The Education of an Idealist

by Samantha Power

  AS MY DOUBTS about whether to move to the Balkans lingered, I devised a test for myself that I have used many times since. The test, as I put it then, was as follows: If I end up not making it as a journalist, will something else I learn in the process make it worth trying? I would come to call this the “in trying for Y, the most I accomplish is X” test, or the “X test.” This was a kind of self-protective exercise—designed to minimize my sense of risk by preemptively establishing a positive spin on even a negligible potential outcome.

  Since I was fascinated by Balkan history, I had my answer. If the most I achieved by moving to the former Yugoslavia was to learn the history and language of the region, I thought, it will have been worth it (provided I did not die).

  The Irish people are a famously emotional bunch, but tend to avoid displays of sentimentality. Frank McCourt, who spent his childhood in Ireland, wrote in his magnificent memoir Angela’s Ashes:

  If I were in America I could say, I love you, Dad, the way they do in the films, but you can’t say that in Limerick for fear you might be laughed at. You’re allowed to say you love God and babies and horses that win but anything else is a softness in the head.

  When I read this passage a few years after my move to the Balkans, I dog-eared the page, as I felt it unlocked one of the mysteries of my childhood in which love was tacitly communicated but almost never directly expressed.

  Nonetheless, at the airport with Mum and Eddie before I boarded my flight to Europe, we all teared up as we said goodbye. In the back of our minds, we knew that relatively peaceful Zagreb would not hold me long. The human toll of the Bosnian war—and the possibility of being able to do something to draw more attention to it—would be too great a gravitational pull.

  I DECIDED NOT TO DIVE in as a freelance journalist from the start, but instead to sign up for an intensive Croatian language and culture program. I would pay a small fee to live with a host family in Zagreb rather than immediately having to find an apartment of my own. If I could get a handle on the language, I thought, I would need to spend less on expensive interpreters when I started actual reporting.

  My arrival in Zagreb was not unlike that of an American college student in a study abroad program. My Croatian host family greeted me at the airport. They encouraged me to try out my rudimentary Croatian,* and I went out for drinks with their daughter, a vivacious university student who offered tips for exploring the city. But within no time, I found myself put off by the family’s nationalism and the way the parents denigrated Serbs. This was not the first time I had seen how kindness toward a favored “in-group” (I was Catholic like them) could coexist with bigotry toward those who were not included. The situation reminded me of my experience as a new Lakeside student when the parents of a few of my white high school friends had generously embraced me while disparaging the other newcomers, the African Americans who were bused to school.

  I soon learned that expressions of anti-Serb animus were fairly commonplace around Croatia. Croatians had felt subjugated by Serbs in the former Yugoslavia and had very recently suffered ruthless Yugoslav Army bombardments. When I tried to argue that the whole ethnic group could not be blamed, several said out loud, “The only good Serb is a dead Serb.” I eventually dropped out of my Croatian language class because my teacher refused to use words that originated in Serbia, and I began the familiar practice of building my own flash-card library. Luckily, I would later find a wonderful teacher in Bosnia.

  Laura Pitter was the person who most eased my transition. She proved every bit as bighearted as she had seemed when we first met the previous summer. She immediately invited me to accompany her to interviews. “You are going to do great here,” she said, as if reading my doubts. “Remember, you know the story.”

  After I had been in Croatia for two weeks, I telephoned NPR, using the number the foreign editor had given me before I left Washington. I tentatively asked the person who answered if she would be interested in “something” on a cease-fire between Bosnia’s Muslims and Croats that had just been brokered by US diplomats. The voice on the other end seemed practiced in fielding calls from strangers. “Sure,” she said, to my shock. “How about a forty-five-second spot? We will call you back from the studio within the hour.”

  Before I had a chance to inquire about specifics, I heard a dial tone.

  I turned to Laura, who was sitting cross-legged on her couch, writing her own story on a laptop. “What’s a spot?” I asked.

