The Education of an Idealist

by Samantha Power

  Many people died on Mount Igman, including a number of peacekeepers and, later that summer, three US officials: President Clinton’s Bosnia special envoy Robert Frasure, National Security Council aide Nelson Drew, and the Defense Department’s Joseph Kruzel. The French soldier transporting the American diplomats into Sarajevo had been driving at a rapid clip when he accidentally veered off the side of the road while trying to avoid an approaching convoy. The diplomats’ armored personnel carrier went tumbling more than three hundred yards down the mountain, causing anti-tank rockets in the vehicle to explode.

  From the relative shelter of a Bosnian government checkpoint at the top of the mountain road, Roger and I braced ourselves for the perilous journey. As we set off, we could see the hulks of vehicles hit by Serb gunfire or destroyed after drivers had taken the hairpin turns too quickly. Driving the heavy armored vehicle provided by the Times, Roger was aiming for the unachievable combination of speed and maneuverability at once. Whenever we shaved the edge of the road, I turned my body toward the gearshift—as if I could personally avoid the land mines that the outer part of the vehicle might accidentally set off.

  As we hurtled down the mountain at a velocity that we hoped would outpace the Serb gunners who might have us in their sights, Roger began to lose control of the vehicle. Our downward momentum from the steepness of the descent caused the steering wheel to elude his grasp and spin wildly. Sweating profusely, all I could do as we lunged from right to left was press my hand against the roof of the five-ton vehicle as Roger tried to keep hold of the violently shaking steering wheel and force the car toward the center of the road. At one point in particular, I felt sure we were about to plunge down the mountain as the car careened out of control toward the edge—but somehow, in a mystery that neither of us understand to this day, Roger managed to haul us back onto the trail.

  I WAS BY THEN SPENDING most of my time in Sarajevo, the epicenter of the war. The situation was deteriorating badly. While I was working there in June and July of 1995, an average of three hundred shells rained down on the city each day. With no end to the war in sight, I was starting to feel increasingly like a vulture, preying upon Bosnian misery to write my stories.

  Even when my articles received prominent placement in a newspaper or magazine, potentially bringing my reporting to the attention of millions of people, I had a nagging sense that I was falling short. I grew practiced at interviewing survivors of violence, but I still couldn’t shake the feeling that by asking questions designed to elicit appalling detail, I was exploiting someone’s personal trauma for “my story.”

  There would come a moment in every interview where I would feel a rush of recognition—“I have what I need”—and then would hasten to wind down the conversation so I could get to a power source for my laptop and start writing. I would then begin to feel guilty for having invaded someone’s home, drunk (at their insistence) their scarce coffee or tea, and left.

  Once, after I rose to end an interview with an elderly Muslim woman in Serb-held territory, she hugged me goodbye. Writing later that night in my journal, I noted, “She squeezed me like I was one of her own. I was ashamed.” I don’t know now if I was ashamed because I had been practicing my new craft while she was sobbing in pain at the loss of her sons, because I felt the United States was not doing enough to prevent such devastation, or some combination.

  When I drove with Stacy Sullivan of Newsweek to UN headquarters for the daily press briefing in Sarajevo, we typically passed a cluster of photographers in an expectant scrum at the entrance to the main road, which was known as Sniper Alley. The still and video photographers had their cameras ready, knowing that someone was likely to get shot by a Bosnian Serb sniper as he or she made a mad dash across this exposed portion of road. Elizabeth Rubin, a writer with Harper’s who would become a close friend, once saw a woman who managed to survive the crossing yell back at one of the perched photographers, “No work for you today, asshole. I made it alive.”

  Until that summer, I had believed that if my colleagues and I conveyed the suffering around us to decision-makers in Washington, our journalism might move President Clinton to stage a rescue mission. This had not happened. The words, the photographs, the videos—nothing had changed the President’s mind. While Sarajevans had once thought of Western journalists as messengers on their behalf, they had now begun to see us as ambassadors of idle nations. No matter how many massacres we covered, Western governments seemed determined to steer clear of the conflict.

  Even if Clinton and his advisers did not think it reasonable to get involved to prevent atrocities, I thought they should have seen how failing to shore up a fragmenting part of Europe would impact traditional US security interests. The occurrence of such a conflict in the heart of Europe made NATO look feckless, and the failed state gave unsavory criminal elements—like arms traffickers and terrorists—a foothold in Europe. I knew that thousands of foreign fighters were making their way to the country, including the battle-hardened mujahedeen from Afghanistan. But I only later learned that a still-young terrorist group known as al-Qaeda was active there, and that two of the September 11th hijackers as well as attack architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed ended up fighting in Bosnia.2

  On several occasions during the long summer of 1995, when I dropped by the home of someone who had lost a loved one in the capital, I was shooed away. “Why should we talk to you?” one woman screamed at me before slamming her door. “The world knows, your government knows, and you do nothing.”

  Just as the war had come to feel normal, so too had the idea that nobody would stop it.

