Jacques Vergès: counsel and companion of nazis, terrorists and dictators
Published on Wednesday, 14 December 2011 15:01 Written by Adam Carter
A lawyer who seeks out and associates with nazis and antisemites and downplayed the horrors of the Holocaust to defend a Nazi war criminal has been invited to take part in a public event at the University of London. Jacques Vergés will join the distinguished international lawyer Martti Koskenniemi in a discussion on international justice and the danger of staging show trials.
Adam Carter looks at whether Vergés has merely given his notorious clients the legal representation in court to which everyone has a right or has stepped over the line in their support.
JACQUES VERGÈS, WHO has been invited to speak at an event titled "International Justice: Between Impunity and Show Trials" in February 2012 by London University's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), is no ordinary lawyer. He earned the nickname, "the Devil's advocate" on account of his close association with some of the worst mass murderers, terrorists and extremists of the 20th century, including Klaus Barbie, the convicted Nazi war criminal, the infamous terrorist Carlos the Jackal (the Venezuelan pro-Palestinian lllich Ramirez Sanchez), Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy, former Iraqi deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz and the veteran Swiss Nazi François Genoud.
He has offered to represent, although his services were declined, former dictators such as Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic. He is currently defending his long-time friend Khieu Samphan, one of the leaders of the murderous Khmer Rouge regime, responsible for the infamous killing fields, from charges of genocide at a Cambodian war crimes tribunal. Given Vergès's very dubious pedigree and his long association with Nazis, antisemites and other extremists, Searchlight finds it astonishing that the University of London would choose to invite this man to an officially sanctioned event.
Antisemitic allies
Vergés was born in Thailand in 1925 to a French father from the island of Réunion and a Vietnamese mother. In his youth he joined the free French forces under General de Gaulle, was for a while a leftist militant and later supported the Algerian National Liberation Front in its anti-colonial struggle for independence from France. In one of his first high-profile cases, he unsuccessfully defended an Algerian militant, Djamila Bouhired, from charges that she bombed a milk bar (a scene dramatised in Pontecorvo's classic film Battle of Algiers). She was found guilty but later released after a journalistic campaign and Vergés was eventually married to her.
During the trial he used what became known as the rupture strategy - the principle of launching a defence with a political counter-attack which would often accuse the prosecution of the same crimes as the defendant. Much of his defence, as it later would in the Barbie trial, consisted of putting the entire French establishment on trial - in this case for the injustices of colonialism, and led to the courtroom grandstanding that was to be a feature of his lengthy legal career.
Vergés knew and was influenced by many Third World radicals fighting colonialism in their own countries and it has also been alleged that he converted to Islam during this period. These combined influences led to him embracing an extreme hostility to Israel which was to become a lifelong obsession so that he aligned himself with not only those staunchly critical of Israeli policy but also some of the most vicious, hardcore and violent antisemites.
In the late 1960s Vergés began to represent Palestinian militants including terrorists from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) who had hijacked an El AI plane. It was around this time that he made the acquaintance of his long-term associate, the Swiss Nazi François Genoud (see separate article), one of the most significant, mysterious and influential figures in postwar Nazism. Genoud, who was intimately involved with funding both Nazi groups and Middle East terrorist groups, paid Vergés to represent the PFLP.
In 1970 Vergés disappeared completely for eight years and, to this day, his whereabouts during this period are not known. There are persistent rumours that he may have been in Cambodia with Pol Pot (whom he knew from his student days in France) or possibly with Palestinian militants but no hard facts have emerged. Whether Vergés was still in touch with Genoud during this period is unknown although the latter was very active behind the scenes in the international nazi movement at this time. Speaking of this period in interviews, Vergés stated, "I am a discreet man. I stepped through the looking glass, where I served an apprenticeship," and "It's highly amusing that no one, in our modern police state, can figure out where I was for almost 10 years. It has been conjectured that I spent the time with the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, in Palestine, in China and in France. I enjoyed reading my obituaries."
Klaus Barbie trial
When he returned from his mysterious exile, Vergés resumed his legal practice, representing the terrorist Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, who was convicted of the murder of the US military attaché in Paris. His notoriety soon reached infamous proportions when he defended the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie at his trial for crimes against humanity in 1987. The request to defend Barbie came directly from Genoud, who is thought to have provided funding for the legal team.
Barbie was in charge of the Gestapo in Lyon in 1942-44 where he earned his terrible sobriquet, "the Butcher of Lyon". There is evidence that Barbie personally tortured prisoners whom he interrogated and he is blamed for around 4,000 deaths and a further 7,500 deportations during the war. At his trial he was accused of deporting 842 people, mainly Jews, to concentration camps in Germany. In one incident 44 children were rounded up from a farmhouse at Izieu, east of Lyon, and sent to their deaths. Barbie was was found guilty of the 341 separate charges that were brought against him and sent to prison where he died in 1991.
Vergés actively tried to make the trial a media circus and used it as an opportunity to raise his own profile and political grievances. His defence of Barbie did not centre on trying to clear the Nazi of the charges but took the form of a legalistic form of moral relativism which argued that France had no right to prosecute Barbie due to its own complicity in atrocities during the Algerian war of independence. He tried to downplay the horrors of the Holocaust using the same method and also tried to shift the blame for the persecution of the Jews from the Nazi oppressors and onto the victims themselves. Vergès's journey from Marxist revolutionary and friend of the Third World to professional provocateur and defender of antisemites and Nazis was complete.
