James Michel and Paul Verges – birds of old feathers?
James Michel and Paul Verges - "Bonjour camarade"
The level of protocol given to Paul Vergès this week makes one wonder what is left for President Nicholas Sarkosy of France as and when he decides to make a state visit. Verges, who may have some standing in La Reunion, is but a lowly regional official in the French Republic. La Reunion is only a small part of France, thousands of miles from la Metropole. In fact, in La Reunion the most important French government official is not Paul Vergès but the Prefet, a civil servant who represents the French President in the Departement, much like the Governor used to represent the Queen during our colonial days.
However, Mr Michel does have some affinity with Monsieur Vergès which explains their bonhomie as they greeted each other. Both are Marxists although they don’t practice or adhere to the ideology anymore. Mr Vergès has the accolade of having been the founder of the Communist Party of Reunion in 1959 as well as leader until 1993.
Born in Thailand and brought up on the island of Réunion, he is the son of Raymond Vergès, a French diplomat, and a Vietnamese mother. Vergès was born on 5th March, 1925. So when he founded his political party he was relatively young at 34, more or less the same age as Fidel Castro who also founded the Communist Party of Cuba and led the Cuban revolution which overthrew the dictator Batistat at around the same time. Unlike in Cuba where you can only join the Communist Party or be persecuted, in France no one is persecuted for belonging to the communist party or any party for that matter. At a much younger age, however, Vergès was imprisoned for murdering a political rival to his father.
Paul Vergès has, however, a twin brother who has acquired considerable fame not only in France but also internationally. Throughout his career as an attorney, Paul’s twin brother Jacques Vergès, has primarily taken political cases, and his clients have included both left and right-wing terrorists, war criminals and militants. He defended the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie (1987) (the Butcher of Lyon), Ilich Ramírez Sánchez a.k.a. Carlos the Jackal (1994), the Kelkal faction (1995), the Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy (1996) and President Slobodan Milošević (2002), although the latter declined any legal advice from any party. When asked if he would have defended Hitler, Vergès once replied “I would even defend George Bush, if he would plead guilty.” In 1949 he became president of the AEC (Association for Colonial Students), where it is said, he met and befriended Pol Pot who went on to become the butcher of Cambodia, being responsible for a million deaths. In 1950 at the request of his Communist mentors Jacques Vergès went to Prague to lead a youth organization for four years.
Old birds of the same feathers do flock together.
