The terrorist complex
Does Carlos the Jackals trial show we no longer romanticise terror?
Jacques Vergès,who should now be 86 years old,was a victim of racial discrimination as a young man. He made a career out of representing in court the unrepresentable,and once became a Maoist. Beginning with Algerian militant Djamila Bouhired,whom he later married,his client list extended to Klaus Barbie (the Butcher of Lyon,a Nazi war criminal who worked for both the US and West Germany and allegedly helped the CIA capture Che Guevara),Palestinian terrorists,the Khmer Rouge and Ilich Ramírez Sánchez (Carlos the Jackal).
When Vergès reappeared after his Maoist phase,he was working for the Baader-Meinhof gang (the Red Army Faction). His range of exotic clients,militant left to genocidal right,cannot be brushed aside as a lawyer’s privilege. It shows how the whole anti-colonial project in the West was actually run from the East Bloc,which had at its disposal the services of unreformed Nazis and every kind of anti-liberal element,to say nothing of Leninist terrorists. This network was precisely traced in Barbet Schroeder’s 2007 documentary on Vergès,Terror’s Advocate. In real life,Vergès used to be called the Devil’s Advocate.
The ongoing trial in Paris of one of Vergès’ former clients,Carlos the Jackal,now compels the question: what does the lawyer who became a celebrity and terrorist tell us about the romanticisation of terror? Schroeder’s own answer is the naiveté of his generation,its easy culpability before the emotional and ideological manoeuvres by violent,calculating and unscrupulous men and women who were not liberating the human race,nor freeing subjugated nations,but killing and maiming people. This cold and crazy underworld became the face of terror in the 1970s and ’80s.
Vergès is an extreme case. But in the 1970s and ’80s,the world romanticised terror; every individual thought she had her reason. Every third world people thought it had its reason. For the individual,the pre-condition for hungrily consuming the news and subsequently understood horror of,say,Carlos the Jackal bombing trains in France was the safety of distance. A third world national psyche would grant Carlos the Jackal mythic status for taking 11 OPEC ministers hostage in Vienna because of the sense of some grave political wrong being righted,no matter how wrongly. Can we quite deny now how fascinated we (here in India) were by Gaddafi till the other decade?
However,it’s not a socio-psychological study of what makes a terrorist that adequately explains the contours of the romance that terror held for people who were just beginning to become mass consumers of news. Don DeLillo’s 1991 novel Mao II explores the vacuum left by the writer that the terrorist alone could fill. While this understanding of the power of the terrorist is from the ebbing novelist’s perspective,it underscores the point that there’s a creative affinity between the two in desiring to cause outrage. But the outrage of the written word had been passed up by a less-reading,more TV-entranced public for the images of terror. What arrests attention and compels us to acknowledge its existence above everything else when we don’t have time to collect our thoughts? Terror.
Carlos the Jackal has dismissed civilian casualties as only “10 per cent” of his boasted “1,500 to 2,000” victims. From the Algerian freedom fighters through the leftist radicals in western Europe (West Germany’s RAF and Italy’s Red Brigades) and the US (Weather Underground) to Islamist terror,the civilian victim moved centrestage. Terror came home,and people were no longer illicitly thrilled by it. In India,the watershed was March 12,1993,which awakened us to a new age and scale of terror,although those serial blasts didn’t quite fit the category back then. For the West,and the world as a whole,where a butchery in one corner was merely news everywhere else,the paradigm shift was 9/11. Bin Laden came to be even more romanticised by some,but DeLillo’s Mao II had suddenly become antediluvian.
The end of the Cold War smoked out the last underground radical leftist of the Western world. A decade later,their memory would be of juvenile experimenters eclipsed by terror’s biggest spectacle that also ended the spectacle of terror. So,the only hypnotised people at Carlos the Jackal’s trial are the defence lawyers,old admirers and a bunch of applauding young men who may or may not think they are the defence against neo-Nazis. Did you think the post-Cold War generation was unpolluted by cruel emotions? Carlos still has the leftover from the radical leftist-Palestinian alliance — the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine,founded by George Habbash and Wadie Haddad (whose names perhaps fused into George Haddad,also a Maoist,in Mao II) — or contemporary political activists like the French comedian Dieudonné,condemned time and again by the courts for his anti-semitic bile. Well,Maoists here constantly kill,and never lose some city-dwellers’ romanticising halo.
sudeep.paul@expressindia.com
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