The Education of an Idealist

by Samantha Power

  After writing a story on the graves, David traveled back to Bosnian-held territory, where he found nine Muslims who said they had played dead in the fields of Srebrenica where the mass executions occurred. When he showed the survivors the items he had found in the fields, one man gasped after seeing the 1982 elementary school diploma of his brother from whom he had been separated. He asked David where he had found the document, and David said he had picked it up fifty feet from a mass grave. The man, David wrote in the Monitor, “stared blankly and then quietly faded into a crowd of soldiers.”

  David emailed me after his encounter with the survivors, writing:

  I cannot articulate the combination of sadness and disbelief that washed over me when these men would accurately describe the soccer field I visited . . . and then go on to talk about 1,000 people being gunned down. I kept asking them more and more detailed questions, hoping they would get things wrong, but they didn’t . . . These people aren’t lying.

  The evil of what transpired in Srebrenica, which David did more than any other reporter to expose, helped me decide what I should do next. I could continue to write articles about the Bosnia carnage in an effort to move President Clinton. I could pursue a possible job with Holbrooke and work from within the US government to push for the same outcome. Or I could attend Harvard Law School and, although it would take a few years, try to become a prosecutor who could bring murderers to justice. Working at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague now seemed like the worthiest goal, and the one that would ultimately have the most impact. We would not bring back the men and boys who had been executed, but we could make sure that Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladić and others like him faced justice.

  Jonathan Moore, the former US diplomat and refugee expert I met working at Carnegie, had become someone I turned to at critical moments. With school beginning at the start of September, I needed to make a final decision, so I telephoned him and asked what I should do.

  Jonathan didn’t hesitate. “Get the hell out of there,” he urged me. “You need to break out of the compulsion for power, glory, ego, relevance, contribution. Get out. Get out before it gets you, and you forget what got you in.”

  I didn’t think self-consciously about power, glory, and ego, but Jonathan knew I didn’t mind seeing my name in print. He also knew that I was drawn to joining the US government’s Bosnia team because I couldn’t bear to move away from the center of the action.

  “But Holbrooke—” I tried.

  “Forget Holbrooke,” he said. “There will be other jobs. Reading books will do you good.”

  THE PERSON WHO I KNEW would be on the other side of the argument—echoing Mort’s conviction that I stay—was of course Fred Cuny. But once Fred had gotten the water flowing in Sarajevo, he had gone in search of his next ambitious project. A few months later, he had ended up in Chechnya to assess how he could help people being subjected to a comprehensive Russian carpet-bombing campaign. But I couldn’t get Fred’s perspective because he had gone missing.

  In early 1995, I had been visiting Mum and Eddie when Fred happened to be coming through New York after his first visit to Chechnya. When he walked into the sports bar he had chosen as our meeting place, he exclaimed “Sammie!” and embraced me in a large Texas hug. When we talked about what he had seen, however, he was uncharacteristically despairing.

  “The Serb forces in Bosnia are cruel,” he said, “but they are always trying to figure out how they can get what they want without provoking US intervention. They bomb, they probe, they watch, they pause, they bomb again. Russia’s forces in Chechnya know they are free to do anything they please. They know nobody will stop them. There are no lines they won’t cross. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  While Sarajevo had recorded as many as 3,500 heavy detonations per day, he said, the capital of Chechnya had counted that number each hour. He said that some 400,000 Chechens had been displaced in three months of fighting, and as many as 15,000 Russian and Chechen civilians had been killed.

  Yet instead of being deterred, Fred saw a problem to be tackled. In what seemed to me a complete non sequitur from his descriptions of slaughter, he concluded, “I think we can help broker a cease-fire.”

  My eyes widened. “By ‘we,’ do you mean you?” I asked, hoping I had misheard. He smiled self-consciously. “Yeah, I guess so.”

  Fred also thought that, by visiting, he would be in a stronger position to get the Clinton administration to do more to pressure Russia to desist. He had long impressed upon me one of his core beliefs about influence: “The only way to move people in Washington is to tell them things they don’t already know, and that requires seeing things for yourself.”

