Prosecution Opens

The Translator's Silence

Chapter 7: Prosecution Opens

Claire Devaux stood. The prosecution's lead counsel. She stood at the prosecution table, arranged her notes — three pages, Amara could see through the glass, three pages of typed text with handwritten annotations in the margins, the annotations in blue ink, the particular blue of European fountain pens — and she looked at the judges and she began.

The opening statement was in French. Devaux was Belgian, French-speaking, educated at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles, and her French was the French of the Belgian legal academy, precise, formal, slightly different in cadence from the French of Paris, the way Amara's English was slightly different from the English of London, the accent carrying the geography, the geography carrying the history, the history present in the way the tongue shaped the vowels and the throat released the consonants.

Amara pressed the microphone button. The red light. The live channel. She was now the English voice. Every word Devaux spoke in French, Amara would speak in English, the two women speaking simultaneously, the one in the courtroom and the other in the booth, the one visible and the other invisible, the one addressing the judges and the other addressing the headphones, the two voices carrying the same content in different languages, the same argument in different architectures, the same description of the same events in the same courtroom in two languages at the same time.

Devaux began with the village. She named the village — Matenda. A village of approximately four hundred people in Kisangani Province, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. The village was located at the confluence of two rivers — the Lindi and a smaller tributary whose name Amara translated from Devaux's French pronunciation into the English pronunciation the court would record, the sound shifting, the consonants adjusting, the name the same name but sounding different in the mouths of different languages, the village's name a small example of the large problem, the problem that everything changed in translation, even the things that should not change, even proper nouns, even the names of places where people had lived and died.

Devaux described the village. She described it with the precision of a prosecutor who had studied the evidence, who had read the investigators' reports, who had examined the satellite photographs and the forensic analyses and the witness statements that her team had gathered over three years of preparation. She described the village's geography — the rivers, the surrounding forest, the single road that connected the village to the provincial capital, a road that was not paved but worn into the red earth by the passage of trucks and motorcycles and feet. She described the village's population — farmers, mostly, subsistence farmers who grew cassava and maize and beans, who fished in the rivers, who lived in houses built of mud brick with thatched roofs, houses that would burn.

Amara translated. The description was clinical, as opening statements were clinical — the language calibrated to inform rather than to move, to establish facts rather than to evoke emotions, because the opening statement was a map, not a journey, the prosecution showing the judges where the evidence would take them before the evidence took them there. But the clinical language contained something that was not clinical. The description of the village — the rivers, the cassava, the mud-brick houses — contained life, the life that had existed before the violence, the ordinary life that the violence would destroy, and the ordinary life was present in the clinical language the way the blood was present in the body even when the body appeared calm, circulating beneath the surface, vital, invisible.

Devaux described the morning of the attack. March 14, 2018. Dawn. She said the word dawn — l'aube — and Amara translated it — dawn — and the word was the same in both languages, a single syllable in English, a single syllable in French, the brevity of the word containing the vastness of the event, because dawn was a word that meant the beginning of a day but that in this context meant the beginning of a massacre, and the double meaning was not in the word but in the context, and the context was the prosecution's opening statement, and the opening statement was the frame that gave the word its weight.

The militia arrived at dawn. Devaux described the arrival. She described the number of fighters — approximately one hundred and twenty, the prosecution estimated, based on witness accounts and intercepted communications. She described their weapons — AK-47 assault rifles, machetes, grenades. She described their approach — from the north, along the road from the forest, the approach coordinated, the fighters moving in two columns, the columns encircling the village from the east and the west, the encirclement a military tactic, a textbook tactic, the kind of tactic taught in military academies and employed by armies and militias and anyone who wanted to surround a target and prevent escape, the tactic as old as warfare, as old as organized violence, the tactic that Mukiza, a trained soldier, would have known and would have ordered.

Amara translated the description. She translated "encirclement" — encerclement in Devaux's French, encirclement in Amara's English — the word the same word, borrowed between languages, the Latin root shared, the concept shared, the military history shared, the word traveling from language to language with the ease of a word that described a universal human activity, the activity of surrounding, of closing off, of ensuring that no one escaped.

She was aware, as she translated, of Mukiza in the dock. She could see him through the glass — seated, headphones on, listening to the French-channel translation of Devaux's statement. Devaux was speaking in French, so Mukiza was hearing Devaux directly, without translation, the accused and the prosecutor sharing a language, the language that was Mukiza's first language and Devaux's first language and the language in which the orders had been given and the charges had been filed and the prosecution's case would be argued. Amara's English translation was for the others — for Judge Tanaka, who did not speak French, for the English-speaking members of the gallery, for the English-language record that the court maintained alongside the French-language record, the two records parallel, the two translations of the same proceedings, the duality a structural feature of the ICC, the court built on two languages the way a bridge was built on two banks.

