‘Ya’ from Kandahar to Guantanamo!
The other day, a former Bagram detainee told a very interesting story. We were talking about the innocent Afghans that are arrested by the international forces mistakenly or someone told on them for personal grudges, bounties etc. As majority of the prisoners arrested during the anti-terror war are from the southern and eastern Pashtun provinces of Afghanistan, they claim that their being Pashtun was a major factor that has been contributing to their atrocities during the arrest and post-arrest situations.
Then we talked about the problems of mistranslations and misinterpretations that often led several innocent people end up in Bagram or Guantanamo, the notorious detention U.S. Navel facility in Cuba.
The former Bagram detainee said that many of the detainees from the southern Afghan provinces – Kandahar, Zabul, Oruzgan, Helmand, and even Ghazni – had ended up in Bagram or Guantanamo just because the international forces and their American/European interpreters did not completely understand the local dialect. In many cases, a ‘ya’ is the detainee’s ticket to Bagram or Guantanamo!
The Pashto language has many dialects (click here for more details about this). Pashtuns from the Northern Pashtunkhwa (N.W.F.P.) province of Pakistan, the tribal areas, and from the eastern and central provinces in Afghanistan use the word ‘na’ for ‘no’ and ‘ho’ for ‘yes.’ But Pashtuns from Southern Pashtunkhwa (parts of Baluchistan including Quetta) province of Pakistan and from the southern provinces of Afghanistan use the word ‘ya’ for ‘no’ and ‘ho’ for ‘yes.’ Interpreters and translators who come to Afghanistan from the U.S. and Europe speak better English but don’t possess much knowledge about the local languages and the differences between the dialects. As a result, when they go to the remote areas of the country and question local people, they can’t convey the message properly to the locals and don’t understand their answers which then create problems for both the Afghans and the international forces.
Thus, when the forces raid a house in the south, and ask the men there: ‘Are you Taliban?’ Naturally, they will reply ‘ya.’ The international forces and their interpreters take this as ‘yes’ and arrest the innocent poor people. This is again repeated during the interrogation process. When the interrogators ask a detainee: ‘Do you have ties with the Taliban or insurgents?’ The detainee replies: ‘ya’. He means ‘no’ but because the interpreters don’t know this dialect difference, they take it as his confession and put him into jail. The poor people end up in Bagram or Guantanamo, subjected to torture and many years’ unlawful detention.
Also Read: Translating into Pashto: Some Common Mistakes.
That is similar to the situation in the Korean language, where both 'na' and 'ya' mean yes, and 'anyo' means no.