The Education of an Idealist

by Samantha Power

  An hour later, I sat in Oslo City Hall along with around a thousand others and listened to Obama deliver his Nobel address.

  As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there’s nothing weak—nothing passive—nothing naive—in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.

  But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism—it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

  He rejected the false choice between realism and idealism, saying:

  I believe that peace is unstable where citizens are denied the right to speak freely or worship as they please; choose their own leaders or assemble without fear. Pent-up grievances fester, and the suppression of tribal and religious identity can lead to violence. We also know that the opposite is true. Only when Europe became free did it finally find peace. America has never fought a war against a democracy, and our closest friends are governments that protect the rights of their citizens. No matter how callously defined, neither America’s interests—nor the world’s—are served by the denial of human aspirations . . .

  We can acknowledge that oppression will always be with us, and still strive for justice. We can admit the intractability of depravation, and still strive for dignity. Clear-eyed, we can understand that there will be war, and still strive for peace.

  The crowd was taut with concentration until the very end, but once Obama finished, people erupted into sustained applause.

  Barack Obama was the only President in my lifetime capable of such an address. New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote, “The Oslo speech was the most profound of his presidency, and maybe his life.” Even predictable Republican critics of the President praised it, including Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin.

  On the plane home, I reflected on all that had conspired to produce the speech—not only Obama’s willingness to confront big, hard questions, and clarifying thinking from people who lived long ago, but also bureaucratic gridlock and a chance encounter. The drafting process had been a tightrope walk, but it had come together beautifully.

  — 23 —

  Toolbox

  From our earliest conversations, Obama and I had talked about the recurrence and seeming inevitability of mass atrocities. We discussed not what it would look like to eliminate evil, a utopian fantasy, but rather, how to optimize what the United States did in response. Now that Obama was the president and I was his human rights adviser responsible for atrocity prevention, we had a chance to actually implement the kinds of changes we had batted around.

  Researching “A Problem from Hell,” I had observed that deliberations about how to prevent mass atrocities rarely took place in a timely way among senior decision-makers in the US government. And lower-level US officials who pushed for action lacked the power to authorize it, finding themselves mired in bureaucratic gridlock while violence spread. Partly as a result, the US government often failed to employ low-cost tools—such as sending diplomats to apply pressure or mediate, cutting off the flow of weapons to a country, or working at the UN to deploy international peacekeepers.

  In my writing and activism, I had argued that US officials should respond with a sense of urgency to early-warning signs, and that they should be empowered to alert senior decision-makers to threats of violence. High-level officials should then open their toolbox, scrutinizing whether or not the benefits of employing a particular tool outweighed the costs.

  People who knew me before I met Obama expected the hardest part of my adjustment to working at the White House would be taming my outspokenness.

  But when people asked, “Do you miss having your own voice?” I could barely fathom the question.

  “The reason I was exercising my voice before was to influence people in jobs like the one I now have,” I would say. “A voice is not an end in itself.”

  Now that I was a US official, I hoped to prod the system to speedily consider US and international options to mitigate violence.

  PRESIDENT OBAMA LIKED TO QUOTE from a scene in The Departed where Mark Wahlberg and a fellow cop are on a stakeout. When the other policeman loses the man they are tracking, an enraged Wahlberg begins yelling at the officer, who indignantly shouts back, “Well, who the fuck are you?”

  “I’m the guy who does his job,” Wahlberg responds. “You must be the other guy.”

  With a similar dynamic in mind, I lobbied for the creation of the first-ever White House position to coordinate the US government’s response to atrocities.7 I was responsible for all multilateral affairs and human rights issues; I needed a single individual by my side who would think full-time about how to prevent mass atrocities. Together, we could push senior decision-makers to authorize action before violence spiraled out of hand, incurring fewer risks and conceivably saving more lives.

  After consulting with President Obama, Denis McDonough (who had replaced Lippert as NSC Chief of Staff) agreed to create the position of NSC Director for War Crimes and Atrocities, which would report to me. I had a very specific person in mind for the role: a thirty-two-year-old civil rights lawyer named David Pressman, who had served as an aide to Madeleine Albright when she was Secretary of State.

  I had gotten to know David back in 2005, when he worked with George Clooney to intensify public pressure on the Bush administration to do more to prevent atrocities in Darfur. He was full of contradictions. He projected ambition, and over the years had cultivated an impressive Rolodex of contacts in both political parties. He said he became a lawyer because he viewed law as a “language of power.” Yet David’s Machiavellian sensibility had a beautiful twist—he ruthlessly pursued the goal of protecting vulnerable people.

  True to this aim, during law school he secured a clerkship on the Supreme Court . . . of Rwanda. And while David could be argumentative to a fault, he also had an endearing ability to laugh at himself. I had heard the acronym GSD—Get Shit Done—used to praise people who were effective in government, and I was confident that David’s GSD score would be high. He was destined to break large amounts of bureaucratic crockery, but I could not imagine achieving the kind of change I sought without him.