  At the same time, I noticed that I had gradually lost my fear. While once I had shivered for hours after evading Serb shelling or sniper fire, now I no longer worried about the crack of gunfire or the crash of a mortar exploding nearby. Three years into their agony, Sarajevans were joking, “If you run, you hit the bullet; if you walk, the bullet hits you.” I had begun to feel a similar fatalism, gradually giving up the superstitions that I had originally seized upon for safety—my Pirates baseball cap, my back-street route to the press briefing, and my ritual beer as I pounded away on my laptop after a long day’s work.

  I knew I had been lucky—every reporter had close calls, and mine were nowhere near as hair-raising as those of others. But they began to add up. As I was driving in Serb territory along an icy road, my car turned 180 degrees and spun into a ditch that was surrounded by mines. Once, in Sarajevo, shrapnel burst through the window and landed on the desk where Stacy and I often worked side by side. In the same month, a large mortar attack flattened a house several doors from where I was charging my computer. One day, as Stacy, Emma, and I exited our car near the Bosnian president’s office, Serb snipers fired on us repeatedly, forcing us to race across the parking lot in a panicked search for cover. Our assailants were just a few hundred yards away, and certainly could have hit us if that had been their goal. Instead, they seemed more interested in amusing themselves.

  The spike in violence weighed heavily on Mum, Eddie, and Stephen, who were each tracking the news from New York. When I called home, my brother, who was back for the summer after his junior year in college, grabbed the phone. Stephen and my mother had a fraught relationship: she struggled to get him to focus on school and to lay off drugs and alcohol, while he insisted he didn’t need her advice, saying he took after his father, which was just what she was worried about. At the same time, he was protective of her. If one of the patients she was close to died, he was tender, assuring her she had done all she could and frying her up a fish he had caught for dinner.

  Stephen and I were not especially close, but we were always warm with each other. So it shocked me when he confronted me about the risks I was taking.

  “What you are doing is so selfish, sis,” he said on the phone, asking, “Don’t you ever think about Mum?”

  My brother had a point. For all the time I’d spent trying to convey to others what it was like to be a Bosnian under siege, I had n
ot really stopped to imagine what it must have been like to be the parent of someone who had chosen to go live in a war zone.

  The call with Stephen reoriented me. “Maybe it’s time,” I thought, and the words of folk singer/songwriter Michelle Shocked sprung into my mind: “The secret to a long life’s knowing when it’s time to go.” I began to think seriously about an exit strategy.

  Like many of my contemporaries who had graduated college but were not sure what they wanted to do in their careers, I had considered applying to law school and had taken the LSAT during my year with Mort at Carnegie. The prospect of actually becoming a lawyer hadn’t much appealed to me at the time, and I never followed through with submitting applications. After a few months of working in the Balkans, however, the idea had resurfaced.

  The one area where the so-called international community seemed to be making progress was in building new institutions to promote criminal justice. A tribunal was being assembled in The Hague to punish war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Self-conscious about simply recording what was happening around me, I wondered whether, if I became a lawyer, I could do something more concrete to support the victims of atrocities or to punish wrongdoers. Immersing myself in lessons on the rule of law seemed an antidote to the violence and impunity around me.

  After a year in the region, I had sent an application to Harvard Law School along with several of my press clips. I thought Harvard’s prestige might add credibility to my writings and policy recommendations, and the law school brochure described a wide range of international law offerings. I also liked the prospect of being just a train ride from Mum and Eddie. In the spring of 1995, I was notified that I had been admitted.

  Still unsure of whether I actually wanted to attend, I reached out to Mort for advice. He was vehemently opposed. “Why would you stop doing something valuable in order to go sit in a classroom for three years?” he asked.

  He then called his friend, Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, whom President Clinton had recently asked to lead the American effort to broker peace in Bosnia, and asked him to use his negotiating skills to talk me out of going to law school. When I answered the phone and heard Holbrooke’s nasal voice, which I knew only from television, I was startled. He told me that he knew many women who had mistakenly gone to law school because they felt they needed a credential to be taken seriously. “You do not need a piece of paper to legitimize yourself,” he said, before adding—to my amazement—“Mort says I should hire you.”

  The prospect of working as a junior aide to Holbrooke as he tried to bring the war to an end was tantalizing beyond words. I thanked him for calling and told him I would seriously consider what he had said. After we hung up, I called Eddie and told him about the conversation. “If I work for Holbrooke,” I exclaimed, “I can eliminate all the middle men!” What I meant was that, in order to influence US policy, I would no longer need to convince editors to accept my stories. I could make my case directly to the top decision-makers in government.

  Eddie loved the idea, and, in a spontaneous burst of lyricism, immediately launched into one of Shakespeare’s best-known monologues, from Julius Caesar:

  There is a tide in the affairs of men,

  Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

  Omitted, all the voyage of their life

  Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

  On such a full sea are we now afloat;

  And we must take the current when it serves,

  Or lose our ventures.

  Knowing I didn’t always grasp precisely what he was getting at, after he finished his oration, he declared, “Go for it!”

  But something held me back from taking this fantasy job with Holbrooke. I had begun to fixate on the notion that in law school I could acquire technical, tangible skills that would ultimately equip me to make a bigger difference than I would by putting words to paper, even as an aide to the US envoy. I decided to send in a letter of acceptance to Harvard in order to hold my place, but continued to internally debate whether to attend, self-conscious about the luxury of privileged indecision.