  Even for Fred Cuny, who had often managed to pull off what entire governments and humanitarian agencies deemed inconceivable, getting the Russians to cease their assault in Chechnya seemed delusional. He was the expert, though, and while I teased him about his excessive confidence, I felt I didn’t know enough to challenge him.

  Fred spent the next month publicly blasting the Russian government for its actions, testifying before Congress and writing a lengthy critical essay about Russia’s conduct in the New York Review of Books. His advocacy exposed how badly the Russian efforts were going and, indeed, how some 5,000 Russian soldiers had already been killed. It also encouraged greater scrutiny of the Russian military’s atrocities. By going public with his criticisms of Russia’s war, however, Fred made himself a target. For his safety, Fred’s coworkers pleaded with him not to return to Chechnya, but nobody could say no to Fred Cuny.

  In March of 1995, Fred traveled back into Chechnya with two doctors from the Russian Red Cross, a Russian translator, and a local driver. When Fred’s delegation entered territory held by Chechen separatists, they were apprehended. Fred sent a calm note to the Soros Foundation, his funder, saying that his group had been delayed. His Russian translator added a postscript with a wholly different message: “We, as always, are in deep shit . . . If we’re not back in three days, shake everyone up.”

  Then the delegation had disappeared.

  Fred’s twenty-eight-year-old son, Craig, and his brother, Chris, quickly flew to the region to begin searching. They got shot at, shelled, and robbed as they spent much of the summer of 1995 trying to find him. Mort excitedly called me in Sarajevo one day with word that Fred had been found—and I was euphoric. But the report proved incorrect, one of several false sightings. Still, I clung to the belief that Fred would turn up.

  In mid-August, Craig and Chris announced that Fred had been executed by Chechen rebels not long after being taken captive. Chris said that while Chechen gunmen had pulled the trigger, it was the Russian government that had loaded the gun, spreading false information that Fred was an anti-Chechen Russian agent. “Let it be known to all nations and humanitarian organizations,” Chris declared at a press conference, “that Russia was responsible for the death of one of the world’s great humanitarians.”

  I was devastated, both by the loss of someone who had been so exceptionally kind to me, and by the death of a humanitarian hero, whose expertise and can-do spirit seemed so necessary in a world increasingly racked by ethnic and religious conflict.

  No matter how much cruelty I had seen in Bosnia, a stubbornly naive part of me could not accept the truth. For weeks, I had vivid dreams about Fred showing up at my door with a big smile and a six-pack of root beer. “You didn’t really think I could die, did you?” he would tell me. I did everything I could to fend off thoughts about his final hours. And I resorted to my time-tested approach to blunting the pain I felt at losing someone important to me: I kept moving.

  Fred’s death cemented my decision to duck out of the “real world” and decompress. In late August, I packed up my belongings and booked my flight back to the United States to begin law school.

  BACK IN AMERICA, I saw that David’s reporting on Srebrenica had landed like a bombshell in Washington, yielding just the kind of impact I had hoped to achieve through my own w
riting. Suddenly, leading members of Congress were pushing President Clinton to intervene militarily to end the war and prevent “future Srebrenicas.”

  The final straw for Clinton came in late August. As I pulled myself together at Mum and Eddie’s home in Brooklyn, I heard the news that Bosnian Serb gunners around Sarajevo had struck again, hitting the same market they had attacked in February of 1994, this time killing forty-three people. Once I had established that nobody I knew had been killed, I fumed that the United States continued to allow the slaying of innocents. And in truth, I wished I were still there to cover a story that was leading the news around the world.

  The day before law school began, I loaded up a Ryder truck in Brooklyn with two suitcases, a bicycle, and my laptop, and drove toward Boston. Just as I reached my new hometown, NPR cut into its radio program with a breaking news bulletin: “NATO air action around Sarajevo is under way.” I let out tears of relief.

  By my second week of law school, US air strikes had broken the siege of Sarajevo and brought the Bosnian war to an end.

