When Bosnia was a Commonwealth Country: British Forces and their Interpreters in Republika Srpska 1995-2007

I interviewed Bojan in a bookshop café in the centre of Banja Luka. He was turning thirty-two that year - only four years older than me - but had started working as an interpreter in 1996 while attending a gimnazija, the most academic Bosnian secondary school, near his home town in north-west Bosnia. Bojan and I talked about his work on several British bases around Multi-National Division South-West (MND SW), the zone of Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) where the multi-national military force was commanded by a British division headquartered in the so-called Banja Luka Metal Factory. His mother and father, a schoolteacher and a private-sector employee, had depended on his earnings, which he remembered as over a thousand Deutschmarks for a month's full-time work. After various part-time contracts for other international organizations and private clients, he won a foreign postgraduate scholarship and returned to teach at a private college in his home town. Afterwards, over coffee, he reflected on what the British presence had meant to Banja Luka. He associated British forces with a calm efficiency missing from local practices and suggested to me that when the British had been in Banja Luka, Bosnia had practically been a Commonwealth country - a foreign territory drawn into Britain's cultural ambit through the exercise of British power.

Bojan was one of fourteen interpreters I interviewed who had worked for British forces in the Serb entity of BiH, usually known even in English as 'Republika Srpska' or 'the RS'.¹ This paper aims to show the experiences most common to local people who were employed as interpreters through the Metal Factory headquarters during the British deployment to north-west Bosnia. Local interpreters facilitated communication and were essential to the peace-support activities of British troops - weapons inspections, liaison visits, mine clearance, civil-military relations, patrols. Their accounts point to a semi-British cultural space within the Banja Luka area that was produced on military bases yet carried over into the interpreters' homes and friendship networks. However, they also show that many factors impeded

Fig. 1.

Bosnia-Herzegovina in December 1995.

affinity between interpreters and the force. Workers could have been supported and the quality of language mediations could have been improved if interpreters or their users and supervisors had been equipped to recognize the impact of everyday practices or policies not thought through.

The RS group unexpectedly represented the largest single cluster of interviewees in my study of language support for peace operations in BiH.² Originally, I had expected respondents to be more or less evenly spaced throughout Bosnia apart from a predicted Sarajevo cluster. However, my research team connected two British universities from large English cities and one public institution associated with semi-official military history (Southampton, Reading and the Imperial War Museum), and I was a British national and native English speaker. These links influenced the structure of the dataset and also shaped the data. The RS speakers were conscious of an immediate British listener and a remote British audience: even before speaking, they had chosen to acknowledge their Anglophone audience and perform identities as experienced English users by giving the interview in English, not their native language. Studies of oral history remind us that 'the story that is actually told is always the one preferred amongst other possible versions'.³ The RS stories were told at or near the end of unexpected careers to an imagined collective audience that had never appreciated the impact of British presence in north-west Bosnia.

Some context for the British presence in Bosnia is necessary before turning to the experiences of these interpreters. The British military had had troops in Bosnia since November 1992, when it began contributing to the United Nations peacekeeping force (UNPROFOR), and remained a key contributor after UNPROFOR was replaced by a NATO-led force following the Dayton Peace Agreement in December 1995. The NATO force was organizationally divided into three Multi-National Divisions (MNDs), led by the three so...