  Once David assumed the newly created position, I could count on finding him in the office when I arrived early in the morning, and he usually stayed well after I left late at night. I don’t think I ever came in to the EEOB on the weekend without finding our office door unlocked and David pounding away on his keyboard. Because I had been unable to secure additional office space, my administrative assistant’s tiny cubicle had been partitioned into two. Both she and David worked without complaint in a jury-rigged space not much larger than a mid-sized refrigerator. “You’ve come a long way since hanging out with movie stars,” I teased him.

  David and I met with people inside and outside the US government to devise a list of meaningful reforms. And we drafted a directive that President Obama soon issued to his cabinet, declaring that “preventing mass atrocities and genocide is a core national security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United States” and creating an Atrocities Prevention Board, the first White House–led structure tasked to react to early warnings of atrocities.

  From there, Obama directed the intelligence community to prepare an unprecedented National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) identifying the places facing the greatest risk of mass atrocities. He licensed the creation of “alert channels” so that information about unfolding crises could more easily reach decision-makers, including him. He directed the Pentagon to incorporate the prevention of atrocities into its training and contingency planning. He b
anned violators of human rights from entering the United States.8 And he called on the private sector to create new technologies that could expose or authenticate violations of human rights.

  But while these moves were trailblazing, the real test of the US government’s seriousness about preventing mass atrocities would come, of course, in the real world.

  IN 2010, ON THE FIFTEENTH ANNIVERSARY of the Srebrenica massacre, I returned to Bosnia as a US official, touching down in a Sarajevo that had been transformed from the war zone I’d lived in as a young reporter. The Bosnian government had designated July 11th, the anniversary of Srebrenica’s fall, as a day of mourning and remembrance in which families would gather to bury the remains of their loved ones. Remarkably, forensic experts were still discovering bone fragments and personal effects of the victims. Five years before, I had visited with my friend David Rohde for one such ceremony in which 610 men and boys had been interred. This year, 775 Bosnians would be laid to rest.

  Before the official ceremony began in the tiny hamlet in eastern Bosnia, I ducked away from the heads of state and foreign ministers milling around and approached a woman who looked distraught. She told me in Serbo-Croatian that the previous year she had buried her husband and three of her five sons, each of whom had been murdered by Bosnian Serb soldiers. This year she was burying her fourth son.

  I knew how hollow my words would sound. But I told her I had come on behalf of President Obama, who wanted to express his condolences and solidarity. “Ja sam nova majka,” I added, but as soon as I said those words (“I am a new mother”) and thought of Declan, I struggled to continue.

  “Ne mogu zamisliti Vašu bol,” I said. “I can’t imagine your pain.”

  The woman began speaking. “In my dreams they are there,” she said. “But then I wake up and they are gone. They have vanished.” What she said next shook me: “My son I am burying today was only seventeen. He was just a young boy. I didn’t have time to love him enough. I didn’t give him enough hugs. He wouldn’t have known what he meant to me.”

  We never know how much time we will have with those we love. I could do nothing other than embrace the woman.

  “We can’t bring your sons or husband back,” I said as we parted. “But we will never give up on bringing to justice those who did this to your family.”

  Ratko Mladić, the mastermind of the Srebrenica genocide who had been indicted by the UN war crimes tribunal, had evaded capture for fifteen years. There had to be a way to find him.

  The two previous administrations had tried. President Clinton’s State Department created a War Crimes Rewards Program, plastering around Bosnia and Serbia thousands of WANTED posters featuring photos of Mladić and the other leading indictee, Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadžić. The posters promised $5 million for information that led to their arrests. But in Mladić’s early years on the run, he had benefitted from a wide circle of protectors that included elements within the Serbian military and Russia’s powerful Federal Security Service.

  At the beginning of his presidency, George W. Bush had intensified the manhunt, sending more Special Forces to Bosnia than the United States had deployed anywhere else in the world since the end of the Cold War. But after September 11th, 2001, tracking down Balkan war criminals naturally receded as a priority, and the intelligence and military resources dedicated to finding Mladić were reassigned to counterterrorism efforts. Without pressure from the United States, the pursuit lost momentum.9

  After President Obama took office, he sent Vice President Joe Biden to Belgrade to meet Serbian president Boris Tadić, a reformer who wanted to forge a closer relationship with the West. Biden encouraged Tadić to find and arrest Mladić. Our government and that of the UK offered assistance to Serbian authorities in tracking the fugitive’s whereabouts. Unfortunately, concrete leads remained elusive.

  Using the tools at our disposal, we got to work. Stephen Rapp, Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes, traveled to Serbia five times to underscore President Obama’s deep interest in the case. Capitalizing on the imprimatur of the White House, David also launched a new process in which he gathered government agency representatives to look for ways the United States could capture those, like Mladić, who had been indicted by international tribunals for war crimes or crimes against humanity.

