.
Verges says he became obsessed with Bouhired's case because of his own family's
struggle with colonialism. (Friends of Verges suggest he was merely obsessed
with the beautiful Bouhired, whom he later married.) He and his twin brother
were born in 1925 in Thailand, where their father, Raymond, was serving as a
French diplomat. Their mother was Vietnamese, and the mixed marriage led to
Raymond's forced resignation from the French foreign services. Hecklers shouted
"Chinaman!" at Verges during Bouhired's trial.
Verges lost the case and Bouhired was sentenced to death. In turn, Verges took
the case to the public. He penned articles and essays attacking the French
court's validity, sparking public rallies and international calls for
Bouhired's release. Her execution was delayed and she was eventually pardoned.
Verges, after temporary disbarment and two months in jail for supporting
terrorists, courted Bouhired.
Longtime friend and French cartoonist Sine, in Terrors Advocate, says he
joked to Verges that if he married Bouhired he'd have to convert to Islam, and
be circumcised. Nevertheless, Verges converted and changed his name to Mansoor.
He and Bouhired settled in Algiers and had two children. He became a divorce
attorney, but hated the life. After seven years, he left his wife and children
and went into hiding.
Where Verges went from 1970 to 1978 remains a mystery, but some believe he was
with the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Verges had joined the Communist Party as a
teenager and while studying in Paris had met fellow students Khieu Samphan and
Saloth Sar, who later became Pol Pot.
DC-Cam's Chhang said he and filmmaker Barbet Schroeder, director of Terror's
Advocate, searched for months for evidence that Verges visited Cambodia
in the 1970s but found nothing. Former Brother Number 2, Nuon Chea, who is now
awaiting trial at the ECCC, has said he is certain Verges was not in Cambodia
during that period.
After he re-emerged, Verges took up his old practice. In 1987, he defended Nazi
war criminal Klaus Barbie, known as "The Butcher of Lyon" for overseeing a
Gestapo camp in France. In 1997, he represented Illich Ramirez Sanchez, aka
Carlos the Jackal, who masterminded a 1975 raid on Organization of Petroleum
Exporting Countries headquarters in Vienna. Verges later volunteered to defend
Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic, ex-leader of the former
Yugoslavia.
Verges' reputation as a defense advocate is disputable. "The Butcher" got life
in prison and "The Jackal" sacked Verges and found a new lawyer. Both Saddam
and Milosevic refused Verges' counsel. This is all of no matter to Verges, says
international war correspondent and Carlos the Jackal biographer Colin Smith.
"It appears that [Verges] is utterly terrified to take on a case he might win.
Instead, he delights in defending the indefensible," Smith told Asia Times
Online by e-mail. Verges did not return e-mails or phone calls for an
interview.
By influencing public emotions in his numerous cases, Verges changed the nature
of legal defense. Michael Radu, an expert on terrorism and senior fellow at the
Foreign Policy Research Institute, calls Verges a trailblazer for radical
lawyers everywhere. In the 1950s, before Verges took Bouhired's case outside
the court, appealing to public opinion was unheard of.
"You could say that I invented the tactic," Verges says in his play, according
to a recent article in Radio France Internationale. " ... [B]efore I used the
trial as a tribune, the accused were isolated. And now they aren't alone and
they can appeal to world opinion".
When it was confirmed in 2006 that Verges would take part in the Khmer Rouge
trial, the news was not unwelcome.
"I have not worked before with Jacques Verges, but his reputation goes before
him, and in searching for the truth he is a man who never fears to ask any
question of anyone, no matter how difficult the answer may be for many people,"
Rupert Skilbeck, then the ECCC's principle defender, told the Phnom Penh Post
at the time. "If one of the purposes of the ECCC is to find out what happened
in Cambodia and why, then there is no better advocate to assist in that task.
Attacking the prosecution is the job of any good defense advocate. Maitre
Verges happens to be very good at it."
Verges' play, Serial Paideur, is a two-hour monologue. According to the
playbill, Verges dramatizes a courtroom battle between prosecution and defense
as they tell two, not necessarily true, but probable, stories.
