The Education of an Idealist

by Samantha Power

  Unable to get through to Holbrooke, I (somewhat absurdly) asked the hotel receptionist in Dayton to pass on a message—verbatim:

  David Rohde has been abducted in Serb territory. Please make him the lead item in the peace talks.

  I was able to reach Strobe, who started our conversation as courteously as ever. He told me that Secretary of State Warren Christopher had that day raised David’s case with Serbian president Milošević in Dayton. Instead of expressing gratitude, though, I snapped, “That’s not enough.”

  Strobe continued, “Milošević understands that he will bear the consequences if anything happens to David.”

  “The consequences!” I said, sarcastically. “What consequences?!” Strobe must have wondered why he ever took my calls.

  “Well, if you’re going to take that view, then there’s nothing more I can say,” he responded, and the call quickly ended.

  When I connected with Rosenfeld, I begged him to write an editorial demanding that the US government secure David’s release before proceeding with the Dayton talks. “He’s the only Western eyewitness to the mass graves,” I implored. “He’s in profound danger.”

  Rosenfeld explained that the next day’s paper had already gone to press. “Well, if we don’t do something quickly, it will be too late,” I warned. “You have to understand: people don’t just disappear in Bosnia. We have a short window to shame David’s captors into not harming him, but it is closing.”

  Rosenfeld gave me an opening. “If you want to write something,” he offered, “we will run it.”

  Less than thirty-six hours after I heard Elizabeth’s message, the Washington Post ran my op-ed, the first opinion piece I had penned since the Daily Jang. The essay, printed November 3rd, 1995, concluded: “I relay David’s odyssey because he is my colleague and my dear friend. American officials claim they can do no more than ‘raise the issue at the highest levels.’ David did more. Why can’t they?”

  I went to class and tried not to think about the barbaric treatment my friend was likely suffering—if he was even still alive. When I returned home a few hours later, I saw that the tape on my answering machine had been filled. Strangers—lower-level State Department officials, Hill staffers, journalists, and Post readers from all walks of life—had located my home number through directory assistance and left messages asking how they could help. One man moved me immensely with his simple words of support. “Howdy, my name is Bill,” his message began. “I am a truck driver. I just wanna know what I can do for David.”

  Much more importantly, by nightfall, the Serb authorities acknowledged that David was in their custody. Had they planned to kill him, they would never have admitted to detaining him. I now believed that his family, who had staged a protest outside of the Dayton airbase where the Bosnia peace talks were taking place, would get him back.

  David was released ten days after he was seized. Once free, he revealed that a source had given him a map with the exact location of four additional mass graves near Srebrenica. Blacklisted from entering Bosnian Serb territory because of his reporting in August, he doctored the date on his expired press pass and drove into Serb territory, where he found the first of the gravesites and evidence of murder: piles of coats, abandoned shoes, Muslim identity documents, even canes and shattered eyeglasses.

  But as was David’s wont, he had pushed his luck, trying to find even more. He was arrested at rifle-point at the second grave, just as he was preparing to photograph two human femurs he had discovered. Because he was carrying a camera, a map with suspected gravesites circled, and film stuffed into his socks, the Bosnian Serbs labeled him a spy.

  “Mr. David,” his interrogator repeatedly asked him at the remote police station where he was held, “What is your rank? Who is your commander in the CIA? And what is your mission?”

  His captors forced him to stand through the night, denying him sleep. They threatened him with a lengthy stay in a Bosnian Serb prison camp, and even with execution. After three days of threats, fearful that he would be shot if he continued to hold out, David considered telling the interrogators whatever they wanted. But a friendly guard whispered in his ear that he knew David was a journalist. He urged him to stand firm. This gave US diplomacy and public advocacy time to succeed.

  I was thrilled by David’s release and rushed to Logan Airport to be part of the crowd that welcomed him. After the dark discoveries of the previous months, the sight of David being reunited with his family felt like a sudden burst of light.

  Close to midnight, I heard a knock on the front door of my Somerville apartment and saw David outside. We stayed up until daybreak, talking about what he had seen and gone through. We also began a debate, which we continue to this day, about when journalism is most effective in prodding change.

  The evidence David gathered was a factor in helping convince the Clinton administration to launch the bombing raids that so quickly ended the war. Even though I was now stuck in law school, I told him that he had single-handedly given me a new appreciation for the power of the pen. He later considered attending law school because, despite being one of the most decorated reporters in the business—winning two Pulitzer Prizes—he often wished he could personally do more about the injustices he was exposing.

  David’s release also showed the impact of concentrated public pressure. He was the beneficiary of the so-called identifiable victim effect—the human tendency to be more helpful to those with a name and face than to anonymous victims. As Mother Teresa famously said, “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”4

  But I knew David had another factor working in his favor: he was American. The photo that the Washington Post used with my op-ed depicted a bespectacled young man wearing a fleece. For all of my heartfelt reporting and writing when I lived in the Balkans, I had managed to generate a far more intense outpouring for my friend than I had for Bosnia’s thousands of victims. Readers could relate to him. They could see him. And because he was one person, they could imagine that their actions could conceivably help him. Not so for the people of Srebrenica. An identifiable American life would almost always be more galvanizing than thousands of faceless foreigners in a faraway country.

