The Education of an Idealist

by Samantha Power

  When we finally reached Furawiyah, we asked to be directed to the wells. As a local resident steered us, we passed a large gray rocket that was partly lodged in the sand; this was the undetonated Sudanese Air Force ordnance that Amina had described. We also passed an enormous crater, at least twenty-five feet in diameter and five feet deep, where another bomb had exploded.

  “Here are the wells,” our guide said as we pulled up to the area that Amina had depicted on a map she had drawn for us. I saw only more Sahara sand.

  “What wells?” I asked.

  The guide kept pointing to the same patch of desert, and, frustrated, we stepped closer. There, barely visible beneath the pale-yellow sand, were the faint outlines of the rims of one large stone well and two smaller ones. This was where Amina and her son had watered their animals, and where Amina had later found Mohammed’s severed head.

  The janjaweed had stuffed the wells with bodies and buried their victims beneath mounds of sand. In so doing, they had destroyed water sources vital for the survival of people in the area. Among the twenty-five wells around Furawiyah, we learned, only three still functioned—and those would surely dry up soon due to overuse.

  The young man who showed us the wells then took us on a short drive outside Furawiyah to the base of a slope. We climbed out of our Land Cruiser and started to ascend on foot. The stench of decomposing flesh hit us before the rotting bodies, in gullies on either side of the hill, finally came into view.

  Fourteen men, in bloodied traditional white djellabas or in shirts and slacks, were lying dead in the sand. I counted seventeen bullet casings scattered around them. It looked as though the men had been divided into two groups and lined up in front of the ditches. They had all been shot from behind, except for one man. His body lay not in a ditch, but in the center of the slope. One of his palms was outstretched, as if he had been pleading for mercy.

  WHEN JOHN AND I RETURNED to the United States, we publicized what we had learned as widely as possible. He wrote an op-ed in the New York Times, and several weeks later, I contributed a long article to The New Yorker called “Dying in Darfur,” which opened with Amina’s story. Together, we also did a TV segment that aired on 60 Minutes. We each had full-time jobs—I was still teaching at the Kennedy School, and John was writing reports for the International Crisis Group on a broad range of African conflicts. But we joined others in trying to pressure the Bush administration to take meaningful action to do more for the people of Darfur.

  Thanks in part to John’s relentless activism, which brought him to college campuses, churches, and synagogues around the country, an unusual coalition of students and religious groups began to coalesce. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum strived to be a “living memorial” that would use the history of the Holocaust to educate—and motivate—future generations. The museum had already hosted me, John, Nick Kristof, and other speakers to talk about Darfur. In July, it officially issued a “genocide emergency” warning on Darfur, the first time it had ever made this designation. The same month, the museum and the American Jewish World Service teamed up to establish a broad network of faith-based, advocacy, and human rights organizations, which eventually included 190 groups and operated under the banner of “Save Darfur.”

  John and I donated the children’s schoolbooks and backpack, the toothbrushes, and the crumpled prayer to the Holocaust museum. We were not sure the people who owned these items were still alive, and, if they were, we assumed they would not be returning to their razed homes anytime soon. The museum staff turned our photos and artifacts into a gripping exhibit, which generated additional public interest.

  Evangelical Christians had a history of protesting mass atrocities in southern Sudan (which was home to a substantial Christian population), and now they began raising money for Muslim survivors in Darfur. In August of 2004, thirty-five evangelical leaders, representing fifty-one denominations and 45,000 churches, called for “swift action” from President Bush to “prevent further slaughter and death.” When I reached out to a prominent evangelical leader to better understand what was driving the community, I received a refreshingly straightforward response. “Killing is wrong, whether you’re killing a Jew, a Christian, or a Muslim,” he said. “God made the people there in Darfur. For us to ignore them would be a sin.”

  Private citizens and students across the country threw themselves into the Darfur campaign. A piano teacher in Salt Lake City donated two weeks’ of her earnings. The pastor of a Methodist church in Ohio asked congregants to spend half as much on Christmas presents as they usually did, and to contribute the rest—raising $327,000 for relief efforts. At Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, a group of students heard reports that a tiny African Union monitoring mission in Darfur didn’t have the budget to afford flak jackets. They raised $300,000 to help equip the beleaguered African Union personnel. Other college students formed an organization called Students Take Action Now for Darfur (STAND), which, within three years, had established chapters at six hundred universities and high schools across the United States.

  Back in 2001, I had written an Atlantic article describing the Clinton administration’s inaction during the Rwandan genocide. I later heard from a US official that President Bush had scribbled “Not on my watch” on a memo summarizing the article. Having always hoped to reach senior policymakers with my writing, I was moved by this, even as I wondered what it would mean practically. Inspired by the Livestrong anti-cancer bracelets, a group of activists created green wristbands inscribed with “Not On Our Watch,” which John and I joined thousands of people in wearing in an effort to raise awareness about Darfur. The year 2004 also happened to be the ten-year anniversary of the Rwandan slaughter, and, when the film Hotel Rwanda hit theaters, powerfully telling the story of Paul Rusesabagina, the hotelier who sheltered thousands during the genocide, many viewers looked to apply the lessons of Rwanda to the crisis under way in Darfur.

