About two weeks ago in the New Yorker George Packer wrote an excellent article about Iraqi translators working for the US Army in Iraq.
His article makes clear the lesson offered by most mafia movies. It has been ignored by the US authorities in Baghdad and Washington. Give the people working for you more reasons to be loyal than fear alone.
Mr. Packer's article offers many insights on how the US managed to alienate those Iraqis who were willing to work with the Americans, even after it became clear that the Americans were treating them as second class citizens at best.
But for any author or journalist who has ever used translators under less pleasant circumstances, reading this article is an incentive for some self-reflection.
Now, of course, journalists tend not to invade other countries, at least not in the same way that armies do. In general, they have less power than ambassadors and state department officials when it comes to granting visas, but still.
This fall, I traveled to Kosovo and Montenegro. I was completely dependent on translators. In Montenegro, I was traveling with a young Muslim from Bosnia who had fled in the nineties to the Netherlands.
Wherever we were going, this young man was introduced by our guide from Montenegro as “the Muslim.” However, both the young man and I had requested that he be introduced by his name.
From time to time, I felt that my translator was more fearful than I was, probably because he was able to understand what the people around him were saying.
Nevertheless, most of the time he seemed to enjoy the trip.
While traveling to the city of Mitrovica in Kosovo, my experiences with the translator were rather different.
My translator there was a Serbian woman, seven months pregnant. She was about to leave Kosovo, because in her opinion there was no future for Serbs in Kosovo.
She was disappointed in the West, in journalists, in a lot of things, but since we were sitting in the same car for a few hours I tried to keep a conversation going.
She had worked as a translator for a while and she told me that she had gone to quite a few dangerous places. Places that she had tried to avoid in her daily life.
When I asked her why she didn’t refuse to go there with the journalist she offered a convincing answer: “I needed the money.”