  I HOPED THAT THE GOOD NEWS of David’s release would help cure me of my all-consuming focus on Bosnia. When I lived in the Balkans, I often thought about how lucky I was relative to the people around me. But once back in the United States, I sometimes acted as if I had personally suffered the losses of war. Changing that would take time.

  Jonathan Moore had moved from Washington back to his home in Massachusetts and was now based at the Harvard Kennedy School. I often confided in him about my struggles readjusting to life as a student in placid Cambridge. Occasionally, my self-absorption—a constant—would devolve into self-pity, and Jonathan would stop me in my tracks. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he would say, teasingly but firmly. “Have you been ethnically cleansed?!”

  The first time I recall being able to make fun of myself came, strangely, during the 1995 New York City Marathon, a few days after David’s release. Before living in Bosnia, I had never loved running, always preferring what I called “real sports”—games like baseball or basketball that required strategy and skill with a ball. Living in encircled Sarajevo had changed my attitude, making me appreciate the freedom running provided. After returning to the United States, I had trained for the marathon for ten weeks, with Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” and John Barry’s cheesy movie theme “Born Free” on heavy rotation on my Walkman’s mixtape. Going for ten-mile practice runs wasn’t exactly fun, but I enjoyed no longer feeling caged up.

  The night before the race, I ate a heaping pasta supper with two college friends who were also running. Afterward, we decorated plain white Hanes T-shirts with words designed to draw shouts of moral support from the crowd. Miro, who had been with me in Atlanta at the time of the Tiananmen massacre, wrote “MO” in huge block letters as a kind of pick-me-up nickname.

  In
stead of “SAM,” or even “POWER,” I scribbled “REMEMBER SREBRENICA.”

  Then, for good measure, I added on the back, “8,000 BOSNIAN MUSLIM MEN AND BOYS, MURDERED JULY 12–13, 1995.”

  As we set off the next day, crossing the Verrazano Bridge, I heard the crowds yelling, “Go Mo!” Seeing the energy that the cheers gave Miro, I immediately regretted the decision to splash a morbid Public Service Announcement across my chest. Many people along the way made a spirited effort to root for me in spite of myself, albeit while mangling their attempts at pronouncing “Srebrenica.”

  “Remember Srebedeedeedee!” I heard, or “Remember Srebre-oh-whatever.”

  With two miles to go, a group of rowdy spectators, seeing my pace slowing, tried to urge me on, chanting, “Go Remember! Go Go Remember!” In my heavy-handedness, I had managed to turn myself into someone with the name “Remember,” which kept me smiling until I crossed the finish line. It seemed fitting.

  I RETURNED TO SARAJEVO twice during my first year in law school, once over Christmas and then again for summer break. Mort had been the driving force behind creating the International Crisis Group, a new nongovernmental organization dedicated to conflict prevention, and he asked me to help launch their first field office in Bosnia to monitor the implementation of the peace agreement that Holbrooke had negotiated at Dayton. I loved being back among my friends, seeing the universities reopened, and watching the markets and cafés bustling with life. Witnessing even a flawed peace gave me a sense of closure, which I had craved.

  Unfortunately, almost as soon as I arrived back in Cambridge for my second year of law school, I found myself struggling to breathe properly. The ailment that my college boyfriend Schu had called “lungers” was back with a vengeance. In college, these bouts of constricted breathing were a nuisance, an inconvenient background occurrence that never interfered with my life. But now I was unable to concentrate on anything other than whether I would be able to take a proper breath.

  On the advice of friends, I tried yoga; but like a child who has just noticed her blinking, and suddenly begins to do it intentionally, this activity only caused me to focus more on my breathing, a huge impediment to regularizing it. For the first time, I grew so rattled by this mystery ailment that I could not sleep. Even when I managed to doze off for a few hours, when I awoke, I would experience a split second of deep, regular breathing before recalling the debilitating constriction of my lungs, which would promptly return.

  After several weeks of mounting torment, I took a long run along the Charles River in the hopes that it would necessitate inhaling large amounts of air. Still running after an hour, I maneuvered along the paved roads near MIT to head back to my apartment, trying to take extra-deep breaths as I ran. I was so focused on my breathing that I didn’t look where I was running and tripped on an uneven sidewalk slab. I was lucky not to spill into the oncoming traffic, but I did land in a pile of shattered glass. Both of my knees were lacerated and began bleeding profusely.

  I hobbled as quickly as I could, in significant pain, to the University Health Services. When the doctor asked what had happened, I told him I had been struggling to breathe and had not paid proper attention to where I was stepping. He asked if I was experiencing anxiety.

  “No,” I said, “the complete opposite. I was a journalist in Bosnia, and I think I find the lack of stress here on campus very hard to get used to.”

  He asked if I would like to be prescribed something to settle my nerves. I told him I was completely fine and needed nothing other than a good knee cleaning so as to avoid an infection. As I was speaking, I glanced down and saw that my knees bore shards of gravel and glass and my white running socks had turned crimson with blood.

