Closing Arguments

The Translator's Silence

Chapter 18: Closing Arguments

The trial had lasted seven months. Seven months of testimony, of cross-examination, of legal argument, of procedural motions, of recesses and adjournments and the particular pacing of international criminal proceedings, which moved with the deliberation of an institution that understood that the quality of its justice depended on the thoroughness of its process, the thoroughness measured not in speed but in completeness, the completeness the standard, the standard requiring that every piece of evidence be presented and challenged and considered, that every witness be heard and cross-examined, that every legal argument be made and rebutted.

Seven months. Amara had translated for seven months. She had sat in the booth for seven months — not continuously, not every day, the schedule rotating, other interpreters sharing the load on days when the testimony was not in Lingala, the load distributed among the English booth's team. But the core of the trial — the witnesses who spoke Lingala, the testimony that required Amara's particular skill — the core had been hers, and the core had occupied the center of her professional life for seven months, and the seven months had produced the accumulation that the sponge now held.

Fourteen witnesses. The prosecution had called fourteen witnesses over the course of the trial. Fourteen people who had traveled from the DRC to The Hague to sit in the witness box and speak into the microphone and describe what had happened to them. Fourteen testimonies. Fourteen translations. Fourteen crossings of the bridge. Some in Lingala, translated directly by Amara. Some in Swahili or French, translated through the relay. Each testimony adding to the record, adding to the evidence, adding to the weight.

The defense had called three witnesses — an expert on the chain of command in the Forces de Liberation militia, a former militia member who testified that the attacks on the villages were conducted by lower-ranking officers without Mukiza's knowledge or authorization, and a character witness who testified to Mukiza's reputation for discipline and restraint. The defense witnesses had spoken in French, and Amara had translated their testimony from French to English, and the translation had been straightforward, the testimony factual and controlled, the witnesses professional, the testimony lacking the particular weight of the prosecution witnesses' testimony because the defense witnesses had not been in the villages, had not experienced the attacks, had not carried the events in their bodies.

Now the closing arguments. The trial's final act. The prosecution and the defense making their final cases, their final arguments, their final attempts to persuade the judges that the evidence supported their position — the prosecution arguing that the evidence proved Mukiza's guilt beyond reasonable doubt, the defense arguing that the evidence did not.

Devaux stood for the prosecution. She had prepared for this — months of preparation, the closing argument the culmination of three years of investigation and seven months of trial, the argument the prosecution's last opportunity to speak before the judges withdrew to deliberate. She stood at the prosecution table and she spoke and Amara translated.

Devaux spoke in French. Her French was the same French she had used throughout the trial — precise, formal, the French of the Belgian legal academy — but the French of the closing argument was different in register from the French of the examination, the register elevated, the language moving from the procedural to the persuasive, from the fact-gathering to the argument-making, the shift a shift that Amara translated by shifting her own register, her English moving from the neutral reporting of the examination phase to the structured persuasion of the closing argument, the register-matching the protocol's requirement, the requirement that the translation preserve not just the words but the effect of the words, the effect the persuasion, the persuasion part of the content.

Devaux recounted the evidence. She summarized the testimony of the fourteen witnesses. She described the pattern — the systematic attacks on multiple villages, the consistent methodology (encirclement, separation, execution, burning), the intercepted communications that placed Mukiza in command, the chain of command that connected Mukiza's orders to the fighters who carried them out. She described the pattern with the precision of a lawyer who had spent years constructing it and who now presented it in its completed form, the pattern visible, the pattern compelling, the pattern the prosecution's case.

Amara translated the pattern. She translated each element — the villages, the methodology, the communications, the chain of command. She translated the prosecution's language, which was the language of law, the language of evidence, the language of proof beyond reasonable doubt. She translated the language and the language was clinical and the clinical was, as it had been throughout the trial, the bone, and inside the bone was the marrow, and the marrow was the fourteen testimonies, the fourteen witnesses, the fourteen human beings who had described what they had experienced, and the marrow was present in the closing argument the way the marrow was present in the bone — invisible, internal, essential.

Devaux reached the conclusion of her argument. She stood at the prosecution table and she said, in French, that the evidence proved beyond reasonable doubt that Colonel Jean-Pierre Mukiza had ordered the attacks on the villages of Kisangani Province, that the attacks constituted crimes against humanity under Articles 7(1)(a), 7(1)(b), 7(1)(h) of the Rome Statute and war crimes under Article 8(2)(e)(i), that the accused was criminally responsible for the deaths of three hundred and forty civilians and for the suffering of the survivors. She asked the court to find the accused guilty on all counts.