  In July of 1995, however, all of this faded from mind as the Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladić launched an all-out assault on the UN-declared “safe area” of Srebrenica, and in the ensuing days orchestrated the largest single massacre in Europe since World War II.

  THE DAY BEFORE SREBRENICA FELL, I borrowed a satellite phone from colleagues in Sarajevo and called Ed Cody, the foreign editor of the Washington Post, to pitch a story on the Bosnian Serbs’ march toward the town. Cody said he didn’t deem another Bosnian Serb Army incursion newsworthy, especially as readers had seen a lot in recent months about attacks on UN safe areas.

  I argued with him, pointing out that some 30,000 Muslims in Srebrenica had no protection. But I knew that American readers were fatigued and that I had to clear a higher bar to place a story in the Western press than in the early days of what was already a three-year-old conflict.

  As I rambled on, hoping to persuade him that this crisis was different, Cody cut me off. “Well,” he said, “it sounds like tomorrow, when Srebrenica falls, we’ll have a story.” I was stunned by the cynicism in his words, but I failed to change his mind.

  Twenty-four hours later, Bosnian Serb forces stormed into the town of Srebrenica; on July 12th, my article ran on the front page of the Post under the banner headline: BOSNIAN SERBS SEIZE “SAFE AREA.” When I called Mort, he was disconsolate. “This is the pits, the lowest moment yet,” he said.

  Western reporters like me were unable to get access to Srebrenica in the days that followed. The best we could do was speak with alarmed UN officials and Bosnian government sources, and report what was being broadcast on Serbian TV—primarily, images of Mladić in the town, carting Bosnian Muslim men and boys away on buses while assuring them, “No one will harm you.” Still in Sarajevo, I began reporting unverifiable claims that Muslim prisoners like those we saw on TV were in fact being executed. On July 14th, I wrote an article in the Boston Globe titled MASSACRES REPORTED NEAR SREBRENICA, which relayed the Bosnian government’s allegations that hundreds of prisoners had already been murdered. I also quoted an eyewitness saying that “while the TV cameras were there, the Serbs were good. Then the media disappeared, and the soldiers started taking people off the buses.” The whereabouts of some 10,000 people were unknown.

  Ten days after Srebrenica’s fall, I heard ever more terrifying reports about what was happening out of sight. Bosnian foreign minister Muhamed Sacirbey claimed that 1,600 Bosnian men and boys detained in a stadium near Srebrenica had been shot. Meanwhile, Bosnian Serb radio openly reported that of the Muslim fighters who had fled Srebrenica, “most were liquidated.” I shuddered at what I was hearing. But blocked by Bosnian Serb forces from getting to Srebrenica, neither I nor my colleagues had any way of corroborating the claims. I hoped they were exaggerated or false. I had also already begun reporting on the brazen Serb assault on a second UN “safe area” around the town of Žepa. There, some 20,000 civilians were trapped, protected by just 79 UN peacekeeping troops.*

  On August 10th, at the UN in New York, US ambassador Madeleine Albright presented evidence to the Security Council that Bosnian Serb soldiers had executed as many as 2,700 people, burying them in shallow mass graves. Albright circulated a set of US satellite images showing a small farming village fourteen miles west of Srebrenica. The “before” photos, grainy though they were, clearly showed prisoners crowded into a soccer field, along with pristine fields nearby. The “after” photos were taken a few days later; the prisoners were gone, and the earth in the neighboring fields had been disturbed in three areas, creating what looked like mass graves.

  Albright linked the photos to firsthand testimony from a fifty-five-year-old Muslim who said he had been in a group of men who had been machine-gunned there. The man had miraculously survived, hiding among the corpses of his friends and relatives. At nightfall he had escaped to Bosnian territory
before the bodies around him were bulldozed into one of the large graves that lay waiting.

  MY FRIEND DAVID ROHDE, the Christian Science Monitor’s Eastern Europe correspondent, was on vacation in Australia visiting his girlfriend when the Serbs took Srebrenica. In the weeks that followed, he read horrific testimonies disseminated in the media from survivors like the one Albright quoted. Without permission from the Bosnian Serb authorities, he managed to elude the military and police and spend two days around Srebrenica searching for evidence of the alleged executions.

  On the first day, he entered an abandoned building on the grounds of a local soccer stadium—the same place Foreign Minister Sacirbey had referred to in his alarming speech about mass executions. David found human feces, dried blood, and several dozen bullet holes up and down the walls.

  On the second day, using a faxed copy of one of the blurry US satellite photos, he found the fields Albright had referenced. There, he discovered empty ammunition boxes, Muslim prayer beads, photographs, and various personal items. Finally, and most tellingly, as he would write in the Christian Science Monitor, he saw “what appeared to be a decomposing human leg protruding from the freshly turned dirt.”

  In addition, in a dozen interviews with Serb soldiers and civilians in the area, he met not a soul who reported seeing or hearing about Muslim prisoners. Thousands of Bosnian Muslim men and boys seemed to have simply vanished.