The Education of an Idealist

by Samantha Power

  By then, Fred was doing humanitarian work on behalf of philanthropist George Soros’s foundation with the goal, as Fred modestly put it, of “breaking the siege of Sarajevo.” But he made a point of visiting Washington every few months, and Mort would invite key influencers to hear his insights on the humanitarian conditions and what could be done to improve the situation. Mort’s perennial sense that he did not know enough fueled his curiosity and caused him to pose fundamental questions that few were asking. He never seemed afraid of looking uninformed—which, to me, seemed to be the highest form of confidence.

  As I dug into the news reporting and listened to what visitors from the region said, the war started to feel closer. The more I heard from Bosnia’s crusading representative at the UN or Serbia’s human rights lawyers, the more unnerved I was by the atrocities being committed.

  This response marked a change for me. Between my college graduation and taking up my Carnegie internship, I had taught English in Berlin for six months. I had seen the gaunt faces of Bosnian families as they arrived at German bus and train terminals, but I had not been moved to action by their suffering. It never occurred to me that I personally could do anything for them. Although I had felt horror toward the Tiananmen massacre several years before, in Berlin I had gone about my business, teaching and exploring the city, despite encountering the war’s survivors.

  Now, just a few months later at Carnegie, I was devouring the dispatches from Balkan war correspondents. I was working for someone who believed he could make a difference; if I could help him, I felt I might be making a modest contribution of my own.

  As I learned more, Mort began asking me to fact-check his opinion pieces for the Washington Post and other publications. I slowly started developing views and tried my hand at writing editorials. At first, all I did was read the drafts to Mum and Eddie over the telephone. When I finally got up the nerve to show one to Mort, he eviscerated what I had written, decrying my “purple prose” and telling me to “tone down” the language. Crestfallen, I reflected on the rejection in my journal. “I think what Mort detests—and I can’t say I blame him—is my voice. I’m too young, too lacking knowledge and experience, to assume such airs.”

  Even if I didn’t yet have a knack for such writing, Mort was exposing me to a different mind-set. I now shared his impatience with commentary that detailed the contours of a problem without offering realistic, concrete ideas for how the United States and other actors might improve matters. And I now understood why Mort had all the time in the world for Fred, someone who was a font of constructive ideas for how to respond to the Bosnian Serb Army’s devastating siege of Sarajevo.

  In addition to terrorizing and killing civilians, Bosnian Serb soldiers had cut off gas and water supplies to the city, sapping the will of its inhabitants to resist. Fred and his team of humanitarian engineers had resuscitated a natural gas line, thereby enabling some 20,000 Sarajevans to restore heating to their homes during the frigid winter. But the Serbs had also cut off the power to pumps that delivered water into the capital, a tactic that had even more dire effects. In order to get water, thousands of Sarajevans were hauling large plastic containers from their homes to the town’s main river or its other water sources. The river was polluted and terribly exposed to sniper fire. Because the queues at the water distribution points often stretched whole city blocks, the waiting crowds spent hours vulnerable to shelling.

  “What is the most powerful weapon the Bosnian Serb extremists have?” Fred asked me and the other interns one day on a visit to Washington. “Their siege,” he answered, explaining, “If we can find a way to restore water, they can still shoot people, but the city will not surrender. We will foil their plans and give the Bosnians the time to muster the means to fight back.”

  Fred’s plan was audacious in the extreme. He planned to smuggle water pumps and other large machinery past the Bosnian Serb gunners and then jury-rig a vast water purification plant inside a Sarajevo tunnel, where it would be shielded from Serb fire. If the plan worked, Fred said, 120,000 gallons of water would flow, giving a third of the city’s residents water around the clock.

  Fred was just one person with a small team. His idea seemed unbelievably risky. “If this is doable,” I asked, “why wouldn’t the United Nations do it?”