Amara translated: "The prosecution requests that the court find the accused guilty on all counts."

The sentence was the prosecution's sentence. The sentence was the prosecution's demand for justice. The sentence demanded. And Amara, translating the demand, was the vehicle of the demand — her voice carrying the prosecution's demand into the headphones of the court, her mouth producing the words that asked for Mukiza's conviction, her body the conduit through which the demand traveled from the prosecution's intention to the court's hearing.

She translated the demand with the neutrality the protocol required. The neutrality. The word that had defined her work for seven months, for twelve years, for the entire duration of her career as an interpreter. The neutrality that the protocol demanded, the neutrality that the training instilled, the neutrality that was the fiction upon which the work was built, the fiction that the interpreter was a window, a conduit, a mechanism, the fiction that the words passed through without affecting the passage, the fiction that Amara, translating the prosecution's demand for Mukiza's conviction, was neither for the conviction nor against it, neither hoping for justice nor fearing injustice, neither siding with the prosecution nor sympathizing with the defense.

The fiction. Marcus had called it a fiction. Dr. Brandt had called it a necessary fiction. The protocol called it a requirement. Amara called it the booth — the booth was the fiction made physical, the booth the space where the fiction was enacted, the glass and the microphone and the headphones the props of the fiction, the props creating the conditions under which the fiction became functional, the fiction functioning because the booth enforced it, the booth separating the interpreter from the courtroom, the separation making the neutrality possible, the possibility the fiction's condition.

The fiction kept the booth from being a cage. This was the thought that came to Amara during the prosecution's closing argument, the thought arriving between sentences, between the French and the English, in the gap where the translation happened. The fiction of neutrality kept the booth from being a cage. Without the fiction — without the belief that she was a window, a conduit, a mechanism — the booth would be a cage, a box of glass in which a woman sat and absorbed the worst of human behavior and was required to reproduce it in another language without reaction, without response, without the human right to say no, I will not carry this, I will not translate this, this is too much, this is too heavy, this exceeds my capacity. The fiction of neutrality was the thing that made the carrying bearable, the fiction the psychological mechanism that the protocol provided, the mechanism saying: you are not carrying this, you are transmitting this, the weight is not yours, the weight belongs to the testimony, and you are only the bridge.

The fiction was a fiction. The weight was hers. The sponge was full. But the fiction was necessary, and the necessity was the booth's mercy, and the mercy was the thing that allowed Amara to continue, to sit in the chair, to put on the headphones, to press the button, to translate.

Laporte stood for the defense. The defense's closing argument. Amara translated this too.

Laporte spoke in the same precise French he had used throughout the trial, the French measured, deliberate, each word selected from the available options with the care of a jeweler selecting stones, each word examined for its clarity and its weight and its position in the sentence's structure. He argued that the prosecution had not proven its case beyond reasonable doubt. He argued that the intercepted communications were ambiguous, that the chain of command was unclear, that the witnesses' testimonies contained inconsistencies — the inconsistencies he had identified during the cross-examinations, the numerical uncertainties, the durational approximations, the inability to identify the accused.

He argued that his client was not guilty. He argued this not as a statement of moral innocence but as a legal argument, the legal argument operating in the specific framework of proof and doubt, the framework requiring that the prosecution prove its case to the standard of beyond reasonable doubt, and the defense arguing that the prosecution had not met this standard. The argument was a legal argument, a procedural argument, an argument about evidence and standards and the particular requirements of international criminal law, and Amara translated it with the same neutrality she had translated the prosecution's argument, the same accuracy, the same fidelity, the same register.

She translated the defense's demand for acquittal with the same voice she had translated the prosecution's demand for conviction. The same voice. The same microphone. The same booth. The same red light. The two demands — conviction and acquittal, justice and doubt — passing through the same interpreter, the same mechanism, the same window, the same sponge. The two demands translated with the same skill and the same care and the same neutrality, the neutrality the equalization, the neutrality treating both demands equally, the equality the court's requirement, the requirement the principle of fair trial, the principle that the accused was entitled to have his defense translated with the same accuracy and the same fidelity as the prosecution's case, the accuracy and the fidelity blind to outcome, blind to verdict, blind to the particular content of the translation.

This was the neutrality's highest test. The closing arguments were the moment when the trial's stakes were most visible, the moment when the two sides made their final cases and the interpreter translated both with equal care, the equal care the proof that the neutrality was functional, that the fiction held, that the booth was not a cage but a bridge, a bridge that carried traffic in both directions, a bridge that did not favor one side or the other, a bridge that was structurally neutral even if the bridge-builder was humanly affected.

