War-Crime Interpreters Tell Their Own Stories

[gentle music]

[Speaker 1] If I would make a film about myself

I would be the voiceover.

Can you hear me?

Can you hear me?

Can you hear me?

Nobody else in any conversation pays as much attention

to what is being said as I do.

Everything that comes out of your mouth is important.

Suddenly your thoughts are my thoughts.

I am you.

[Speaker 2] So I see this superhero as a lawyer.

The man who leads, the man who controls the whole situation.

The man who is in the courtroom.

I see the animal.

I see it as a witness because it’s vulnerable.

They will prey during the war.

That’s why I see a witness in this animal.

The vase I associate with myself, an interpreter.

The only purpose of a vase is to hold a flower.

And our sole purpose here

in this triangle is to provide interpretation

to facilitate the conversation

and nothing else.

[Speaker 3] I must sound composed.

You don’t need to know what is going on in my heart.

It’s important to give emotions

but I shouldn’t be telling you,

Oh, by the way this hurts me as well.

[Interviewer] Do you believe

that your sons are alive today?

[speaks in foreign language]

No, they’re not alive.

[speaks in foreign language]

Yankee knows that.

I would like to know in which grave they are so

that me their mother can give them proper burial.

So I can go and visit the place where their bodies are.

So I can look at their graves.

[Speaker 4] All rise.

[indistinct]

The International Criminal Tribunal for former

Yugoslavia is now session.

Please be seated.

[Speaker 5] I’m safe in my bubble

between the walls of my booth, behind my glass.

But then the person I’m interpreting says something

that pierces my bubble and comes back home to me.

One day in trial

we are seeing a video showing Serbian forces who are

forcing this one Muslim prisoner to shout and communicate

with other Muslims hiding around in the neighboring hills.

He’s yelling to them, Come, come here,

the Serbs are not gonna harm you,

they are not gonna do anything to you.

Don’t worry.

Just come.

I’ve seen that video already seven times.

And I know where the graves are of that man

and of the men who are hiding up there in the hills.

Something chokes in me and I hand the microphone

over to my colleague because I want to cry.

I know that if I try and say one word, tears will come

and strange sounds muffled and unintelligible.

[Speaker 6] This was a hotel room

where we met with one witness.

It was just one

of those hotel rooms that are, same everywhere.

A big bed and chair where here the witness was sitting.

And the two of us, the investigator and myself.

While being on a mission in Scandinavia, one

of the places we visited was a home of an elderly couple.

We sat down with them in their living room

with the painting of Jajce waterfall on the wall.

The photos on their shelves were of their two sons.

As we progressed with the statement

I learned that these two boys were taken

to a concentration camp in 1992.

They were never found.

They were never returned.

Their remains had not been found.

And the story itself was very sad and and terrible.

But what struck me the most was when we asked the couple

or the man actually

if he would like to have protective statements

should he be called to testify,

he said, Oh yes please

because if they hear that I am testifying in the courtroom

they might kill my boys, they might hurt them.

And then I realized that they, after eight years

they still believed that their children are alive.

And that was just heartbreaking.

Very, very hard to hear.

[Speaker 7] I discovered that it’s very,

very important to sit

in the middle of legal client and a victim.

And I also never wanted to look at any of them.

I always looked at the side

because I never really wanted to have witness

or victim turn around to me and say, Well, you explain

to him you’re Bosnian and you’ve been through the war.

Explain to him how all these things happened.

because I cannot explain anything to anyone.

I’m not there.

I’m a glorified phone.

But several times I allowed myself to look

at the victim to start feeling for that person.

And it didn’t really work out very well.

The last time was a couple of years ago.

It was in Srebrenica.

We were interviewing drivers who were driving men

and boys to get killed.

There was this driver and he started to tell a story

about how he drove with a boy, a Muslim boy.

And they were singing

with all these men waiting to be driven

to execution in the trunk in the back.

And the driver said, And when we were finished

I didn’t really know what to do with the boy.

I called back to the headquarters

and the duty officer got up.

He drove for 45 minutes.

He went into the truck, he picked up a boy

took him to the bushes and he killed him.

I couldn’t process it.

Who gets up at three, four,

five o’clock in the morning to kill a boy?

I came home that evening

and I started drinking and I was drunk for a month.

I wanted the energy of that boy.

I wanted it in my home and I wanted to be devastated

for him because he didn’t have anyone else to cry for him.

[Speaker 8] Omarska camp was operational

for quite a long time.

