Прав, xenophobia.

away from that altogether. Put me in the tank and let me go on my own and leave me alone. " And this lasted all through my life.

Britain in those days had seen their troops come back from Dunkirk, but they didn't realize really what the humiliation of the defeat was and having the German occupying your house. That kind of thing. When I spoke to my English friends they just didn't understand what you were talking about. I went to an English school after that and one of the teachers, 5-10 years older than I was, was about to go into the Royal Air Force and he said to me, "You know, Hitler can't win the war! He's never played cricket. No team-spirit. " This was shocking to me. I said, "If you knew what's going on on the other side of the Atlantic, or the Channel, rather, you really wouldn't be talking like this. It's a very, very serious situation. And really it needs people who really want to give their all. " And I found were doing it. And I thought it was oneway of repaying for the hospitalityx.

That I received from France for 12 years and now I was going with them on a crusade, perhaps.

Cor. You said earlier you resisted becoming an interpreter. What made you decide to do so in 1968?

B.B. I went bankrupt in Paris, and I had children at school, a boy of 17, a girl of 13, if I'm not mistaken. And close to 50 years of age, the only outfit that answered me was the United Nations. I seemed to be welcome there. Welcome because I had some training as an engineer and they needed translation, not interpretation... translation of technical subjects. I seemed to fit the bill. For me at that moment it was just a check coming at the end of the month. No idealism, nothing like that.

It was just a way of solving my financial situation. So I came to the UN as a translator. Do you know that translators write, interpreters speak. The translator has all the time in the world, perhaps, the interpreter doesn't. The translator can have his references and consult them; the interpreter can't. The translator takes his work home, when it's not finished; the interpreter must finish when the meeting finishes, etc. Translation for me was really a drudgery, my nature doesn't accept it very easily. Quite honestly I couldn't really live very happily as a translator. And at the end of two years I was told by my superiors that there was a programme going along at the United Nations, being launched whereby translators could train to become interpreters. If you are a translator, you are an erudite, perhaps a slow-thinker, it doesn't matter, but a thorough person. An interpreter has to be quick even if he isn't thorough. From the character standpoint they are completely different people. They thought that anyway the translator could sweat away at his desk all morning and then in the afternoon go zipping through a meeting without a hesitation, without an "amm " or "ar....". It was impossible, but what was possible for me was to say, "I'd rather leave the translation section altogether and go into the interpretation section," which I did. There is some kind of, as we say, mental reactions that have to be trained - to hear and speak at the same time, but evidently I think you are wired for it, meaning that you are born with it like music being able to play the piano. You know, some people can just sit down without training and play the piano. They have a talent for it. And I think interpreting is the same thing.

Cor. Clearly, the immediacy of all that can be quite a stressful experience. What was your the most challenging experience in that time at the UN?

B.B. I've had several. There are two kinds, forgive me for being a little technical here, there are two kinds of interpretation. One is consecutive, when you speak after the speaker, in other words, you've memorized it or taken notes, and you rebuild the speech. It can be a whole speech. And there's another kind called the simultaneous which is you've got earphones on, you hear "Good morning," you say "Bon jour." And the speech goes on, fast or slow, slurred or well-articulated — you follow.

But my most embarrassing moments have been — and then they really have been embarrassing — I've had several times when I was sitting just three people in the room around the table, very important people, in very awkward situations, when one person says to another something that is very close to an insult, and the other person, not speaking English, didn't understand, and I had to interpret looking him in the eyes 3 feet away and very politely telling him the insult. And I could see the red rising from his color right up to the root of his hair. I've done the same thing with another lady ambassador. I found it a very, very awkward moment.

Cor. You retired from the UN when you reached official retirement age, but you were then recalled to the colours. How did that happen?

B.B. Well, they are short of interpreters. However, if I leave at the end of the subway, my chances of being called back are very good.

Cor. But did you expect to be recalled and asked to go to... Yugoslavia?

B.B. Oh, absolutely not.

Cor. Did you want to go?

B.B. Well, I went, so I must have...wanted to go. My wife probably knew me better than I did, and she says (I hesitated a long time and she said), "You know that you want to go, why don't you?"

Cor. What did you expect to find when you got there?