  When NPR called back, Laura said, they would conduct a sound check and then would expect me to do three things: get listeners’ attention with my opening, describe my nugget of news, and efficiently conclude.

  I practiced and practiced, ducking into the bathroom so Laura wouldn’t hear my affected inflections. I found the sign-off the most difficult: “For NPR, this is Samantha Power reporting from Zagreb.” I just could not believe that NPR would want me to say this; they barely knew me! But Laura insisted it was standard. When the phone rang, I tried not to let my nervousness show and successfully delivered the “spot” on my third try.

  I telephoned my mother later that evening, but she beat me to my news. “I nearly crashed my car on the way home!” she told me, clearly overjoyed and amazed by the speed with which I seemed to have gotten settled. Whatever her misgivings, she had never strayed from my corner. Eddie, meanwhile, had already contacted NPR to secure a copy of the tape. “They said your name twice!” he declared.

  Not long after, Fred Cuny passed through Zagreb and welcomed me to the region by inviting me to dinner with a few of his friends. He told us that his team had completed the dangerous operation at Sarajevo Airport. “We got our time down to seven minutes!” he boasted, explaining that the specially designed equipment they had snuck into the city was already filtering and chlorinating previously undrinkable river water. When he and his team opened the pipes for the first time, he recalled, they were accidentally doused in five hundred gallons of water. He described a jubilant scene of soaked engineers, arm in arm with Bosnian staff who laughed merrily as they imagined what running water would mean for their families and neighbors.

  I was in awe of what Fred had done. By improvising a water system, he had helped blunt the impact of one of the cruelest tactics in the Bosnian Serb siege. He had also enhanced his relevance in Washington, giving him more sway in the ongoing debate about whether the United States should use military force to try to end the carnage. Because of the Bosnian Serb Army’s terror tactics and what he saw as the minimal risk to US forces, Fred believed it should. He seemed to know more than most US officials about the location and capabilities of Bosnian Serb heavy weapons. While other humanitarians avoided contact with the US government in order to show their independence and neutrality, he relished sharing all he knew.

  The day after our dinner in Zagreb, Fred returned to Sarajevo. He was driving with ABC News anchor Peter Jennings when they heard a shell crashing into the main market two blocks away. Sixty-eight people were killed in what was the deadliest massacre of the war. Fred was incensed. He raged against the US government, telling Jennings on camera that two American fighter planes had been flying overhead when the Bosnian Serb Army struck. “They were stunting up there, just flying around in circles and playing,” he said. “They could have done something.”

  I was getting a complicated introduction to American power. Since April of 1993, the United States and its NATO allies had been patrolling a no-fly zone that prevented Serb fighter jets from carrying out aerial bombardments over Bosnian territory. US-piloted F-16s were frequently visible in the sky, and their overhead passes—with sonic booms like those heard at a baseball game on the Fourth of July—were awesome displays of might.

  Yet the UN Security Council resolution authorizing the no-fly zone only permitted NATO to shoot down aircraft that were dropping bombs from the air; its pilots did not have permission to attack those who were using their artillery and mortars to slaughter people.

  Fred called me the night of th
e market massacre, his voice still trembling as he spoke: “This is a failure of humanity,” he said. “They will not stop until they are stopped.”

  Sitting in my Zagreb apartment and watching CNN footage of market vendors carrying away the bloodied remains of their mutilated friends, I found myself rooting for the first time in my life for the United States to use military force.

  Despite President Clinton’s promises during the 1992 presidential campaign to stop the killing, the deaths of eighteen American soldiers in Somalia during the first year of his presidency left him deeply concerned about US forces becoming entangled in messy, peripheral conflicts around the world. He was fearful that even limited action in Bosnia would lead to “another Somalia,” or, worse, “another Vietnam.” This reminded me of the peril of applying analogies in geopolitics, best encapsulated in Mark Twain’s line: “A cat who sits on a hot stove will never sit on a hot stove again. But he won’t sit on a cold stove either.” The conflicts in Somalia, Vietnam, and Bosnia had little in common with one another. In addition, the UN Security Council had imposed an arms embargo on Bosnia, which disproportionately impacted Bosnia’s Muslims, as they did not have access to weapons from Yugoslavia’s vast national army arsenal. They could not rescue or defend themselves. American planes were already flying overhead. I did not believe Clinton should deploy ground forces to Bosnia, but I thought he should tell Bosnian Serb soldiers to leave their positions and should order US planes to destroy their weapons, so they could not kill civilians with impunity.

