Two days after video of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was pummeled by American commentators from The New York Post to Jon Stewart for getting angry at an apparently rude question from a Congolese student during a forum in Kinshasa on Monday, two reporters who were at the event say that the much-reported idea that the French-speaking student’s question had been mistranslated is incorrect.
In the video of the event embedded below, from Britain’s Channel 4 News, Mrs. Clinton can be seen listening and then responding to a simultaneous translation as the student asked: “We’ve all heard about the Chinese contracts in this country — the interferences from the World Bank against this contract. What does Mr. Clinton think, through the mouth of Mrs. Clinton, and what does Mr. Mutumbo think on this situation?”
By the time this video made its way to the attention of most viewers in the United States, though, it was packaged in reports, like one from Kirit Radia of ABC News, stating that “apparently the translator made a mistake.” On Tuesday Mr. Radia reported: “A State Department official tells ABC News the student went up to Clinton after the event and told her he was misquoted,” and said that he had actually asked her to share President Obama’s views on Congo’s relations with China.
It always seemed unlikely to The Lede that a translator working for Mrs. Clinton would make such a large error with a question asked in French — or that an African university student would say “Mr. Clinton” when he meant “Mr. Obama” — and my colleague Jeffrey Gettleman reports in Thursday’s New York Times that “further inspection of the audio recording of the event indicated that the translation was fine; the student had indeed said ‘Mr. Clinton.’ ” A second reporter traveling with Mrs. Clinton, a friend of your Lede blogger’s who is a magazine journalist, said the same thing in an e-mail exchange on Wednesday night, that a French-speaking colleague who was in the room confirmed that the student “did ask the question that way: ‘the mind of Mr. From the lips of Mrs.’ ”
Given that it now appears that the question was translated correctly — and that the male student wanted to know not just what Bill Clinton thought of Chinese relations with Congo but also what the former N.B.A. star Dikembe Mutumbo, who was present at the event, thought, too, but expressed no interest in the perspective of America’s female secretary of state — is it possible that Mrs. Clinton has gotten a raw deal from commentators in the United States for her angry reply?
More to the point, while most of the derisive commentary on Mrs. Clinton’s flash of temper contextualized it by noting that her husband had just been lauded for his trip to North Korea, few noted that she was in the middle of a trip to Congo, where the plight of women, many of whom suffered violent sexual abuse during recent fighting, is a major issue.
As Mr. Gettleman reported in a post on The Caucus on the incident, a State Department spokesman, P.J. Crowley, said on Tuesday: “An abiding theme that she has in her trip to Africa is empowering women.” Mr. Crowley also noted: “As the question was posed to her, it was posed in a way that said I want to get the views of two men, but not you, the Secretary of State.” Mr. Gettleman also noted in an article on Tuesday that “the United Nations calls Congo the rape capital of the world.”
The video below, from the State Department’s Web site, shows some of Mrs. Clinton’s remarks at the forum on Monday in Kinshasa on the subject of attacks on women, after her visit to a hospital founded by Mr. Mutumbo and dedicated to his mother. In her remarks to the group, which included the student who asked her to share her husband’s thoughts, Mrs. Clinton said:
“I hope that here in the [Democratic Republic of Congo] there will be a concerted effort to demand justice for women who are violently attacked, and to make sure that the attackers are punished — and I hope that students will take the lead in this, to speak out because these are fundamental human rights.”
Putting Mrs. Clinton’s reply to the student’s question in this context, as words spoken to Congolese students in a forum partly devoted to a discussion of violent discrimination against women in that country, do readers still think that her indignation at this request that she channel her husband as inappropriate as some of her critics have charged? Or could it be seen as a legitimate attempt to make a clear statement that women’s opinions matter, in a part of the world where that perspective may not be often aired?
Let The Lede know your thoughts in the comment thread below.
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