Devaux described the separation. The militia separated the men from the women and children. She described the process — the fighters entering the houses, ordering the occupants out, forcing them to the village's central clearing, a clearing where the market was held on Saturdays, where children played, where the village gathered for celebrations and meetings and the ordinary congregations of community life. The clearing became the site of the separation. The men were ordered to one side. The women and children to the other. The separation was methodical — the fighters moving through the gathered villagers, pointing, directing, the physical sorting of human beings into categories, the categories determined by the militia's purpose, which the men would not survive and which the women and children would survive in the specific and terrible way that survival meant in the context of this particular militia's practices.

Amara translated this. She translated the separation. She translated the clearing, the pointing, the directing. She translated the language of sorting — the French words for "separated," "ordered," "directed" becoming the English words for "separated," "ordered," "directed," the words the same in meaning, the meaning the same in horror, the horror the same in both languages because horror did not change in translation, horror was one of the things that translated with complete fidelity, the way mathematics translated with complete fidelity, because horror, like mathematics, was a structure that existed independently of language, a structure that language could only describe, not modify.

Then the killing. Devaux described the killing. She described it in the language of the law — "the militia forces opened fire on the male villagers," she said, and Amara translated, "the militia forces opened fire on the male villagers," and the sentence was clinical, was legal, was the kind of sentence that appeared in indictments and prosecution briefs and court records, a sentence that contained a massacre in the way a bottle contained the sea — a portion of it, a sample, the vastness reduced to a manageable volume, the volume necessary for the court's purposes, the court unable to contain the vastness, the court requiring the reduction.

Devaux continued. She described the killing in more detail — the duration, the method, the systematic nature. She said that the killing lasted approximately forty-five minutes. She said that the fighters used automatic weapons and machetes. She said that the killing was not random but systematic — the men lined up, shot in groups, the bodies falling in rows, the rows visible in the satellite photographs that the prosecution would present as evidence, the photographs taken by a commercial satellite that happened to pass over the village on March 15, the day after the attack, the satellite's camera recording the aftermath from orbit, the burned houses and the mass graves visible from space, the violence legible at a distance of four hundred kilometers.

Amara translated this. She translated "systematic." She translated "automatic weapons." She translated "forty-five minutes." She translated the duration and she thought about duration — forty-five minutes was the length of a class period in the schools she had attended in Accra, was the length of a moderate run on the beach, was the length of time she might spend cooking dinner, was a unit of time that she understood in her body, in her daily life, in the ordinary context of ordinary activities, and the understanding of the duration in ordinary context made the duration in this context harder to translate, not linguistically harder but psychologically harder, because the forty-five minutes of killing were the same forty-five minutes as the forty-five minutes of running or cooking, the same number of seconds, the same passage of time, and the sameness connected the ordinary to the extraordinary, connected Amara's life to the lives that had ended in those forty-five minutes, connected the translator's body to the bodies that had fallen in the clearing in Matenda.

She did not pause. She did not hesitate. She translated "forty-five minutes" without pause because the protocol required it and because her training required it and because the courtroom required it, the courtroom's schedule and rhythm and procedure requiring that the translation be continuous, uninterrupted, the bridge open, the words crossing, the testimony carried.

Devaux described what happened after the killing. The burning. The fighters set fire to the houses. The mud-brick houses with thatch roofs — the thatch caught quickly, the fires spreading from house to house, the village burning while the bodies of the men lay in the clearing and the women and children were held at the village's edge, made to watch, or not made to watch but unable to not watch, the fire visible from everywhere in the village because the village was small and the fire was large and the smoke rose in columns that were visible for kilometers, the smoke the signal, the announcement, the militia's declaration that the village had been punished, that the punishment was complete, that the smoke was the punctuation at the end of the sentence the militia had written in fire and blood.

Amara translated the burning. She translated the smoke. She translated the declarative function of the violence — the violence as communication, the militia communicating its power through the destruction of the village, the communication intended for other villages, for the province, for the region, the violence a language of its own, a language that did not require translation because its meaning was universal: we can do this to you; we have done this to them; you are next or you are not next, depending on your compliance, your submission, your willingness to accept the authority of the militia, which was the authority of the gun and the machete and the match.