  I called Mort and awakened him at four a.m. in Washington. I urged him to contact all the people he knew in the Clinton administration—but mainly, I just needed to hear his voice.

  “What will it take?” I pleaded.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But this may finally get them to move.” He was referring to Clinton and his national security team. He paused. “Then again, it may not.”

  The fact that Fred was so close to the market when the massacre occurred was an uncomfortable reminder of what I was getting myself into. While Westerners were not targeted nearly as frequently as they later would be in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, journalists, aid workers, and diplomats still faced serious risks, and could easily be hit in “wrong place, wrong time” incidents. I could tell myself Fred knew the ropes and I would be safe with him. But any feeling of security in Bosnia was deceptive. Who lived and died in the war was viciously random.

  MY FIRST SPRING IN THE REGION, I traveled with two male colleagues to the towns of Prijedor and Banja Luka in the so-called Republika Srpska. The local Serb authorities had made non-Serbs turn over their properties and businesses before gunmen forced many to flee and herded thousands into concentration camps, where they were tortured, starved, and killed. The paramilitaries had instructed Serb residents to mark their homes to denote the ethnic “purity” of those within. So many Muslims and Croats had been expelled or murdered that we referred to the area as the “heart of darkness.”

  As the three of us absorbed the desolate, almost apocalyptic sight of roads lined with gutted, bombed-out houses that had once been owned by Muslims and Croats, we did not speak. The homes that remained flew white flags or had Serbian nationalist symbols spray-painted near their front doors. These marked, lit residences—bustling with life, but often wedged between the carcasses of what had been the homes of their neighbors—gave off a sinister glow.

  We checked into a gloomy, virtually empty hotel near the main road and went up to our separate rooms. Just as I was drifting off to sleep, I heard a sudden banging on the door. Before I had the chance to answer, several large armed men barged in, shouting at me to get up and go with them.

  They reeked of alcohol, and my hands shook so much that I had trouble packing. One of the creepiest and most commanding of the lot led me outside into the backseat of a car, where, to my great relief, my male colleagues were already sitting. As I tried to settle my nerves, I watched out of the corner of my eyes as the Serb soldier who had taken me to the car began flicking through my passport.

  “Sam-an-ta,” he leered in a tone of mock admiration. I looked away, fearing that eye contact might increase the risk of physical contact.

  “Sam-an-ta,” he said again. “Are you virgin?” My head began to spin. I thought about trying to bolt from the car.

  “I said, are you virgin?” he repeated. I stared out the window, determined to pretend I was not hearing what I heard.

  “Sam-an-ta, answer me,” he said sharply. “Are you virgin?” Lacking recourse, I snapped back at him, “It is none of your business. Leave me alone.”

  He asked again. “Stop,” I said with as much conviction as I could muster.

  He came closer, and I could see he looked puzzled—and slightly wounded. He held up my passport and said, “You born September twenty-one. I thought you virgin.”

  I felt suddenly faint. “No, no, no,” I said, “you mean Virgo. You mean, ‘Are you Virgo?’ Yes! My birthday is September twenty-first. I am a Virgo.”

  We were soon released without physical harm. Bosnian women and girls were not so lucky. Some 20,000 of them are estimated to have been raped during the conflict.

  Being a woman covering the war affected my experience in other ways. The culture that female reporters confronted in the Balkans was traditional and patriarchal, with deep-rooted sexism. That said, those with power may well have viewed women as less threatening than men, sometimes offering us better access to the people and events we wished to cover. I cannot pinpoint the difference gender made, and other female correspondents may not agree, but I found some of my sources underestimated me—and thus may have been more forthcoming than with male reporters.