B.B. No idea. I'd no idea what the job was, no idea why I was needed. Here was a country speaking Serbo-Croatian. I thought, it turns out they speak Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, it's all perhaps, the same language but you can't say Serbo-Croatian, they were at war over that. And I didn't have that, but had English and French, and then I found out that the Force Commander needed someone to put his French ideas into English language not at the English troops, but you also had Nigerian troops, Nepalese troops. I think there were about 39 nations there that spoke English of sorts. And if the Force Commander's English of sorts got transmitted to the Nepalese English of sorts you may have got disastrous results in the field. So they needed an interpreter to follow through and make sure that everything's well understood. I must confess the troops were surprised to see this old guy with white hair coming along, being an interpreter, but I managed to find a sort of easy way of communicating with both the British and the French officers.

Cor. Did the general get depressed by all these conflicting pressures on him?

B.B. It wasn't his type, no! Every morning it was a delight to meet general Cotte. He is an extraordinary wonderful man. Without any presumption I do think I can count him among my friends. He would every morning start up with a new day, new sunshine, new hope, new ideas, and new plans to propose. This was on the local level nothing to do [with global things?] with new thoughts to confide in his staff. I'm talking here about colonels and generals around him, and I would participate in all that simply because I would have to interpret his ideas from French to English. Of course, as the day wore on, and this happened every day we were disappointed, greatly disappointed by what happened, by what we perceived, do forgive me for saying "we," I am not talking as an interpreter, but I was part of the gang there. What perceived as being betrayal by the people we were coming to help. And I'm not saying Serbs, I'm not saying Croats or Muslims, and at the end of the day it really was where we tried to get today, and it hasn't come off, and it was easy to allow oneself, with the fatigue and all that, to go into a brown study. But I've never, never seen general Cotte depressed.

Cor. Who were the key figures you were dealing with on the Yugoslavia side?

B.B. Well, Mr./zetbegovich and Mr.Koracljich. I've never met general Mladic¹. He was [неразбор­чиво] a man to have seated across the table from you, but I've never met him for some reason or other. He did have "diplomatic illnesses" or wounds and the rumour went around that he'd been

¹ General Mladic is considered a war criminal in the West. 38

wounded or hurt himself somehow or other. They'd hoped that he'd be out of service for a little while, but unfortunately he showed up again a couple of weeks later.

Cor. It's been suggested by lots of people who were involved in negotiations and a lot of press and media commentators that people were economical with the truth — to say the very least — on all warring parties there. Did this have to be translated through you as an interpreter to general Cotte if you thought somebody wasn't telling the truth?

B.B. Oh, I didn't have to translate to general Cotte or anyone else. I just did my job and passed no judgement. I went home, but I did overhear people saying, " He's lying through his teeth! " And I must confess this was regular. Evidently lying was thought to be a weapon of war.

Cor. Did you sometimes feel you were in almost Alice-in-Wonderland situation?

B.B. It was a very strange situation, you know. After three years of war in the Second World War, it was us and them. In this war you were in the middle and you...to find out is this Serbian, is this Croatian, is this Moslem. This village has been burnt down. And we would go right in and it was up to me to find out who had done it, what party the local people belonged to. The names, of course, were a great problem. Getting the names straight. At that time there was Foreign Minister...Granich in Saraevo and a Minister in Croatia called Ganich. I had to be quite sure... just a detail. But finding out where you were was...a very difficult situation.

Then finding out the people that you were talking to had last night ordered the bombing or the shelling of Saraevo on the midnight of the 1^st January 1994. The people you've been talking to have ordered the shelling of the PTT building where you were! We've just finished a dinner, and midnight came around. A group of young musicians who call themselves "Le Cabaret de Sarajevo" had been providing the music. Everybody went home (home being the floors on the PTT building), and we got shelled. Not just against the wall of the grounds, right in the building. They destroyed the PX which was a room next to where everybody had been dancing. This was 12:15. I was half up the stairs, we had that enormous explosion and the light stayed on. We couldn't see because of all that dust raised, with clouds and clouds of dust. The general had already retired. I met him in his pajamas.

