International conference LANGUAGES AT WAR: POLICIES AND PRACTICES OF LANGUAGE CONTACTS IN CONFLICT 7-9 April 2011, Imperial War Museum, London List of abstracts Baker Dr. Catherine Baker University of Southampton When Bosnia was a Commonwealth country: British forces and their interpreters in Republika Srpska, 1995-2007 British forces established a network of bases in Republika Srpska immediately after the Dayton Peace Agreement in December 1995 and remained, with their presence centred on the divisional base at the Banja Luka Metal Factory, until 2007. This paper draws on oral history interviews with interpreters who worked in towns such as Mrkonjic Grad, Sipovo, Prijedor and Banja Luka itself to present an account of their experiences between the arrival of British troops and the closure of the Metal Factory: from beginning work during the improvised phase of recruitment and adapting to the diverse dialects and regimental cultures of British forces, through reconciling one's employment with local mistrust of NATO, to negotiating the anxieties of the gradual drawdown of forces and coming to terms with the cultural and political impact of years of close contact with the British military. Best Dr David Albert Best Università degli studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”, Italy For use in connection with Italian prisoners-of-war working in Agriculture”: Case study of an Italian Phrase Book designed for Scots farmers assigned Italian P.O.W.s “This little book is intended as an aid to farmers and their households, officials, foremen and all who have to deal with Italian prisoners-of- war.” Thus commences the Italian Phrase Book and Vocabulary issued by the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries in conjunction with the Department of Agriculture for Scotland. The booklet, part of government foreign language policy during WWII, was aimed at those in direct charge of prisoners-of-war who, in many cases, were “peasant” soldiers taken during desert combat in North Africa and then put to work on Scottish farms, but also those many male members of Scots-Italian families who had been residing peacefully on British soil for years and had nothing to do with the Italian military campaign nor, for that matter, with farming. In the Italian Phrase Book, much is told in the agrarian terminology about Scottish agriculture, landscapes, and climatic conditions, in a simplified, phonetically transcribed Italian. But even with such a basic approach to language acquisition, where “the phrase will be intelligible to Italians even if the speaker does not know how to pronounce the language”, would such a rustic outlook have made much sense to Italians coming from very different rural Mediterranean (or non-rural Scottish) contexts? My case study of the little Italian Phrase Book endeavours to shed light on what Scots farmers/ landowners and their Italian P.O.W.s made of a pamphlet designed to ease communication with one another through “dealing with the main kind of work prisoners undertake” when perhaps – if we think in translation terms – the concepts “communicated” by the Ministry were either redundant or had no cultural equivalence at all. British Resolving Conflict via English : the British Council’s Peacekeeping Council English Project Presenters Nicholas Fletcher - manager Afghan National Security Forces Language Capability Project British Council Afghanistan Peter Hare – manager Peacekeeping English Project British Council Ethiopia This paper firstly will seek to give an overview of the British Council’s Peacekeeping English projects which have run or are still running in 34 countries all over the world. It will outline a brief history of the projects, how they were conceived, how they were funded, how they evolved and how they matured. Secondly the paper will seek to show how the British Council’s approach to introducing effective English language learning, teaching and testing systems in Ministries of Defence and in Ministries of the Interior around the world differ from analogue systems introduced by US agencies. Subsequently the paper will present four case studies of Peacekeeping English projects set up in Mongolia, Colombia, Ethiopia and Afghanistan. The project was set up in Mongolia to enable the country to send military units on UN peacekeeping missions around the world where the working language was English. The project was set up in Colombia for the same reason but also to enable the Colombian armed forces to work effectively with US agencies to counter the “narco- traficantes”. In Afghanistan, English language proficiency is essential for the Afghan security forces to collaborate effectively with multinational partners while the Ethiopian armed forces need English to work productively as African Union peacekeepers. Lastly the paper will attempt to assess the impact of the Peacekeeping English projects in helping to defuse global conflict using both quantitative and qualitative data. Cairoli Dr. Roberta Cairoli PhD, Università degli Studi of Milan Nazi fascist Spies and saboteurs in freed Italy (1943-1945) If the main strategies and politics of the Nazi occupation regime in Italy have been effectively reconstructed thanks to fundamental studies by historians such as Collotti, Klinkhammer, Schreiber and Gentile to name but a few, the activities of the German intelligence agencies in liberated Italy are still nearly completely unexplored. Those activities consisted in sending Italian agents, men and women, behind enemy lines; they were recruited and trained to carry out delicate missions of espionage and sabotage in the Allies occupied territory. The crossed analysis of documents from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Washington DC, and in particular from the Office of Counterespionage of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), contributes to throw light on the location and organization of the GIS (German Service Intelligence) which operated in tight connection with the special services, the police and the Armed Forces of the Italian Social Republic (RSI), giving place to a chaotic proliferation of control centers whose competences often overlapped. The interrogation reports written by the agents of the Counter- Intelligence Corps (CIC) - opportunely instructed on the interrogation techniques to employ in order to unmask enemy spies - concurs, moreover, to reconstruct the profile of enemy agents, their family and socio-cultural background, the activities carried out before and after the 8th September 1943, the reasons and the modalities of their enlistment, the characteristics of the mission and the circumstances of their arrest. In the greater part of the cases they were young people from the National Republican Guard (GNR), from Decima Flotilla Mas, from the Movement of the republican Italian Young people (MGIR) and meaningfully from the feminine auxiliary Services, a true tank of recruitment for the “secret agents”. Many engaged in the recruitment of agents who were provided through special offices were sent to schools to be taught courses, lasting between ten and thirty days, on the collection of information or sabotage operations to be performed in Allied-occupied Italy. The task of recruiting agents was generally entrusted to military personnel, mainly Italian or German officers who knew and spoke Italian. In other cases, agents were the same as those who helped the recruitment of friends and wished to experience "adventure" or were flattered by the excitement of engagement. Women were also recruited, such as those known as "Annabella", alias Baronessa Von Hodenberg, of German nationality, Floriana Bianchini Poli, "Daniela" also known as the "Black Lady", engaging with her husband for the Abwehr, or Miranda Serra, Commander of the female group “Onore e Combattimento” in Milan, which dealt with the recruitment for the “Special Group A” Col. David, composed exclusively of female staff. With regard to education the courses were exclusively led by German officers who spoke perfect Italian, aided and assisted by an interpreter. In this regard what is particularly relevant is the presence of a large number of women employed in the German secret services - particularly in Sicherheisdienst (SD) - acting as interpreters and secretaries, however, they were also used as spies. The paper will therefore contribute to wider debates on the cultural history of war, especially addressing gender issues, and by offering an entirely new perspective on ‘meeting the other in war and conflict’. Charalambous Constadina Charalambous Open University Cyprus Learning the language of 'The Other' in conflict-ridden Cyprus: exploring barriers and possibilities Language-learning is considered a key school-subject for developing intercultural understanding, and recently, there has been an increasing number of scholars writing about the contribution of language education to intercultural communication. Nevertheless, this research strand has tended to ignore contexts where the target-language is the language of an ‘enemy’, and where language-learning becomes highly ideological. In order to bring these issues to the foreground, this paper draws on data from a linguistic ethnographic study in Cyprus. Taking into account the history of long and violent conflict between the Greek- and Turkish- Cypriot communities, this study examined the discursive (re- )negotiations of ethnic identity and ethnolinguistic borders that occurred in classes teaching the language of ‘The Other’. By transferring the debates around language, identity and communication across