  One night I joined my friend Stacy Sullivan, Newsweek’s freelance correspondent, on an outing across Sarajevo to try to find water for a long-overdue bath. We were pulled over, arrested for violating the curfew, and confined to a Sarajevo prison cell. When I got permission to make a phone call, instead of calling the US ambassador, I telephoned the Bosnian prime minister, whom I had often interviewed and who was a notorious flirt. He seemed to enjoy flexing his muscles to secure our release, and we headed home within several hours. A couple of months later, I agreed to meet the prime minister for an interview at a Zagreb hotel as he passed through on his way to lobby the Clinton administration in Washington. When I arrived at the hotel room that the prime minister’s aide had directed me to, I expected to be greeted by his entourage. Instead, the prime minister himself met me at the door—barely dressed.

  I was so shocked that instead of fleeing immediately as I should have, I crossed the threshold into his suite as if on autopilot—only to spend the next fifteen minutes dodging his repeated efforts to embrace me while I futilely urged him to commence our scheduled interview. Finally, when he made clear that he had little interest in being questioned about the war afflicting his people, I left.

  I do not know a female correspondent who wasn’t caught off guard by an aggressive sexual come-on from a source. Because we women had become such close friends, we often traded stories and warned one another away from particular people. “Ewwwwwwwww . . .” was the subject we gave the emails we sent to one another recounting our latest experiences with unwelcome male attention. We even found ourselves occasionally expressing gratitude for those local and international officials who didn’t make lewd comments or direct advances.

  Now, however, I am struck by the fact that we didn’t publicize these incidents. Perhaps this was because such aggressive acts were so run-of-the-mill that they didn’t seem noteworthy. We may also have compared our experiences to those of Bosnian women whom we interviewed who had been raped and brutalized. Mainly, though, I think we believed that the burden was on us to evade harm.

  — 9 —

  “Tell Clinton”

  Just after US diplomats helped broker a cease-fire between Bosnian Muslim and Croat fighters in central Bosnia, Time asked Laura to report on the nascent peace, and she invited me along. La
ura and I ended up spending several weeks traveling around the ravaged area, which had been inhabited mainly by Muslims and Croats before the war. The Bosnian Serb paramilitaries had first introduced the chilling term “ethnic cleansing” in places like Banja Luka to describe how they sought to “purify” the land they controlled of its Muslim and Croat residents. But it hadn’t taken long for Muslim and Croat militias to adopt the same sinister strategy of purging the “other” from the territory they controlled.

  As we drove through the areas where the US-brokered cease-fire was taking effect, we could often tell which ethnic group held an enclave only by noting who was being insulted in the graffiti scrawled on apartment building walls. Sometimes our best clue as to who had been victimized was either a church’s cross or a mosque’s minaret poking out from a large pile of rubble. The scenes reminded me of a Macedonian satirist’s brilliant summation of the ethos behind the killing: “Why should I be a minority in your state when you can be a minority in mine?”

  After ten months of ferocious fighting, the civilians we met were shell-shocked, blinking in the afternoon winter sunshine like people who had just emerged into the daylight after watching a horror movie in a darkened theater. One woman stood in her front yard looking at her home, which had been in enemy hands for more than a year, trembling at the sight of what little was left. I asked a group of soldiers how they had gone so quickly from firing grenades across a front line to tossing their rivals packs of cigarettes. “Our commanders told us to fight,” one soldier said simply. “Now they are telling us to stop.”

  My time in central Bosnia deepened my understanding of American power, which I could now see encompassed far more than fighter jets. The United States had brokered the cease-fire not by resorting to military action, but by exerting unrelenting diplomatic pressure on both sides. Although almost everyone we met had lost a loved one in the fighting, the new agreement allowed people to dare to hope that the war—or at least their experience of the war—might end. The superpower had made a horrific situation much better.