EYEBROWS were raised recently when Michael Mansfield QC, defender of the Guilford Four and the Birmingham Six, agreed to represent Mohamed Al-Fayed, shopkeeper and conspiracy theorist, at the inquest into the death of Princess Diana. That apparent political volte face was, however, as nothing when set beside the decision by Jacques Vergès, a French lawyer long associated with the hard left, to defend the notorious Nazi Klaus Barbie.
Our readers in the legal world will, of course, already be preparing letters pointing out that a barrister's decision to represent a criminal implies no approval of the defendant's beliefs. That's true enough, but, as this thrilling documentary makes clear, Vergès has long viewed his forensic gift as a weapon to be wielded against supposed bourgeois reactionaries.
Raised on the east African island of Réunion, the son of a French diplomat and his Vietnamese wife, Vergès was a friend of Pol Pot at university and became properly politicised during France's war of occupation in Algeria. After defending some of the resistance movement's fighters, he married Djamila Bouhired, an icon of the new Algeria, and made an unsuccessful attempt to settle in the former colony.
In the mid 1970s Vergès disappeared. Some say he was fighting for the Khmer Rouge. Others suggest he was involved with the PLO. Whatever the truth, he eventually re-emerged into public life somewhat tainted by his association with the loons, profiteers, sincere freedom fighters and general misfits that constituted the guerrilla community in those troubled times. Subsequent clients included Slobodan Miloseviç, Tariq Aziz and, most conspicuously, Carlos the Jackal.
Barbet Schroeder's skilfully edited film, which features lengthy interviews with Vergès and many of his associates, comes to no firm conclusions as to what motivates its subject. But by beginning the film with Vergès's attempt to downplay the numbers killed by the Khmer Rouge, the director inevitably reminds us of the sly circumlocutions so beloved of Holocaust deniers.
Later the lawyer accidentally reveals the extent to which ego drives his decisions. Noting the number of lawyers prosecuting Barbie, he remarks upon his own fame and asks the interviewer: "Have you heard of any of the others?" One suspects this declared communist - who wallows in expensive cigar smoke throughout the interview and is said to enjoy the finest Bordeaux - would not savour the anonymity imposed by the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Still, such anomalies make Vergès all the more fascinating a subject for Schroeder's astute analysis.