  In September of 2004, as this pressure was building and the killings in Darfur continued, Secretary of State Colin Powell testified before the Senate that the Sudanese government’s actions amounted to “genocide.”6 This was the first time that the US government had issued such a finding. Far from satisfying the activists, however, Powell’s genocide declaration inspired them to push even harder.

  The Bush administration responded, appointing a special envoy and imposing new sanctions on the Sudanese government. It also greatly increased aid to displaced Darfuris and support for the peacekeeping forces deployed by the African Union and the United Nations. Unfortunately, because the war in Iraq was going so poorly, the administration had lost substantial influence abroad, which weakened its ability to mobilize a united, global coalition to pressure Khartoum to end its atrocities.7

  Darfur exposed the limits of what one country could do—even one as powerful as the United States. The perpetrators of genocide knew they could still rely on powerful players in the international community, like China, to defend them. Nevertheless, the outpouring of attention forced the Sudanese government to allow food aid and foreign peacekeepers into their country. The movement also kept Darfuris fed and sheltered with the donated funds. This unique network of students, faith groups, and others, in which I had only a small role, helped save lives.

  WHEN GEORGE W. BUSH WAS REELECTED in November of 2004, I was despondent. The result seemed to affirm Bush’s decision to invade Iraq, his introduction of torture, and his use of the Guantánamo Bay prison for indefinite detention of prisoners of war, among other deeply problematic, harmful policies. A few days after the election, I had coffee with Peter Galbraith, whom I had profiled in my book. He urged me not to wallow, but to do something constructive.

  “What would you have me do?” I said, grasping at one of the few positive national stories to have come out of the election. “Go work for Barack Obama?”

  I had never heard of Obama before his speech at the July 2004 Democratic National Convention. Before he took the stage, I had been toggling between an evenin
g Red Sox game and the various speeches from Democrats criticizing President Bush. But as soon as Obama began his oration, I was transfixed by his soaring, inclusive message.

  Peter brightened when he heard me mention the senator-elect from Illinois. “Would you do that?” he asked.

  “Do what?” I answered, not even sure what I had just said.

  “I know a good friend of Obama’s. Let’s send him your book,” Peter replied.

  “Why would Obama want a six-hundred-page book on genocide?” I asked.

  Peter shot me an exasperated look. “Do you want me to engage my guy or not?” he asked.

  That week, I inscribed and mailed a copy of “A Problem from Hell” to the address that Peter had given me. I did not expect to hear back.

  But nearly five months later, in March of 2005, I received an email from Obama’s scheduler saying that the senator was interested in meeting for dinner the next time I was in Washington, DC.

  — 14 —

  Going to Washington

  When we met for dinner at a Washington steakhouse in the spring of 2005, Senator Barack Obama introduced himself with a distracted handshake and apologized in advance for any interruptions from lobbyists that would come during the course of our dinner. The whole restaurant seemed to be staring at the forty-three-year-old freshman senator as we sat down, reflecting the unprecedented attention that he had drawn since his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic convention. With one speech, Obama had propelled himself onto the national stage. Before even being sworn in as a senator, he had signed a million-dollar book deal and appeared on the cover of Newsweek.

  Because Peter Galbraith had connected me to Obama and his advisers with an eye toward getting me a job in his Senate office, I had come to the dinner expecting that to be a main topic of conversation. But Obama gave no indication he was even aware of the possibility.

  He started by making clear that he couldn’t stay long, but tactfully reassured me that we would have other opportunities to speak. “I really hope over the next forty-five minutes we can start what will be a longer conversation over time,” he said.

  I made a mental note not to order an appetizer and to speak quickly.

  But once Obama settled into our conversation, his various curiosities seemed to override his plan for a rapid exit.

  “Where do you come from?” he asked, starting us off. I gave him my story: Ireland, Pittsburgh, Georgia, Bosnia, Winthrop. At thirty-four, I had a time-tested encapsulation of my life.

  “Because there was no divorce in Ireland, my mother decided to move to America.”

  “After I saw images of emaciated men behind barbed wire in Europe, I became a war correspondent in the Balkans.”

  Obama refused to follow my script. “What the hell does ‘no divorce in Ireland’ have to do with ending up in Georgia?” he asked, interrupting me as I tried to speed through the chronology. Or, “What do you mean, you just went and became a war correspondent?”

  His interjections took me by surprise. I thought a life like mine would have been familiar to him, given his own itinerant upbringing. I knew he had lived in Indonesia as a boy and had moved to Chicago after college without really knowing anyone. “You know how it is when you turn up someplace new,” I said. “You figure it out.”

  Obama looked skeptical. “Well, you are more entrepreneurial than I am,” he replied disarmingly. “Chicago is not Sarajevo.”

