Jacques Vergès dies; French lawyer defended despised criminals - Washington Post

Mr. Vergès died of a heart attack in the house where 18th-century philosopher Voltaire once lived, according to his publisher Pierre-Guillaume de Roux, news agencies reported.

Mr. Vergès was born in Thailand to a Vietnamese mother and a Frenchman serving in the colonial diplomatic corps. Mr. Vergès claimed that his father lost his job because of the mixed marriage, and he said the sting of prejudice he experienced in childhood motivated his legal work on behalf of outcasts.

In a career spanning more than five decades, Mr. Vergès was one of the most enigmatic and provocative legal personalities in the world. He cultivated an air of mystery by vanishing for most of the 1970s, an absence that to this day — and despite the best efforts of investigative journalists — has never been explained.

To many, he was deeply infuriating, a headline-monger always ready with an audacious statement to draw attention to his clients and himself.

Defending Barbie, dubbed the "Butcher of Lyons" for his role in the deaths of thousands of Jews and French Resistance fighters during World War II, Mr. Vergès said he found him "a respectable man .?.?. unjustly condemned."

In Carlos the Jackal, the Marxist-inspired radical who orchestrated a series of bombings and kidnappings in the 1970s and 1980s, Mr. Vergès saw "a man of taste . . . who feels at home in a dinner jacket."

"I would have defended Hitler," he told the German news magazine Der Spiegel in 2008. "Defending doesn't mean excusing. A lawyer doesn't judge, doesn't condemn, doesn't acquit. He tries to understand."

Mr. Vergès first came to international attention in the late 1950s as an attorney for Algerians accused of terrorism in their quest for independence from France. Later clients included militants acting on behalf of Palestinian causes and members of left-wing terrorist factions in Germany.

"I'm a bit like Don Juan," Mr. Vergès once said. "I love revolutions like he loved women. I like to go from one to the other, and I like them when they are young. When they get older, I lose interest."

When not defending revolutionaries, he was an advocate of choice for the reviled. Mr. Vergès said he provided legal counsel to Khieu Samphan, the titular head of Cambodia's widely reviled Khmer Rouge; Serbian leader and accused war criminal Slobodan Milosevic and former Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz, a top deputy to Saddam Hussein.

In melodramatic rants against capitalism, racism and the hypocrisy of Western society, Mr. Vergès often turned the courtroom into a theater of political grandstanding. Defending the accused Algerian terrorists, he argued that they fought for independence from colonial overlords in France and therefore were not subject to judgment under French law.