Defending Holocaust denial
The French Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy was found guilty of breaking a law that prohibits the questioning of crimes against humanity and also convicted for racial defamation in 1998. Garaudy was another former leftwing activist who had converted to Islam and then developed a hatred for Israel, so it was no surprise that Vergés chose unsuccessfully to defend him. The prosecution arose from claims in Garaudy's 1995 book The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics, in which he denied that the Holocaust occurred, saying that Jews under Nazi control died of starvation and disease, rather than being gassed.
Vergés also represented the provocative writer Jean Edern-Hallier when he was successfully sued for antisemitism by two anti-racist organisations.
Offers to represent Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein were turned down by the dictators' entourages although Vergés was part of the team defending former Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz and has recently been in Cambodia defending Khieu Samphan. He has ublished widely on jurisprudence, written, with customary lack of humility, a play about his life and was the enigmatic subject of a ocumentary Terror's Advocate (2007) in which he spoke passionately of his early life as an anti-colonialist but also actively denied the genocide in Cambodia.
Vergés is undoubtedly a fascinating and complex showman (although it has to be noted that he lost most of his famous cases). Anyone who claims to have met inter alia Stalin, Che Guevara, Mao Zedong, Carlos the Jackal and Pol Pot is bound to have some fascinating anecdotes to tell. However his colourful life also includes substantial amounts of time spent defending antisemites and Nazis, minimising or denying genocide and consorting with tyrants, terrorists and dictators.
Despite his personal denials of antisemitism and sympathy for Nazism, and his supposed leftist anti-establishment credentials, he has been happy to take money from a variety of Nazis and antisemites. Is this really the kind of person that SOAS/University of London thinks should be invited to a discussion of international justice?
François Genoud: the Nazi in the shadows
FRANÇOIS GENOUD WAS undoubtedly one of the most important Nazis in the latter half of the 20th century who provided an ideological, financial and organisational link directly from the Nazi leadership in the Second World War to their contemporary descendents. A deeply enigmatic and mysterious figure with shadowy connections with intelligence services, bankers, Nazis and pro-Palestinian terrorists, he was also intimately involved with Jacques Vergés.
Genoud was the authorised publisher of posthumous writings by Adolf Hitler, Martin Bormann and Joseph Goebbels, was heavily involved in transferring looted Nazi gold and valuables into the Swiss banking system, bankrolled the defence of captured Nazis such as Adolf Eichmann and Klaus Barbie and was an active financier of Arab terrorist groups which he regarded as carrying on the tradition of antisemitic violence.
Born in Switzerland in 1915, Genoud actually met Hitler in Germany when he was 16. Sixty years after that meeting he was quoted in the British press saying: "My views have not changed since I was a young man. Hitler was a great leader, and if he had won the War the world would be a better place today." In 1936, he travelled to Palestine where he met the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the pro-Nazi religious and political leader of Palestinian Muslims, Muhammed Amin el-Husseini. According to the journalist David Lee Preston and British author Gitta Sereny, the Grand Mufti "would consider [Genoud] a confidant until his death in 1974".
During the Second World War Genoud worked for German intelligence and travelled extensively in the Middle East. After meeting leading Nazis at the Nuremberg trials in 1946, he obtained Bormann’s account of Hitler's conversations which was published as Hitler's Table Talk. In the preface to this book, Genoud apparently wrote that Hitler wanted the people of the Third World to carry on the work of the Thousand Year Reich. Genoud subsequently became literary executor for Hitler and Goebbels and became wealthy on the proceeds.
In the early postwar years in Egypt, Genoud made contact with leaders of the FLN, the Algerian liberation movement. He set up Arabo-Africa, a company that ran weapons into Algeria for the FLN. In 1958 he established the Arab Commercial Bank in Switzerland through which he administered the FLN's finances. And, during the independence struggle, he met Vergés, then an up-and-coming lawyer committed to the Third World.
Millions of dollars raised by the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) passed through accounts in the Arab Commercial Bank. But Genoud offered more public support as well. When three members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) were arrested in Zurich after an attack on an El AI plane in 1969, their legal costs were paid by Genoud, and their representative in court was Vergés.
Genoud was a key participant in the setting up of the postwar nazi international the New European Order, and played a leading role at its 1969 conference where a unity of sorts was established between neo-nazis and Palestinian groups embarked upon armed struggle against Israel. His participation was confirmed by Searchlight which obtained a photograph of him at the event.
In 1972 Genoud turned this collaboration into direct action when he was personally involved in organising a hijacking by Palestinian terrorists in Germany. He later admitted his involvement, which included delivering a ransom note, to a French journalist.
In 1982, two members of Carlos the Jackal’s terrorist group were held in Paris apparently about to blow up a coffee bar opposite the town hall. Bruno Breguet and Magdelena Kopp, Carlos's wife, were former members of the terrorist Baader-Meinhof gang, and Breguet was a close friend of Genoud who in 1970 had campaigned energetically to have him released from a prison in Israel after earlier terrorist attacks. Their lawyer was Vergés, who went on record declaring his "esteem" for them.
Then in 1987 Genoud summoned Vergés and asked him to represent Barbie in Lyons and also allegedly funded the legal costs.
Genoud had connections with nearly all the most important figures in European nazi politics including the discredited Holocaust denier David Irving (who has extensive correspondence with Genoud on his own website dating back to the early 1970s).
When Genoud followed his beloved Führer by committing suicide in 1996, he was under investigation by the Swiss and US authorities for his central role in the looting of Nazi gold from Jewish victims and its sequestering in Swiss banks.