Amara translated Laporte's closing argument. She translated his analysis of the evidence. She translated his challenges to the prosecution's witnesses. She translated his legal arguments about the standard of proof. She translated his conclusion — that the accused should be acquitted on all counts.

She translated: "The defense requests that the court acquit the accused on all counts."

The sentence was the defense's sentence. The sentence was the defense's demand for doubt. And Amara, having translated both demands — the demand for justice and the demand for doubt — sat in the booth and held both in her body, the two demands coexisting in the space where the translation happened, the space that was neutral, the space that was the fiction, the space that held both the conviction and the acquittal without choosing, without preferring, without the particular human act of deciding which demand was right.

But she had heard the testimony. She had translated the testimony. She had carried the testimony in her body for seven months. She had heard Witness 247's voice in the original Lingala, had heard the witness describe the village and the attack and the hiding and the church and the grief. She had heard fourteen witnesses. She had heard the three sentences. She had heard the five-minute pause. She had heard the untranslatable word.

The hearing was not neutral. The hearing was the sponge. The sponge had absorbed the testimony and the testimony was the prosecution's evidence and the evidence argued for conviction and the sponge, full of the evidence, was not neutral, could not be neutral, the neutrality impossible for the sponge because the sponge held the testimony and the testimony was not neutral — the testimony was the witness's truth, the witness's experience, the witness's carrying, and the carrying was not neutral because the carrying was not abstract but specific, not general but particular, not legal but human.

And yet the translation was neutral. The translation of the defense's closing argument was as accurate, as faithful, as the translation of the prosecution's closing argument. The output was neutral. The window was transparent. The bridge carried both ways.

The sponge was not neutral. The window was neutral. Amara was both.

The booth held both — the fiction and the truth, the neutrality and the absorption, the window and the sponge. The booth was the space where both coexisted, the space where the translator performed the fiction while experiencing the truth, the performance the work, the experience the cost, the work and the cost simultaneous, inseparable, the two conditions of the translator's existence.

The closing arguments ended. Both sides had spoken. Both demands had been translated. Both cases had been made. The trial's argumentative phase was complete.

Judge Okonjo spoke. He thanked both counsel. He announced that the court would retire to deliberate. He did not indicate how long the deliberation would take — days, weeks, months. The deliberation's duration was the court's prerogative, the duration determined by the complexity of the evidence and the judges' need for thorough consideration and the particular pace of judicial reasoning, which was not the pace of argument but the pace of judgment, the pace slower, more careful, the judgment requiring the consideration of everything that had been said and translated and recorded over seven months.

The court rose. The courtroom emptied. The trial's active phase was over. What remained was the waiting — the waiting for the deliberation to conclude, the waiting for the verdict, the waiting that was not the interpreter's waiting (the interpreter had nothing to translate during the deliberation) but the trial's waiting, the case's waiting, the justice's waiting.

Amara removed her headphones. She sat in the booth. The booth was quiet. The courtroom was empty. The closing arguments were over. The demands had been translated. The neutrality had been maintained. The fiction had held.

The fiction had held. The booth was not a cage. The booth was a bridge. The bridge had carried both demands. The bridge was neutral. The builder was not. The builder was human. The builder was a sponge. The sponge was full.

The builder sat in the booth and she looked through the glass at the empty courtroom and she thought about the seven months and the fourteen witnesses and the closing arguments and the two demands and the neutrality and the fiction and the truth.

She thought: the fiction is the thing that keeps the booth from being a cage. The fiction is the thing that makes the carrying possible. The fiction is the mercy.

She stood. She gathered her satchel. She walked to the door. The door clicked. The corridor. The lobby. The exit. The air.

The air was October. The air was cold. The autumn had arrived while the closing arguments were being delivered. The seasons had changed. The trial had changed them — or the trial had occurred while they changed, the changing independent of the trial, the seasons indifferent to the courtroom, the seasons continuing their cycle while the court conducted its proceedings, the cycle and the proceedings simultaneous, the simultaneity the condition of all human activity, the activity occurring within the cycle rather than apart from it.

Amara walked into the October air. She walked to the tram stop. She waited. The tram came. She boarded. She sat. She went home.

The waiting began. The deliberation began. The silence began — not the translator's silence but the court's silence, the silence of the judges behind closed doors, the silence of deliberation, the silence in which the verdict was formed.

And within the court's silence, Amara's silence. The translator's silence. The silence that held both demands — the demand for justice and the demand for doubt — and that chose neither, and that carried both, and that waited.