Translating Evidence and Interpreting Testimony at a War Crimes Tribunal

Working in a Tug-of-War

Ellen Elias-Bursac

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137332660
• eBook ISBN: 9781137332677
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How can defendants be tried if they cannot understand the charges being raised against them? Can a witness testify if the judges and attorneys cannot understand what the witness is saying? Can a judge decide whether to convict or acquit if she or he cannot read the documentary evidence? The very viability of international criminal prosecution and adjudication hinges on the massive amounts of translation and interpreting that are required in order to run these lengthy, complex trials, and the procedures for handling the demands facing language services. This book explores the dynamic courtroom interactions in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in which witnesses testify through an interpreter about translations, attorneys argue through an interpreter about translations and the interpreting, and judges adjudicate on the interpreted testimony and translated evidence.

Part I

The Translators and Interpreters

1

The Practitioners

Field interpreters accompanied the first group of lawyers and other volunteers into the war zone to collect witness statements for an exploratory expert commission, even before the Tribunal was established by the Security Council in 1993. These interpreters later formed the core of the ICTY language services during the initial investigative phase. The international community may not have believed that the Tribunal would adjudicate, that there would ever be indictees or trials or convictions, but committed judges and prosecutors made it a far more powerful institution than anyone had imagined when they set it up. During the second phase, as the first trials began, the language services had to expand rapidly to meet the interpreting and translation demands of the growing number of trials and investigations. The progress of the institution was dizzying. The first indictee was arrested in 1995 and three trials had finished and another five were under way by the summer of 1998; a third courtroom was being designed and indictees were arrested almost every month. When investigations ended in 2004, the Tribunal entered its third phase, with the three courtrooms in session every morning and afternoon and seven to ten trials running concurrently. As this book goes to press there are only four trials and 16 appeals left to adjudicate; the fourth phase began on 1 July 2013, known as the residual mechanism (officially: the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals or MICT), during which these last trials and appeals will be completed and a core of staff will remain at the Tribunal, maintaining the archive, ensuring enforcement of sentences and protection of witnesses, and providing assistance to national jurisdictions (MICT site).

Through survey responses we will see who the translators and interpreters have been who provided the language services in each of the these phases, how they have felt about working at the Tribunal, what they have found the most rewarding and the most challenging, and what they would recommend to others considering a similar job, particularly in terms of the trauma these jobs entail.

1.1 Field interpreters and language assistants

The wars investigated by the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia caused the dissolution of Yugoslavia. They lasted for eight years, from the first shots fired in Slovenia on 27 June 1991 to the cessation of hostilities in Kosovo on 3 June 1999. During this time 140,000 people were killed and some 4,000,000 were displaced in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia.¹ The fighting was still fierce when the ICTY² was established by United Nations Security Council Resolution 827 on 25 May 1993.

The first evidence of war crimes was collected by M. Cherif Bassiouni, a law professor teaching at DePaul University College of Law, in Chicago, even before the Tribunal began its work. In 1992, he organized a group of DePaul law students, volunteers, and lawyers to go out on missions to Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia and collect the first archive of evidence of war crimes, mainly witness statements, which he housed at De Paul University.

Meanwhile, also in 1992, at the urging of Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the UN established a commission to investigate violations of international humanitarian law in the former Yugoslavia. M. C. Bassiouni became its chairman in 1993 and brought on board C. Cleiren (Netherlands) to prepare a report on legal aspects of rape and sexual assault, while H. Sophie Greve (Norway) worked on a project on ethnic cleansing in the Prijedor region of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Hagan 2003: 45). The Commission worked with some 150 non-governmental, private, charitable, and religious organizations from the territory of the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere to collect interviews and other evidence on over 30 missions.

The documents and testimonies amassed on these missions were stored in the DePaul archive until the ICTY was formed. Once the ICTY had started up, the Commission was informed that they were obliged to transfer all their files, documents, and the database to the Tribunal by April 1994, to be used to guide investigators working for the Office of the Prosecutor to lay the groundwork for indictments.