  Fred dismissed the question, telling me, “If the UN had been around in 1939, we’d all be speaking German.” He was galled by UN peacekeepers’ neutrality in the face of what to him seemed clear-cut aggression.

  As Mort deepened his advocacy and Fred began to implement his bold plan to restore water, I also got to know Jonathan Moore, a sixty-year-old former US official based at Carnegie who had been Mort’s colleague in President Richard Nixon’s State Department. Jonathan had a rumpled look. When I first met him, he was wearing brown corduroys and a light green Oxford shirt under a maroon V-neck sweater—attire from which I rarely saw him deviate. For many months, he held together his Rockport shoes with silver duct tape.

  A Republican for most of his life, Jonathan had served as a Senate aide and as a presidential campaign adviser. Working under six presidents, he had also held positions in several governmental agencies, including the Departments of State; Defense; Justice; and Health, Education, and Welfare.* Most impressive to me at the time, he had coordinated the US response to refugee issues under President Reagan, and had gone on to work as one of George H. W. Bush’s top officials at the US Mission to the UN, helping to create the position of a full-time UN coordinator for humanitarian emergencies.

  When I marveled at the variety and significance of all Jonathan had done, he downplayed his achievements. He stressed that he owed his “herky-jerky” career to finding himself in the “right place at the right time,” emphasizing how much each job had given him rather than what he had contributed. He was the first person I met who talked about public service with boundless delight—as a source of camaraderie and fun. To him, even government officials who got themselves into trouble were objects more of fascination than of judgment. “He was so devious, it was neat to watch!” he would exclaim. Jonathan keenly weighed the moral ambiguity inherent in high-level decision-making.

  My first substantive conversation with him occurred after he poked his head into my office to discuss the Bosnian war. “Do you think what is happening in Bosnia is because of the absence of good or the presence of evil?” he asked.

  I was carefully tracking developments in the Balkans, but I had no adequate answer to his question. That didn’t stop him from continuing to drop by my office, recommending readings from scripture or leaving on my chair a news article he had clipped. Jonathan reminded me of Eddie—he had insatiable curiosity.

  I realized that—with Mort, Fred, and now Jonathan—I was surrounded by people from whom I could learn a seemingly infinite amount. But I asked myself what a mere intern could do to support them. I raided Kramerbooks in Dupont Circle, immersing myself in the history and literature of the Balkans. I bought Serbo-Croatian tapes and listened to them on my yellow Sony Walkman as I walked to and from the gym. And at the end of the day, when the office began to empty out, I stayed on, poring over the reports on Bosnian concentration camps and trying to understand how such depravity had befallen the place Schu and I had visited just a couple of summers before.

  Leaving the office each night, I was usually so shaken by what I had read that I did not feel steady enough to ride my bike home, choosing instead to walk with it by my side.

  As I read back issues from the early 1980s of public news sources like the Radio Free Europe digest, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, I began compiling a detailed chronology of the road to Yugoslavia’s destruction. My timeline was a straightforward collection of dates and events, but one that nonetheless showed Yugoslavia’s downward spiral. I had started it so I could keep the sequence straight in my mind and help Mort with his op-eds and speeches. But one night it struck me that such a chronology might find a broader readership. Just as Mort was trying to make
himself a quick study on the conflict, so too were many journalists, NGO advocates, members of Congress, and Clinton administration officials.

  Five months into my internship, I went to Mort with a lengthy printout of my timeline, held together with a large black paper clip, and asked him if he thought it might be worth publishing. He was focused on something else and didn’t seem to process my question—but he assented. Over the next several weeks, through all-nighters and weekend labor, I tried to improve its quality. In June of 1993, reasoning that speed was as important as substance, I took my floppy disk to a printer and asked them to make one thousand copies.