It’s the camp that

it was the first discovery by Western journalist

of something really wrong going on in in Bosnia.

There was a taxi driver who

who kept coming each evening

and would ask the guards to select one

or two prisoners

and then he would just spend the evening beating the guy.

And it was this witness.

I interpreted for him twice

in courtroom, in two cases, and he was a doctor.

He managed to get a camera smuggled

in and then he decided to do something so incredibly brave.

He took photos

of the people he was treating of their wounds

of their bruises as documenting what was going

on just in case he survives and can show that to the world.

He wanted to make sure

that later nobody can say it didn’t happen.

I asked once to give me a tape of his

his testimony and I have a recording somewhere.

I was that impressed.

It’s hard to describe the situation there.

[indistinct]

General care, [indistinct], crying, those shoot.

[tape pulling]

There’s a computer, the microphones a desk and two chairs.

The glass of the booth is tinted.

This gives me space to distance myself.

I get less involved that way.

It is different when I do consecutive interpretation,

when I’m sitting at the same table

with a witness or the accused, when I can smell them

they become more human to me

and it makes it harder to distance yourself.

[Speaker 9] Just imagine this youngest boy

I had those little hands of his, how could they be dead?

[speaks in foreign language]

The mornings I wake up,

I cover my eyes not to look at other children going

to school and husbands going to work holding hands.

[Speaker 1] Hey, it is just words.

Don’t worry.

Take it easy.

Listen to me with my voice and choice of words.

I can make any sentence less of a confrontation

while still giving a correct interpretation.

[Speaker 10] My first job would be the I.C.T.Y.

was actually just

upon the discovery of the secondary mass grave

of Srebrenica men and boys.

I was invited by Srebrenica team to accompany them to

a place where they suspected there was secondary mass grave.

Of course, became prepared with the archeologists

with excavators and all that equipment

for rough digging and also for fine tuning.

And they started digging.

The smell of digging flesh is just absolutely unbearable.

It was very overpowering.

I didn’t really want to approach the area.

I didn’t really want to go and see.

One of the archeologists started talking to me

and she said, Well, did you go to see

the corpses and so on?

And I said, No.

And she said, Why don’t you go

and see what they did to your people?

And then I looked at her

and I thought to myself, Well, she’s absolutely right.

If I was born 20 kilometers to the right

this could have been my corpse in this mass grave.

And I got up and I went to see.

I looked at all those corpses there

and their smell

wasn’t all that overpowering for me anymore.

I looked at them and I said, the Muslim prayer for the dead.

And I felt good about myself

and felt good about what I have done that I saw them.

That could have been me.

[Speaker 11] Yeah.

I didn’t like going to the detention unit because I

didn’t like having any sort of contact

with the accused.

I don’t feel comfortable because I met their victims

and I worked with their victims first.

And all of a sudden I’m thrown into the detention unit to

interpret for the person responsible for their sufferings.

I suffered during the war

and I understand suffering

of the people who came to testify.

But it is weird when, you meet a guy who was

in the paramilitaries and like five minutes

before he was talking about capturing guys, putting a

a rat on his stomach, covering the rat with a pot

and heating the pot so that the rat could dig

out the guts of the guy who was alive.

Can you imagine that?

He said that story in the proofing session.

It’s like, I don’t wanna be,

alone in the room with this guy.

Protect me.

You feel uncomfortable because you know

had we met 15 years ago

I would’ve been the victim for sure.

[Speaker 12] There was a story about

these two famous doctors actually and they were put

into concentration camps because

they were Muslim intellectuals.

They kept them in the toilet and the guards

they would come there, they would just bring them out.

They would beat them up.

And I think that they actually killed them

by beating both of them.

And I kept on having a reoccurring dream

that I’m actually in the toilet and

that the concentration camp guard is knocking at my door.

And I called my grandmother and I told her about the dream

and she told me, Besmir, do you know who they were?

Those people who were knocking at at your door?

And I said, No, I don’t.

She said They were actually angels.

They were there to let you know

that you are doing your job right.

The knowledge that somebody might be looking

at me and scrutinizing my interpretation really

helped me to do my job

the way the dead people I’m interpreting

about would want me to.

I said to myself, Well

I’m going to be the best fucking interpreter there was.

If there are angels watching

or the ghosts of those dead people, well you know what guys?

You can count on me.

War-Crime Interpreters Tell Their Own Stories
Source: Super Trending News PH