The Commission report explains the need to limit their investigations to certain matters: ‘Owing to personnel and time constraints, as well as limited financial resources, the Commission was compelled to adopt a selective approach in its work. It was not practicable to investigate exhaustively …’ (Commission 1994: 11). Using the evidence and testimony they had collected as a guide, the Commission chose to focus on the town of Prijedor and the nearby camps of Omarska, Trnopolje, Manjača, and Keraterm; rape and sexual assault committed throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina; the Ovčara massacre site near Vukovar; and the siege of Sarajevo. This, then, explains why the first trial, Tadić, was about the Prijedor camps, while Furundžija, Čelebići Camp and Kunarac et al. prosecuted sexual assault as a war crime.

The closest the Commission Report comes to mentioning the field interpreters is in its expression of gratitude to the many governments, including those of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which contributed personnel and assistance in taking testimony.

It (almost) goes without saying that the Commission and affiliated organizations could not have recorded all that testimony without the work of a large pool of field interpreters, although they do go without saying it. The words marked in bold in the following passage were added to highlight the moments when field interpreters were implicitly involved, although they are never explicitly mentioned: ‘It is noteworthy that, notwithstanding the understandable fears and apprehensions of the victims and witnesses, 223 of them voluntarily agreed to speak to the Commission’s team of interviewers. Every member of the team first approached interviewees with expressions of human solidarity and concern. Invariably to such traumatized victims, the mere fact that a United Nations body tangibly expressed its concern for them was comforting and uplifting. Almost all interviewees expressed their appreciation to the interviewers in the warmest ways. If nothing else, this unique investigation brought some human comfort and support to these victims. During the last few days of interviewing, the Commission’s field officers received an average of 15 calls a day from victims and witnesses wanting to meet an interviewer’ (Commission: 82).

When asked for comments that he might have about working with field interpreters while on the Commission, M. Cherif Bassiouni replied: ‘During our almost two years of investigation in which we conducted 32 field missions, we received testimony from people in Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia as well as material in English, French, and in other languages. We used this set of UN interpretations and translators and having the same persons work on the translation of the documents ensured consistency. They applied UN standards. They also took into account the differences in the spoken Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian. … [W]hen we did the rape investigation we had 11 interpreters and we spent a week in Zagreb with the 11 interpreters as well as the other 22 members of the investigating team (namely a prosecutor, a psychologist, and an interpreter, all three being women from different countries) discuss[ing] together under my chairmanship the methodology and procedures of the investigation to avoid re-traumatizing the victims and to ensure maximum efficiency. This included extensive discussion on how the translators would address the linguistic variances between the three ethnic groups’ (Bassiouni email).

Field interpreters and language assistants, among other ICTY language staff, were asked in the Language Services Survey—presented in full in Section 1.6—about what the rewarding and challenging aspects of the job were, and their thoughts on the trauma that came with the work. Here are several responses on interpreting on missions:

Trauma: I was completely unprepared for what I experienced at my very first interpretation job, when a witness, a woman (…), broke down while talking about her 12 year old son who was killed by Croatian soldiers before her very eyes. I didn’t know what to do, I was in shock.

Rewarding: …what was most rewarding to me was when a witness would come to me and tell me that he had heard good things about me from another witness who had already worked with me at the ICTY. I felt very proud that my work meant something to those people, and that it was through me that their stories were told. Although it was the most difficult job of my career, it fills me with pride to think that I contributed a great deal in getting the truth about the war in the Former Yugoslavia out on record. I was also pleased with positive feedback I got from investigators and lawyers I had worked with.

Challenging: Traveling on missions with investigation teams whose members didn’t get along with each other and allowed personal conflicts to interfere with their work. Surviving in the culture of CLSS.