  When I turned up to collect the order a week later, I was taken aback by the sight of a half-dozen large brown boxes that would nearly fill my small office. My amateur creation had been artfully compressed into a small book with a gray cover bearing my name and the title I had landed on: Breakdown in the Balkans. When word got out that such a chronology was available, the Washington think tank, diplomatic, policy, and media communities quickly emptied the Carnegie stock. I soon heard from Fred, who called on a satellite phone from Sarajevo to congratulate me on publishing the “hugely useful” Breakdown, which he said he was passing out to government officials and aid workers.

  I felt immense satisfaction—of a kind I had never experienced personally or professionally before. But now that people were actually reading it, I began obsessing about all that I had left out. “The gaps, the gaps,” I would say, deflecting compliments that came my way. Simultaneously, I chastised myself for craving the recognition I was starting to get. “Clearly, I am out, as always, for me, myself, and I,” I wrote in my journal. “I need so much to remember why the book came about in the first place.” I knew that conditions in Bosnia were deteriorating rapidly, and that if my chronology was to land in the hands of Fred’s besieged Sarajevan neighbors, they would likely burn it along with their other books to keep warm.

  The war raged unabated. Four US diplomats—George Kenney, Marshall Harris, Jon Western, and Stephen Walker—had already resigned to protest what they saw as the weakness of the US response to the Bosnian war, the largest wave of resignations over US policy in State Department history. I read about these men in a lengthy Washington Post profile and was gripped by their testimonies. Jon Western, a thirty-year-old intelligence analyst, had sifted through hundreds of photos and videos of what he recalled as “human beings who look like they’ve been through meat grinders.” As he told the Post, the intelligence he needed to consume for his job described preteen girls raped in front of their parents, a sixty-five-year-old man and his thirty-five-year-old son forced at gunpoint to orally castrate each other, and Serb torturers who made Muslim prisoners carve crosses in each other’s skulls.

  Western and the other US officials who resigned had initially tried to change policy from within, but having made no headway, had finally quit. They felt they could no longer be part of a US government that wasn’t doing more, reasoning that they could at least draw media attention to what they saw as America’s moral abdication.

  After reading the Post profile, I grandiosely wrote in my journal: “My only regret is that I don’t work at the State Department so I can quit to protest policy. Instead, I sit impotent and incapable.”

  Following my summer at CBS in Atlanta, when people had asked what I wanted to do with my life, I had begun answering that “I wanted to make a difference.” But at Carnegie I saw that this was an abstraction. Now I had a focus—a specific group of people in a specific place who were being pulverized, and I wanted to do something to support them.

  As a liberal arts major who had no particular knack for foreign languages, I still worried I had little to contribute. But I had managed to assemble the chronology, and I was seeing up close the vast number of ways researchers, columnists, journalists, government officials, and aid workers were involved in the enterprise of American foreign policy. All seemed to be struggling with how to define the US role in the world now that the Cold War was over, as well as how to manage a sudden flurry of nationalist and independence movements.

  I remained acutely aware of all that I lacked—I wasn’t an engineer like Fred, a trained diplomat like Mort, or a doctor like Mum and Eddie. I was focused, but I did not know how to channel my interests. A frustrated journal entry from the time ended simply: “. . . Act, Power.”

  — 7 —

  Risk

  Ben Cohen, a British journalist and activist, was the person who gave me the idea of traveling to the Balkans. “You should see the war up close,” he told me. “And you should write something.”

  After I met Ben at a Carnegie event, we struck up a fast friendship. A Sephardic Jew whose ancestors escaped to Bosnia during the Spanish Inquisition, he was more knowledgeable about the country’s politics, history, and literature than anybody I knew in Washington. Though he was devastated by all that had happened, he brought a dark humor to our discussions.

  Ben arranged an invitation for me—the “author” of Breakdown in the Balkans—to attend a conference being held in peaceful Slovenia, the newly independent former Yugoslav republic. After the conference, he insisted, we should drive to Bosnia.