"Jacques Verges is a showman," says Theary Seng, a civil party victim at the
ECCC and a US-educated lawyer and member of the New York Bar Association. While
a trial proceeds inside the chambers of the ECCC, Seng said she expects another
trial to simultaneously play out in the court of public opinion. Just as Verges
won Bouhired's case outside the courtroom, Seng said she expects Verges will
shine in the public arena.
"I think he will raise, from his grandstanding, political issues that will
broaden the scope of the trial. ... We may find it distasteful, but through it,
if he's raising issues that are of curiosity and drawing attention, then there
are limited benefits," she said.
Seng briefly interacted with Verges at the first Khieu Samphan hearing in
February as the two entered the court compound together.
"It was my first time seeing him in person," Seng recalls. "After passing
through security, I turned to him and said, 'You must be Jacques Verges. I am
Theary Seng.' He turned to me and said, 'Oh,' and walked away."
Seng laughed. "He's a very intimidating, unfriendly man," she continued. "He's
just an old, grouchy, celebrity lawyer. He is one loud voice. Other voices will
help to balance out his."
Those are the voices that DC-Cam's Chhang and Seng want Verges to hear. Seng
lost her parents to the Khmer Rouge. As executive director of the Center for
Social Development, a human-rights organization in Phnom Penh, Seng said she is
now helping register as civil parties more than 60 Khmer Rouge survivors who
also lost their parents to the regime.
Many hope to testify in court, including Seng, and many have already attended
pre-trial hearings, including the December 4 appeal of Khieu Samphan's
detention, when Verges accused the court of misappropriating funds and failing
to translate all evidence into a language he can understand.
"It's a joke," Verges told the judges during the hearing. "We cannot accept
this state of affairs," he told the media during a press conference afterward.
Verges' provocations drew tears and cries from many of the victims present.
Several said they would lose all faith in the court if Verges remained
involved. But Seng still argues that Verges' approach will broaden the issues
addressed by the court.
"Jacques Verges, because of his history of defending political figures, he will
raise political questions and issues and implicate the 'why'," Seng told Asia
Times Online. "We know the US will never be on trial. We know [former US
secretary of state] Henry Kissinger will never be on trial. Given that he is a
very sharp lawyer, Jacques Verges will know how to raise questions in the minds
of the larger public."
Of more concern than Verges' controversial tactics, says Seng, is corruption on
the Cambodian side of the court, and political interference by the government
of Prime Minister Hun Sen, himself a former Khmer Rouge cadre.
While Seng sees the UN-backed tribunal tainted by its Cambodian legal team, Ly
Monysak, who lost both his parents to the regime, argues that foreign attorneys
like Verges are the ones derailing justice and misappropriating funds.
"Foreigners are using the money to stay in luxury. Not for a speedy trial," Ly
Monysak said after the December 4 public hearing.
Luxury, indeed. The ECCC picked up Verges' $450 tab in December when he stayed
two nights at Phnom Penh's Raffles Hotel Le Royal. The bill would have been
higher if not for the ECCC's special rate of $300 rooms for only $100 a night.
Verges' latest bill shows $21.93 in drinks from his room's wet bar, a $20.35
meal and a $38.73 meal delivered to his room. Nothing abnormal, except for the
fact that Verges had just accused the court of wasting funds by conducting
community awareness trips in Cambodia's rural provinces.
On December 4, before flying back to Paris for his one-man show, which runs
until the end of February, Verges retreated to Raffles for a late lunch. He
requested a glass of French wine, a hotel employee told this correspondent, but
the options were only South African, Chilean or Australian.
Verges, perhaps out of concern for the court's finances, settled for a glass of
the house red.
Stephen Kurczy is a Cambodia-based journalist.
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Literally and legally, Verges is on stage once again. In Paris, he is currently
performing a self-penned, one-man play three times a week at the Madeleine
Theater. And in Phnom Penh he's become the star attraction of the ongoing
United Nations-backed trial for the former leaders of the Khmer Rouge - some of
whom were his close friends and Parisian classmates.
