One or two previous blogs in this series have described some of the potential difficulties and disadvantages which may face interpreters (or translators), especially those who work in newsworthy national and international environments and occasionally find themselves being used as scapegoats to save the face of their prominent employers. Number 13 of the series deals briefly with the most negative consequence of this career choice: death on duty.

The conduct of the seemingly endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – and their close (“in our face”) reporting by the international media – would have been impossible without the contingents of intrepid cameramen and local interpreters, translators and ‘fixers’ who have helped the American and allied forces and the battalions of foreign correspondents. A small proportion of these civilian interpreters (etc.) have paid the ultimate price for their work: death. (Others, as in other foreign wars, may well pay a similar price, when the coalition forces finally depart.)

On assignment in North Iraq in March 2003, Eric Campbell, a correspondent for Australian ABC TV was injured and his cameraman was killed in a terrorist attack (virtually on camera). When New York Times correspondent Stephen Farrell was taken hostage recently in Kunduz province, Afghanistan, he was freed in a subsequent commando raid but his “translator”, Sultan Munadi, was killed.

In an account of his own experiences in South Lebanon, another war correspondent, Sam Kiley, narrates the death of Abed Takoush, the fixer for the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen. Kiley also provides this background information on the unique job description of a fixer and an insight into the close bond between foreign correspondents (or the military) and their invaluable local assistants, referring also to the case of Sultan Manadi. (See The Spectator, 16 September 2009)

“Abed was a “fixer”, like Sultan Manadi, who was killed last week during a NATO operation to free the British journalist Stephen Farrell from Afghan kidnappers. ‘Fixer’ is an ignoble title. The word is sleazy and demeaning: it implies the local people hired by the foreign media are mere higglers. The reality is that without a worldwide network of local freelance drivers, translators, and general all-round fixers, there would be a lot of dead journalists, and pretty soon no foreign news at all.

Any nitwit, and I am living proof, can be a ‘war correspondent’ if they are lucky enough to come across a great fixer. These men and women usually earn no more than $100 a day. For that they provide introductions to gangsters, war lords, terrorists, politicians – as well as navigate, drive and give instant tutorials on Albanian politics, Somali clan rivalries and Balkan history. More important, they keep us alive. Behind our backs they apologise for our cultural insensitivity, anticipate our needs before we know that we’ve got them, and from time to time literally lead us through minefields.”
(The Spectator, 16 September 2009)

A happier ending: 30-year-old Australian SAS Trooper Mark Donaldson was recently awarded the Victoria Cross (Australia’s first for 30 years) for rescuing an Afghan interpreter under heavy fire in 2008. He was subsequently received by Queen Elizabeth II in Buckingham Palace.

Note: Sam Kiley is the author of Desperate Glory: At War in Helmand with Britain’s 16th Air Assault Brigade (London, Bloomsbury).

This article highlights the difficulties in pledging money to food aid in Africa. Shocking statistics about the amount of people starving are often misleading. No one is suggesting that people are not suffering, but the ways in which the situation can be improved are open for debate. 

“Kenya is having a terrible time. But it would not be doing so if the breadbasket in the west of the country had not been torn apart by ethnic violence. If the agricultural outreach programmes, which helped farmers to improve productivity through the 1960s and 1970s, had not collapsed, if the Government’s milk and beef marketing system was not ruined by corruption, and if people had not been settled on marginal land that can never sustain them, then Kenya would be able to feed itself even in times of drought”  Sam Kiley, TimesOnline

Everyone watching the news, watching documentaries and learning encounters moments of great sadness at the state of the world that has become in which we live.

When you turn on the news, you watch faces of people. Some of the faces people encounter are people aiming for grandeur, or people in great grief. These are the face that you remember for life.

I got to watch Robert Fisk’s documentary (Ends of the Earth) Beirut to Bosnia.

One of these faces which captured my attention was of an old lady who was a victim of the Bosnian war.

She was uprooted from her home because of the war, and managed to escape the direct effects of the war. When asked about what her plans are, she kept a strong face, and that maybe the international community will take care of them.

She radiates a sense of confidence which people around her do not have. This may be because she has a child-relative she is hugging.

Robert Fisk continued on asking questions to people with many moments of silence of people wondering even if they should have been alive.

In a few minutes, Robert interviews the woman again, but this time with a photo of her enjoying a picnic with her relatives. He asks her which ones are dead. Most of them were, including her mother and husband.

Then Robert asks, “What do you think when you look back at these days now?”

It was a rather blunt and direct question.

She get caught off guard and says,

“What?”

“Why ask when you know everything? Please don’t ask me.”

She raises her hand and gets up, with a shakey voice.

She continues, “I’m sorry. I don’t have any strength anymore.”

The fascade she was trying to put up that everything is all right had been broken down. She walks away crying, trying to wipe the tears. She is going to be a refugee and then scattered somewhere in Europe.

I realise that she is more of a victim and her dead relatives as she has to live with great grief throughout her life.

Another face that I can’t forget was aired recently in “Unreported World – Kosovo , State of Denial”

Sam Kiley reports about Susan, who is a Serbian mother of three living in Kosovo. Her children, and the Albanian husband died in recent raid by “security forces”, during which she was raped. Now she is the only Serbian in the town.

Being a Serb, she is unable to find employment in Kosovo. She now feeds what is left of her family from the city dump (see bottom right of the photo). This includes the cloths that she is wearing. I saw the same attempt in her face to be willingly presenting a mask of strength for the camera, as the Bosnian woman had.

In the deep recesses of the night, you think about what the world has turned into, this is symbolised by the faces of extreme grief that you can’t ever forget.

]]> http://fanonite.org/2008/04/24/unreported-world-reign-of-the-rockets/ Thu, 24 Apr 2008 14:10:46 +0000 Dave http://fanonite.org/2008/04/24/unreported-world-reign-of-the-rockets/