  Given my chronic expectation that something terrible was bound to happen whenever life was going well, I feared heading into what appeared to be a blazing inferno of a war zone. I also didn’t see what I could add to the existing coverage of the war, as the experienced reporters in the region were doing phenomenal work. But Ben kept pushing. And with my internship nearing its end, I had begun considering what jobs would enable me to keep working on issues related to the conflict.

  Thanks to Ben, I already had one published article. Not long after we first met, he had proposed collaborating on an op-ed critiquing the direction of international diplomacy on Bosnia. Joined by George Stamkoski, a Macedonian friend of Ben’s who became our third coauthor, we produced what in retrospect seems a rather pedestrian essay and began “shopping” it to various newspapers.

  We tried every mainstream publication in the United States, and when each one turned us down, we sent it to outlets in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada for which we could find fax numbers. Eventually, Ben called me with “good news and less good news.” Our piece had finally been accepted, he said. “But it might be hard to find.” The essay would be appearing in Pakistan’s Daily Jang, but he wasn’t yet sure if it would be in the Urdu or English edition.

  I didn’t care: I faxed an illegible copy of the op-ed (in English!) to Mum’s office, and stuffed it into Mort’s mailbox.

  When I called Fred Cuny in Sarajevo to get his advice about traveling to Bosnia, he agreed with Ben: I should experience what was happening myself. He also invited me to watch his team in Croatia preparing for the water restoration mission he was planning to undertake in Sarajevo.

  “I will explain more when I see you,” he said cryptically, not wanting to reveal on the phone how he intended to sneak the necessary machinery past trigger-happy Bosnian Serb soldiers.

  Fred’s encouragement was all the motivation I needed. I worked at a think tank. I was published in a widely read newspaper. Well, okay: I interned at a think tank, and the paper was read widely in Karachi. But I was already going to be in the region, so I decided to add two stops after the conference in Slovenia: Bosnia, where Ben promised we would visit someplace safe, and neighboring Croatia, to see Fred in action.

  As it happened, Carnegie’s offices were located in the same building as U.S. News & World Report, a weekly magazine with a circulation of more than two million readers. I asked a journalist friend to introduce me to Carey English, the magazine’s chief of correspondents. Three days later, I found myself entering his small cockpit of an office with a copy of my Balkans chronology in hand. As he thumbed through it, revealing little, I asked whether U.S. News would consider running an article from me once I got to the region.

  Carey was tough but patient—far more patient than I would have been in his shoes. He asked me about
my past journalistic experience, and I pulled out the Daily Jang op-ed and several sports clips from the Yale Daily News. He shook his head. “You are going to a war zone, you know.” I assured him I understood and would not take dumb risks.

  “Define a smart risk,” he said.

  I blanched, but he continued. “Look, I’m skeptical,” he said as he handed me his business card. “But see what you come up with when you’re over there, and call me collect on this number if you have a story.”

  I thanked him and soberly shook his hand. When I left the U.S. News office and the doors to the elevator closed behind me, however, I let out a joyful scream.

  “Whoo-hooo, I’m going to be a foreign correspondent!”

  Ben was elated at the news and immediately began filling me in on the practicalities, including that I would need a UN press badge in order to pass through checkpoints and enter Bosnia. This meant that a news organization had to sponsor me. He suggested I head back downstairs to U.S. News to procure a letter vouching that I would be reporting for them.

  But this was an impossible ask. Carey had said he would take my call if I had a story to propose; that was a far cry from U.S. News sponsoring me as its correspondent. The magazine had a regular freelance contributor in the region already, and Carey was not about to undermine him by adding an untested second.

  Crestfallen by the realization that our fledgling plan might already be falling apart, I sat at my desk staring at the ceiling, unsure what to do next. But when two of my fellow interns who worked at Foreign Policy walked by, an idea popped into my head. Back then, the Foreign Policy journal mostly published work for academics and policy scholars.* Its content was nothing like that of newsmagazines like Time, U.S. News, or Newsweek—and it certainly did not employ foreign correspondents. But I doubted the UN knew that.