  “On second thought,” I said sheepishly, “I’ll take whatever you recommend.”

  Within forty-eight hours, the anti-anxiety medicine worked wonders; once I started breathing normally and focusing on my classwork, I pushed the incident—and my lungers—to the back of my mind. It would be years before I would begin to explore their source.

  — 12 —

  “A Problem from Hell”

  During law school, I came across the transcript of a US government press conference that had occurred while I was working as a journalist in Bosnia. On April 8th, 1994, a mid-level US diplomat named Prudence Bushnell spoke at the State Department’s daily press briefing. She described the horrific killings that had just broken out in Rwanda—a genocidal murder spree that over one hundred days would result in the deaths of 800,000 people.

  When Bushnell left the podium, Michael McCurry, the State Department spokesperson, turned to the next item on the agenda: criticizing foreign governments that were preventing the screening of Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg’s movie about a German businessman who saved 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust.

  “This film,” McCurry said, “shows that even in the midst of genocide, one individual can make a difference.” He continued: “The most effective way to avoid the recurrence of genocidal tragedy is to ensure that past acts of genocide are never forgotten.”

  What struck me was that neither the US officials speaking nor the journalists listening drew a connection between the slaughter being perpetrated in Rwanda and McCurry’s appeal to act in the face of genocide. This disconnect seemed to illustrate the perplexing coexistence of Americans’ purported deep resolve to prevent genocide, and our recurring struggle to acknowledge when it is happening in our midst.

  Like many Americans, I had read Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl and Elie Wiesel’s Night as a teenager. But it was only after visiting Anne Frank’s home and the Dachau concentration camp with Schu that I focused on the question of what more the United States could have done as Hitler set out to exterminate Europe’s Jews.

  Looking for answers, I had turned to well-known books that examined the Roosevelt administration’s response—David Wyman’s landmark The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945 and Arthur Morse’s While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy. I admired President Roosevelt, but I could not wrap my mind around why his administration had not admitted more Jewish refugees, or at least bombed the train tracks to the death camps to disrupt Hitler’s extermination networks. These steps would not have ended the Nazi’s efforts to destroy the Jewish people—it would take winning World War II for that—but at the very least the United States could have saved thousands of lives.

  My experiences in Bosnia deepened my original interest in the Holocaust.* While I was in law school, I scoured the weekly campus event bulletins for lectures on the subject. Not long after the Srebrenica revelations, I watched Claude Lanzmann’s devastating nine-and-a-half-hour documentary Shoah for the first time. I roamed the stacks of Harvard’s Widener Library, checking out so many books on Hitler’s crimes that I dedicated my entire bookshelf to the topic. I traveled abroad, visiting the former Treblinka death camp in Poland, as well as Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Israel. Although at the time I wouldn’t have been able to verbalize the connection, I think I was looking for ways to put what had happened in Bosnia in historical context.

  I also took advantage of Harvard’s wide course offerings and signed up for classes across the university, including a seminar on Holocaust-related literature and film and a broader course called “The Use of Force: Political and Moral Criteria,” taught by Professor Stanley Hoffmann, a legendary scholar of international relations, and Father J. Bryan Hehir, a Catholic priest and theologian. After reading the writings of Thomas Aquinas, Saint Augustine, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Michael Walzer, we were asked to apply their ideas to the war in Vietnam, the Persian Gulf War, and the 1992–1993 US intervention in Somalia.

  The course introduced me to a range of questions I hadn’t considered before but that would help shape my thinking for years to come. For example, when is military force justified? How do the moral and religious traditions of nonviolence coexist with the moral imperative not to stand idly by in the face of suffering
? How does one (particularly one who lacks sufficient information) measure the risks of action and inaction before deciding what to do? What would it mean if any country could take upon itself the decision to use force without any rules? Who should write these rules?

  For the first time, a question that I had initially seen in fairly black-and-white terms—should the United States intervene militarily to stop atrocities in Bosnia?—took on a much more complex texture. I also began to interrogate the stark, simple power of the slogan “Never again.”

  My thinking was powerfully influenced by Philip Gourevitch, an American writer who had traveled to Rwanda in 1995 and then published a series of haunting articles on the genocide in The New Yorker.5 Gourevitch’s first article about Rwanda, which I read during the Hoffmann–Hehir course, began, unforgettably:

  Decimation means the killing of every tenth person in a population, and in the spring and early summer of 1994 a program of massacres decimated the Republic of Rwanda. Although the killing was low-tech—performed largely by machete—it was carried out at dazzling speed . . . the bloodletting in the former Yugoslavia measures up as little more than a neighborhood riot. The dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust.

  It was impossible for me to comprehend that the pace of killing in Rwanda was faster than Hitler’s mechanized annihilation of the Jews. Nor could I fathom that the Bosnia atrocities so seared into my consciousness could have constituted “little more than a neighborhood riot” in comparison.

  I had a pretty clear recollection of being in Sarajevo in April and May of 1994, hearing about massacres in Rwanda, and assuming—just as many were doing at the time about Bosnia—that they were part of a long cycle of recurring “tribal” violence. Only when I read Gourevitch’s work did I begin to appreciate the top-down, organized nature of the killings.