The opening statement continued. Devaux described the aftermath — the survivors, the displacement, the years of exile and trauma that followed the attack. She described the investigation — the ICC's investigators arriving in the region eighteen months after the attack, interviewing survivors, collecting evidence, building the case that would result in the arrest warrant for Mukiza, the warrant executed by Congolese authorities in cooperation with the ICC, Mukiza arrested in Goma in January 2022, transferred to The Hague, detained, charged, arraigned, and now on trial.

Amara translated the entire statement. She translated for ninety minutes — three rotations with Fatima, each rotation thirty minutes, the two women passing the translation back and forth like relay runners passing a baton, the transition seamless in the headphones, the voice changing but the translation continuing, the bridge remaining open.

At the end of the statement, Devaux sat down. The courtroom was silent for a moment — the silence that follows a long and detailed description of violence, the silence that is not emptiness but absorption, the room absorbing what has been said, the air holding the words the way air holds smoke, the words dispersing slowly, settling on the surfaces of the room, on the judges' bench, on the lawyers' tables, on the dock where Mukiza sat with his headphones on, having heard the entire statement in French, having heard his crimes described in the language he shared with his accuser, the language in which he had given the orders that Devaux said had produced the massacre, the language that connected the accuser and the accused in a shared grammar that contained both the orders and the charges.

Amara sat in the booth. Her microphone was still live. The red light was still on. She waited. The silence in the courtroom was the silence she translated by not translating — the silence did not require translation because silence was the same in every language, silence was the one thing that did not change when it crossed the bridge, silence was the universal, the lingua franca, the language that everyone spoke and that no one needed to translate.

But the silence was also different in each language. The silence after French was different from the silence after English was different from the silence after Lingala. The silence carried the residue of the language that preceded it, the way a room carried the residue of the people who had just left it — the warmth, the scent, the displaced air. The silence after Devaux's opening statement was a French silence, a silence that followed formal French legal argument, a silence shaped by the structure of French rhetoric, which built toward a conclusion and then stopped, the stopping definitive, the silence the absence of the definitive stop, the absence that was itself a conclusion.

Judge Okonjo spoke. He thanked the prosecution. He announced a thirty-minute recess. The courtroom began to move — lawyers standing, gallery members stretching, the particular redistribution of bodies that occurred during a recess, the room transitioning from the stillness of proceedings to the motion of intermission.

Amara turned off her microphone. The red light went dark. She removed her headphones. She sat in the booth. Fatima was already standing, already moving toward the door, already crossing the threshold from the booth to the corridor. Amara sat.

She sat and she thought about marrow. The word had come to her during the translation — not a word she had spoken, not a word in the testimony, but a word that had risen in her mind during the description of the village, during the clinical language that contained the horror the way a bone contained marrow. The clinical language was the bone. The horror was the marrow. And Amara, translating the bone, had translated the marrow too, because the marrow was in the bone, was inseparable from the bone, was the living tissue inside the hard structure, and the translation of the structure was also the translation of the tissue, and the tissue was the thing that stayed.

The bone passed through her. The legal language, the clinical description, the prosecution's careful and precise rendering of the evidence — this passed through her the way all professional language passed through her, cleanly, without residue, the words entering and exiting and leaving the interpreter's mind clear. But the marrow — the forty-five minutes, the mud-brick houses, the thatch roofs that caught quickly, the women and children made to watch — the marrow did not pass through. The marrow stayed. The marrow settled in the space between the ears and the mouth, in the space where the seven languages lived, in the space that was Amara's interior, and the settling was quiet, was imperceptible from the outside, was visible only to Amara, who felt it the way she felt the change in temperature when she entered the booth, the slight warmth, the enclosed air, the particular climate of the space where the translation happened and where the marrow accumulated.

She stood. She left the booth. She walked to the cafeteria. She bought a coffee — she did not usually drink coffee, she preferred rooibos tea, but today she wanted the bitterness, the sharp taste that was not soothing but alerting, the taste that said: you are here, you are in the ICC cafeteria, you are a woman buying coffee, you are not in a village in eastern Congo, you are not in a clearing where men were lined up and shot, you are here, in The Hague, in a building where justice is administered through language, and the language is your tool and your burden and the thing you carry and the thing that carries you.

She drank the coffee. It was bitter. She returned to the booth. The recess ended. The proceedings resumed. The protocol continued. The translation continued. The bridge remained open. The words crossed. And the marrow, inside the bone of the legal language, crossed too, and settled, and stayed.