Curtain raises again on Jacques Verges

Asia Times Online
Jan 7, 2009

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 - even from the court's prosecutors.

"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, 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.