"That was an antitank shell, did you hear it?" "Oh, yes, I did. Yes antitank," I said. I really didn't know what it was, but I thought it was a mortar shell. "No, no, that's antitank." "Oh, fine," so we went to bed after that. We had no more trouble, but just a kind of thing. Is it an Alice-in-Wonderland? I suppose so. It's irrational, that's for certain. It reminded me of the old days, but it wasn't the same. It wasn't the terrifying bombing or the artillery barrage. That was what scared everything out of me. I was through the bombing in London and that was scary enough. But I think the worst thing that I went through was an artillery shelling in Alsase just on the Rhine. When you are lying in the mud, face down, and I found myself paralyzed with fear. I couldn't get up, I couldn't even run to a shelter.

That was not what we had in Yugoslavia, and the officers used to say to me: "What was it like in the second French armored division, was this like this?" I said: "Not, nothing like it, nothing like it anything.

Cor. Did you ever find that you somehow find yourself becoming an advocate or even adviser, rather than just an interpreter because of the nature of the situation you were in?

B.B. Yes, sometimes it happened. The general turned to me once and said, well, sort of taunting said, — "What would you have done in the Second French Armored Division?" Well, I just answered, I'd just sent patrol out at night and we were going to disable the guns. Not necessarily kill the gunmen but just disable the guns or take the ammunition with us. And he'd said "Ha — ha — ha" because that was an act of war and he just couldn't do it. His hands were tied. So, the advice I was asked for was completely useless. And as a former soldier in a situation that was quite, quite new and I honestly did not know what could be done. I could see an extraordinary situation and the lack of any possible solution.

For instance, we were on the 6^th February 1994 in the market square in Sarajevo, the day after a mortar shell had fallen in the middle of the market square on Saturday noon. On the Sunday morning we were there and the mayor of Sarajevo was there, Mr. Okashi¹ was there and I was really supposed to be doing a job but I was more impressed by what was left of the massacre. It really was real butchery. It's a square, you know, like a box. Very tall buildings all around and the shell came right over the roofs perpendicular to the ground. It hit the corner of a stall, started exploding and then the

¹ Top UN official, responsible for Jugoslavia.

nose went and buried itself about 4-5 inches down the ground. So it couldn't have been fired from a very great distance. It burst at waist height and caused an enormous amount of deaths — 60-odd people died and a hundred wounded.

And the mayor was there and the people of Sarajevo were there, and the local television station was there and the radio was there and they were shrieking and yelling right in the face of the general "Do something! Why don't you kill the Serbs that did this?".

The suspicion was that the Bosnians themselves had fired this thing among their own people to create this kind of situation right in front of CNN so as to attract sympathy. Proof of it? No.

The crater analysis (this is the sort of thing they do to find out where the shell came from) put a stick in the thing and see what direction you have. The crater analysis was done simply to indicate that it came from an oval within the city, not very far from where the thing had fallen and the demarkation line between Serbs and Muslims went right through the middle of that circle of probability. There was no sure way of attributing the blame.

How on earth can you answer the Mayor of Sarajevo, in tears, imploring the general to do something about it. You can't just turn around and be gone. Kill a few Serbs hoping to appease the Muslims when actually the Muslims would do it again. If it was the Muslims! And that's the kind of tense situation that you have. The interpreter in those cases is very, very useful. It does seem that his presence there calms things down an awful lot.

Cor. What was the worst moment there?

B.B. Oh, nothing to do with life and death, death and fear. It was an incident that I laughed about a great deal afterwards. I think it was Yablonitsa. Yablonitsa is a little place in the middle of a plain surrounded by mountains, tall, over pine mountains. And it was at night that we arrived there. You have to go up from Mostar by helicopter up the gorge of the Neretva valley. I think 9 o'clock at night in February 1994. We had to have a briefing. I interpreted. The general asked the questions and the local commanders answered and he called upon "colonel this, would you please explain this and colonel that what's happening in your valley, etc." I was given a bunker, which was a hole dug in the ground with tree trunks across it, the level of the ground and you had to go down some steps dug in the earth down there. It was freezing, freezing cold, very badly lit. I had my pack on my back and stepped down, missed a step and fell into a hole filled with water up to my knees. I tried to get out and of course I was trapped and fell forward on my face, so I was lying in the mud, covered in mud, weighed down by my bag. I dropped that and swearing with myself, said: -"Why, at your age, what on earth are you doing, what a game? Why come up here? You know, why not let find somebody younger coming for the job." And here I'm supposed to give a briefing afterwards and look dignified and try to keep up appearances and I was swearing with myself and I heard the same splash right behind me and it turned out to be the general to come to see how things were. He had the same thing up to his knees and fell flat on his face, covered with mud. And afterwards I told him about it and I said "You have no idea how good it felt to see that I was not going to be alone to appear