  Fred and Mort had been right about what a US rescue operation could achieve, but tens of thousands of lives had been lost.

  — 11 —

  “Go Remember”

  From the moment I arrived at Harvard Law School, I feared I wouldn’t last. While in Bosnia, I had imagined how satisfying it would be to learn the law and eventually hunt down Balkan war criminals as a prosecutor at The Hague. But as I struggled to adjust to my new life back in the United States, all I could think about was the place I had left behind. Had I remained just a few weeks longer, I kept thinking, I would have witnessed history.

  As I began classes, the US-led NATO bombing campaign quickly wiped out the Bosnian Serb Army’s heavy weapons and communications capabilities, leaving Serb forces unable to defend many of the towns they had ethnically cleansed over the previous three and a half years. Jubilant Muslim and Croat soldiers took advantage of the friendly warplanes in the sky and reclaimed lost territory. For the first time since 1992, my Bosnian friends in Sarajevo could get in their cars and leave the capital, visiting loved ones they had not even been able to speak with by telephone.

  My new, shared apartment was in Somerville, the next town over from Cambridge. I amassed a steep phone bill, frantically calling my reporter friends in Bosnia and making them hold their phones in the air so I could hear the background sounds of honking horns and celebratory music. I surrounded myself with reminders of what I had left behind, hanging on my bedroom wall a map of Sarajevo that showed the gun emplacements around the city, and placing on the living room mantel a 40-millimeter shell that had been engraved and turned into a decorative sculpture.

  My instincts continued to reflect the fact that I had spent the better part of the summer living in a city under fire: the loud scrape of a desk being moved or a library cart being pushed sent me ducking for cover. Meanwhile, simple conveniences—like a light switch—suddenly delighted me. When I visited the local supermarket, I was now paralyzed by all the options. In Sarajevo, I had counted myself fortunate to find a carton of juice priced like a bottle of Bordeaux, but in Cambridge, I was confronted by more than a dozen flavors of Snapple alone. For two years, my journal reflections had been decidedly grim, but trivial discoveries now passed for big news: “We have cantaloupe Snapple!” I marveled in one entry soon after school started.

  My reacclimation to America happened slowly, and it didn’t help that I spoke to Mort daily to discuss developments in Bosnia.

  “I wish Fred were here to see this,” I told him a few days after NATO brought the fighting to an end.

  “He would ask why the hell you’re in law school,” Mort answered.

  I wondered the same thing.

  I didn’t lack the ability to focus—I could bury myself in the library for hours without noticing the setting sun. But while I admired the poise of my classmates who threw themselves into Socratic debates with their peers and professors, I just couldn’t make myself care about the topics we were studying. In 1L, Scott Turow’s memoir of his first year at Harvard Law School, he compares studying case law to stirring concrete with his eyelashes; this description seemed a perfect encapsulation of how I felt reading Civil Procedure cases late into the night.

  I was also not that quick a study. I became flustered when called upon in class, stammering answers that other students quickly tore apart while a hundred pairs of eyes drilled into my back. When my professors interrogated me, I tried to keep my composure by making an insistent mental note, “This professor is not Ratko Mladić, he’s not Ratko Mladić, he’s not . . .” But hours after class ended, my cheeks often still felt flushed with embarrassment.

  ON OCTOBER 29TH, 1995, nearly two months into law school, I picked up the Sunday New York Times at the bottom of my Somerville stoop. There, in the upper left-hand corner, was a huge headline: SREBRENICA: THE DAYS OF SLAUGHTER.3 A reporting team had spent weeks preparing a special investigation that contained previously unpublished details of the systematic murder of Srebrenica’s men and boys.