Challenging: The most challenging aspect was having to work non-stop (up to 16 hrs a day), while being on missions and interpreting at witness interviews without a backup or a day off, while at the same time listening to the most horrific accounts of rape, slaughter, mass executions

A number of people were interviewed by J. Hagan, who worked for the ICTY in the early years, including Brenda Hollis,³ a senior trial attorney for the Office of the Prosecutor, who worked closely with interpreters in the field. ‘It was quite a harsh period to be in Bosnia because a lot of the infrastructure was gone. Food was still in short supply (…). The hotels and places that we stayed in would have electricity and water intermittently, if at all. (…) We had interpreters saying, “I’m not going again because they owe for three missions already and they haven’t paid me.”’ (Hagan 2003: 79).

Hagan’s interview with M. Cherif Bassiouni describes Bassiouni’s first meeting with Richard Goldstone, the Tribunal’s first chief prosecutor: ‘And he said, “(…) I’m at a loss, I don’t know anything about the subject matter, I don’t know anything about the conflict. I have nothing to go on.” … So I said, “I’ll tell you what, let’s start from A, let me put up a map of Yugoslavia somewhere and let me try to brief you on the conflict.” He said, “We don’t even have a map of Yugoslavia.” And so I brought in my two assistants. We gave him his first map. And 65,000 documents, 300 hours of tapes, hundreds of maps and charts and what not. There was enough to fill a container the size of this room’ (Hagan 2003: 68–9). These documents that Bassiouni provided were the beginnings of the ICTY archive and laid the groundwork for investigations and the evidence used in the first trials.

Studies of field interpreters (Cuibilié 2005; Angelleli and Osman 2007; Maier 2007; Stahuljak 2009; M. Baker 2010; Inghilleri 2010; C. Baker 2012, C. Baker and Tobia 2012; Askew 2014) in the Croatian conflict, the Iraqi war, Afghanistan, and African conflicts have examined what motivates field interpreters to work for a foreign organization during a war. All of these articles describe the difficulties arising from the fact that these interpreters have not been professionally trained, for the most part; they are often locally hired by international organizations who only arrive in a conflict zone after hostilities have erupted.

C. Baker has researched this occupational group (2012: 850). As she points out, ‘Most “interpreters” were not professional linguists with postgraduate interpreting/translation degrees, but drew on skills in English or other European languages acquired through other education and work’. In the Bosnian war, C. Baker estimates that ‘Thousands of men and women, many in their twenties and some even in their teens, found work and hard-currency salaries on foreign military bases operated by the UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR), its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)-led successors IFOR (Implementation Force) and SFOR (Stabilization Force), and the European Union-led EUFOR. Thousands more were hired by humanitarian organizations, NGOs, and foreign intervention institutions’ (2012: 850–1).

L. Stern conducted interviews with ICTY interpreters in 2001 and provides valuable insight into just how important a role the interpreters played when working with investigators: ‘Working as a team with field interpreters allowed investigators to rely on their cultural expertise and develop cultural awareness, without which trust cannot be established between an interviewer and interviewee, so that they could act with witnesses and in their homes with sensitivity to customs and habits (e.g. accepting coffee and other forms of hospitality, not offering their hand to more observant Muslim women, understanding the significance of women’s head-dress), and could ensure the correct pronunciation and spelling of witnesses’ names and locations. The mispronunciation of the name Ismet as Izmet,⁴ for example, almost inaudible to a foreign ear, creates an unintended meaning and causes an insult. Reliance on interpreters as cultural advisers helped investigators to interpret the witnesses’ body language and recognise whether they were withdrawn, eager, unstable or close to tears. Consulting interpreters allowed investigation teams to improve the timing of their field trips and interviews to avoid clashing with possible Muslim festivals that would make interviewing impossible and prolong the length of the trips’ (2001: 265).

The first small pool of ICTY language assistants, conference interpreters, and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• “The End and the Beginning”, Wisława Szymborska, translated by Joanna Trzeciak
• Introduction
• Part I The Translators and Interpreters
• Part II The Courtroom
• Appendix 1: ICTY and CLSS
• Appendix 2: Trial Summaries
• Appendix 3: Language Services Survey
• Appendix 4: Data Summary
• Appendix 5: Survey Data Tables
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index