  David always took great pleasure in inventing new government acronyms. “Off to PIFWC!” he would exclaim as he made his way to the Situation Room, carrying a large notebook containing the latest intelligence on our government’s efforts to track alleged war criminals. While I couldn’t always remember precisely what PIFWC stood for (Persons Indicted For War Crimes), I regularly popped my head into David’s cubicle for status updates on Mladić’s whereabouts.

  “Nothing yet,” he would usually say. “But he’s top of the list!” If David was pessimistic, he never showed it.

  Bringing mass murderers to justice meant more than just providing a degree of closure for the families of victims—it advanced US interests. Finding someone like Mladić would remove a major impediment to reconciliation in a place where the US government had deployed tens of thousands of troops and invested billions of dollars in pursuit of greater stability. This logic extended well beyond the Balkans. Impunity for people who had committed unspeakable atrocities undermined fragile governments, often the same governments the State Department and the Pentagon were going to considerable lengths to strengthen. The rule of law was an essential foundation for peace and economic development, and even though the apprehension of war criminals would not itself usher in lawfulness, it could possibly deter other would-be mass murderers.

  In emphasizing the importance of arresting war criminals, David and I of course understood that we would not be able to secure significant additional intelligence or financial resources. To compensate, we pursued an approach inside the government that had a lot in common with activist strategies outside: look for pressure points, identify potential allies, and work the system. And thanks to the relatively simple bureaucratic innovation of the NSC-initiated PIFWC meetings, I saw almost immediately how attention from the White House activated interest throughout the government and concentrated minds in Serbia.

  In an overture that proved pivotal in demonstrating to the Serbian government that President Obama was deeply committed to seeing Mladić brought to justice, we invited the Serbian president’s chief of staff, Miki Rakić, to the White House. David, who had been a theater director in college and always had an eye for the mise-en-scène, reserved the ornate Indian Treaty Room in the EEOB for our meeting. He thought the intricate gold and marble detailing and the kaleidoscopically tiled floor would serve as a fitting backdrop to my reciting the benefits that would accrue to Serbia if Mladić were rounded up. Rakić made clear he would take the message back to his president. This renewed dedication to the pursuit of Bosnia’s most wanted took place almost entirely behind the scenes, but it successfully signaled to Serbian officials that they should dedicate more assets to the search.

  My phone rang at six a.m. on May 26th, 2011. It was David.

  “We got Mladić,” he said, sounding euphoric.

  I could hardly process the news. “You’re kidding?” was all I could initially manage. But to my amazement, it was no joke. After fifteen years on the run, one of the world’s most notorious war criminals was behind bars.

  In a joint effort involving Serbian, British, and American intelligence agencies, officers from the Serbian Interior Ministry had found and arrested Mladić in his cousin’s farmhouse.10

  Hailing the arrest in a statement, President Obama applauded President Tadić and noted the long record the United States had, “from Nuremberg to the present,” in pursuing justice “as both a moral imperative and an essential element of stability and peace.”

  Obama concluded, “May the families of Mladić’s victims find some solace in today’s arrest.”*

  I had suggested this line, thinking not just of the mother I had spoken with during my visit to
Srebrenica, but of all the families in Bosnia who had endured unthinkable loss.

  ONE OF THE FIRST MAJOR TESTS of whether we could smother a possible crisis early on, before it devolved into mass killings, came in South Sudan.

  According to a peace agreement brokered by the Bush administration in 2005, South Sudanese voters were supposed to hold a referendum in January of 2011 on whether to secede from Sudan. Two decades of Sudanese government bombing raids and ground attacks were thought to have left nearly two million people dead, and the people in southern Sudan unequivocally wanted independence. But as we met at the NSC to map out possible scenarios in advance of the vote, it seemed inconceivable that Khartoum’s genocidal government would allow the oil-rich south to become its own country. The most likely outcome was either that Sudan would prevent the referendum, or that it would simply refuse to recognize the inevitably unfavorable results. Both scenarios would provoke violent conflict. Warning lights from NGOs and our own intelligence community were flashing red.

  The administration was filled with people who cared deeply about South Sudan, including Susan at the UN, my Wednesday Group friend Gayle, and our colleagues in the State Department and NSC who managed Africa policy. Denis sent stern messages to all government agencies that a peaceful referendum in South Sudan was one of President Obama’s personal priorities. At the UN, Susan negotiated a landmark communiqué in which China and African nations joined the United States and Europe in calling on the Sudanese government to respect the referendum results. Both the United States and the UN also carried out contingency planning in case violence erupted.

  In large part because of this sustained pressure and unusual international unity, the Sudanese government allowed the vote to go forward. Some 98 percent of the four million registered South Sudanese participated, with 99 percent favoring independence. The government in Khartoum begrudgingly accepted the outcome.