  As I sat reading—clenched in what felt like a full-body grimace—I understood what writers reflecting on the Holocaust meant when they described the human capacity to “know without knowing.” I had covered the fall of Srebrenica and had read all of my friend David Rohde’s articles about it. Laura, who had left journalism to attend graduate school, had spent her summer working for Human Rights Watch, gathering the testimonies of people who had survived the massacres. Yet my reaction to the Times exposé confirmed how wide the chasm can be between holding out hope that something is not true and actually absorbing devastating facts in all of their finality. I had experienced the brutality of the war up close. Yet before reading the Times piece, I had somehow believed that Srebrenica’s missing men and boys were no longer alive, and yet had not necessarily believed that they were dead.*

  I looked back at my own actions and wondered why I hadn’t done more. “I don’t know how that could have been me there,” I wrote in my journal. “I was the correspondent in Munich while the bodies burned in Dachau . . . I had power and I failed to use it.” In beating myself up, I was clearly exaggerating my actual power back in Sarajevo. I was a freelance journalist, running my laptop off of a jury-rigged car battery. President Clinton led the most formidable superpower in the history of the world. He had a vast intelligence apparatus at his disposal. And he certainly knew more contemporaneously than I did about the crimes Mladić and his executioners were carrying out in Srebrenica. The President of the United States had not needed my help if he was to be spurred to action.

  Nonetheless, I felt at sea. My law school classmates and I were of a generation that had unquestioningly embraced the slogan “never again.” Yet I was sure very few of my peers were actually aware of the Times investigation that had sent me spiraling, and even those who had seen it would probably have considered it “too depressing” to read. Powerless to affect the fate of men already killed, I decided that I could at least raise awareness on campus about what had happened.

  In a move that at the time felt as bold as choosing to live under siege in Sarajevo, I asked my Contracts professor for permission to make an announcement before class. “I apologize for using this forum,” I said nervously after taking the floor. “But I just wanted to draw your attention to something that will be in your mailbox later.” I previewed the article, which documented “the largest single massacre in Europe in fifty years.” My lips quivered as I rushed to try to finish. “So please read it. Thanks.”

  After class I met up with a new friend, Sharon Dolovich, who had done her PhD in political theory at Cambridge University and was seemingly curious about all subjects. While most of our classmates had shied away from discussing the upsetting events in the former Yugoslavia, Sharon pumped me for details on my recent experiences and seemed genuinely moved by the revelations about Srebrenica. Sharon and I dropped by the law school copy room to collect the five hundred Xeroxes I had ordered earlier
in the day. Together, we solemnly stuffed a stapled copy of the article into the mailbox of each first-year law student. I knew enough not to linger and watch our classmates sift through their mail, which also included notices for an upcoming ice cream social, various law journal meetings, and book discounts at the Harvard Coop. If the Srebrenica article was to be tossed into the nearby blue recycling tub, I did not want to see it. A few of my classmates approached me later to thank me for alerting them to what had happened. But I got the feeling that most found me off-puttingly intense.

  After saying goodbye to Sharon, I made my way to the law library. I had already fallen behind in my Property reading and needed to prepare for the next day’s class. After a restless hour in a carrel, I wandered to the nearest phone to collect my answering machine messages. I heard the voice of my friend Elizabeth Rubin, who had just returned to New York from Sarajevo.

  “Power, I don’t know if you’ve heard,” she said. There was a pause, and then what sounded like muffled crying. “It’s David.”

  Another pause. “Um . . . he’s been abducted.”

  I flashed back to all that my friend David Rohde had written, doing more than any reporter to uncover Ratko Mladić’s summary executions. My mind jumped to Fred Cuny and his last days. “No! No! No!” I said, holding back tears as I raced to the bike rack and began fumbling with my lock so I could get home.

  When I reached my apartment, I stood in the kitchen with no idea what to do. What more could I contribute to finding David that the US government, the UN, and the press corps weren’t already doing? I defaulted to what I usually did when I was in a bind, calling Mort.

  He was constructive and typically specific. He told me to call Richard Holbrooke—who, in a fortunate coincidence of timing, had just arrived in Dayton, Ohio, for peace talks with the warring factions. He also told me to call Strobe Talbott and Steve Rosenfeld—both of whom I had haplessly lobbied the year before. “Get the Post to write something,” Mort advised.