like that at the briefing." Then, of course, he yelled at me and said "You dirty so and so." That's all the sympathy I got. That's one moment I do remember very clearly. That night, by the way, a so-called stray dog came in, started gnawing at the cot that I had down on the floor and I woke up in the middle of the night there, there was this gnawing sound, I took a torch and realized it was a dog, so I invited the dog into bed to get me warm.

Cor. What did you feel when you left he country? Was it relief or did you feel grateful for the experience?

B.B. Yes, it was relief. That was the first feeling. Yes, I was extremely tired, physically and morally. And after that I was often asked - what's the solution? - and I honestly didn't know. I really didn't know.

Cor. Many people thought after that you were entitled to enjoy your retirement and put your feet up. But it sure wasn't long before you were sent to another place of horror in Africa.

B.B. Yes, Burundi and Rwanda. Burundi... it wasn't a year. I came back in March 1994 and I went out to Burundi in February 1995. There was a call in the middle of the night "Are you available?" The Security Council is going over there. There is a situation of a coup d'etat in the making. The Security Council wants to stop it by taking action immediately. It sent half of its contingent, and no French speakers because those were French-speaking territories and they didn't want to have a lode of past colonial heritage brought to their minds. So they took an interpreter.

Cor. Were you surprised by what you found? 44

B.B. Yes, yes. We traveled all day, traveled all night. I was doing some translating, writing on the armrest on the plane, talking with the President of the Security Council's delegation that was going down there. We were dead tired when we got there and we first met this fellow, then that fellow at the other briefing. I had to catch whatever I could from the mess of information that the political affairs officer had brought. I didn't know who was who or what was what and here I found that this fellow was the fellow responsible for the coup d'etat and discussion went on with all sides, things calmed down for a bit.

One particular thing was told about. This fellow was, do be careful, you may want to knock off the Prime Minister and also the representative of the Secretary General, but don't touch the American Ambassador, he is from Texas! Everybody laughed and that broke the ice a bit and things went from a very tense situation to more and more relaxed. But it was all meeting people and running around during two days we spent there. We went after that to Rwanda and see how things were happening there. Things that calmed down in Rwanda, but it was still great deal of refugee movement and there was one camp in particular, Kibeo, that had 250,000 people. From the helicopter dotting all the country we saw pop-tents, pale blue, UN blue, and when we landed there we found that the country which was supposed to speak French, their language was Kerwanda. Only some children spoke French and we thought the problem was how to educate all those kids, flocks of children all over the place running and, of course, very excited at sight of the helicopter. The people seemed to organize themselves quite well. The 32 commanders chosen

among the population there for 250,000 wasn't much. They were all young men with some experience of government and administration and they were running a very good show. The villagers had grouped themselves by village. They were selling, buying, exchanging the goods delivered to them by ox cart etc. And they were coping as best as could. Things were peaceful and quiet but obviously, it couldn't go on for very long. There was also a sort of teenage, how we say, rowdiness that could have been interpreted as rebellion. You could see an imminence of danger there, which justified the government's decision to break up the camp and send the people home, with all the problems. The soldiers in their guard-room had a panoply of machetes that had been used to inflict harm on the neighbor by various tribes. That was quite impressive, but we were not... we didn't see any massacres.

Cor. What advice would you give to new recruits to the profession now?

B.B. Oh, I love this profession so much that I... You know, I do have a school here, in New York and I do have young recruits who come along and I do try to light the fire in them. And tell them how wonderful it is to start this profession. Not only will you find that you are someone who helps another group of people understand the first party, but you will find yourself... you will derive so much enrichment, personal enrichment from it. And you will get such enormous satisfaction in being able to create understanding and to explain things that may have been misunderstood otherwise I don't know any other profession like it and I am still, still at it.

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