  He had published a memoir at age thirty-three, but he seemed almost bored by the topic of himself and eager to focus on someone else for a while. His manner was at once regal and relaxed.

  I had brought a long list of questions for him, but he kept drilling down on my experiences, asking me to elaborate on just about everything I had grown used to discussing in shorthand. Mort (“What is it about him you most admire?”). Basketball (“Were you any good?”). Harvard Law School (“After Bosnia, was it crazy to be in a place where people were worried about grades and small things?”). The craft of storytelling (“When you start, do you think more about character or plot arc?”). The only topic we didn’t touch on at any length was the one that I was probably the most interested in given my own background: his father.

  I knew from his memoir Dreams from My Father that Barack Obama, Sr., had met and married Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, when Obama Sr. came from Kenya to the University of Hawaii on a scholarship. I knew that when Obama was three, his dad had gone back to Kenya, returning to visit his son just once, seven years later. I also knew that, when he lost his position in the Kenyan government, Obama Sr. had begun drinking heavily, eventually dying in a car crash when Barack was twenty-one. Probing this topic further seemed presumptuous, especially given all that Obama had already put in the public record, and I was hesitant to mention my own alcoholic father. Instead, when we alighted on the topic of his upbringing, I simply said, “Your mother was one brave woman.”

  He smiled and remarked, “In many ways, the book I wrote about my father is all about my mother.”

  Obama eventually brought the conversation around to US foreign policy, but through a personal lens. I told him about my drive to law school in August of 1995 when I cried upon hearing the radio announcement that the United States had finally intervened to try to end the killings in Bosnia.

  “Why the tears?” he asked a bit coolly.

  “I guess relief that America had saved all those people,” I said.

  “Hmm,” he responded, giving little away about his own view.

  He asked me about the massacre in Srebrenica. He wanted to understand what had happened, but also what the episode could teach Americans about how to improve the responsiveness of the US government and the UN to future such crises. Because the United States had ended the Bosnian conflict without incurring combat casualties, President Clinton’s use of military force was hard to argue with in retrospect. But Obama expressed sympathy with decision-makers, noting how hard it must be to predict in advance exactly how local actors will respond to US involvement in a conflict.

  I was familiar with the speech he had given at a Chicago anti-war rally. “I don’t oppose all wars,” he had said in October of 2002 as the Bush administration moved closer to invading Iraq. “What I am opposed to is a dumb war.” I asked him about it, noting that he had taken this position at a time when most Americans supported going to war. I wondered if he had considered the possibility that he was committing political suicide. At the same time, he had not pandered to the progressive crowd, making clear that he was not a pacifist and that some wars were worth fighting.

  Pivoting away from the speech, Obama said he found it maddening that Bush administration officials had simply presumed that our soldiers would be welcomed as liberators in Iraq. For him, it seemed like malpractice to judge one’s prospects by one’s intentions, rather than making a strenuous effort to anticipate and weigh potential consequences.

  Over the course of our dinner, Obama posed questions that I had never considered, wondering aloud whether the controversial “broken windows” theory of policing might be strategically applied to shoring up failing states like Sudan.8 “I can honestly say I’ve never thought about that,” I said, resolving to do my homework and get back to him.

  When I explained how idle I had felt reporting on the bloodshed in Bosnia while hoping that others would do something to stop it, he acknowledged that he had experienced a similar feeling of futility as a community organizer in Chicago. This frustration of attempting to address symptoms and not causes, he told me, had convinced him to get into politics, where he could pursue systemic change. “Now I have different frustrations,” he noted dryly.

  When I finally succeeded in moving the conversation away from myself, I asked him how he was handling his meteoric change in fortune—going from an ugly defeat in his first run at Congress in 2000 to handily winning a seat in the Senate four years later.

  He acknowledged that an awful lot had broken in his favor in recent years. Yes, he had won his Senate seat by 43 percentage
points. But, he stressed, his opponent, Alan Keyes, had never even lived in Illinois and had entered the race only after the Republican primary winner dropped out amid a sex scandal. And even before that, Obama reminded me, he had been trailing in the Democratic primary before the front-runner faced his own damaging scandal involving an allegation of domestic violence.

  The hardest part of his demanding new life, Obama reflected, was being away from his two young daughters, then ages three and six. He had a routine that generally allowed him to tuck them into bed at home in Chicago on Monday nights, fly to Washington, and be back in time to say good night on Thursday—but he admitted, “My wife is carrying us . . . I just can’t miss those flights.”

  When I asked him how, with such intense media attention, he kept from getting “too big a head,” he gave an answer I would hear him repeat often in the coming years: “It has never really felt as if it is about me as such. I’ve become a vehicle. People hunger for something they aren’t getting—authenticity, a willingness to speak one’s convictions, aspirations that transcend party affiliation. I guess I’m filling some kind of void.”

  Obama spoke with unusual precision about his strengths and weaknesses. “I’m not some big original thinker,” he said. “But I listen well, I synthesize ideas, and I can generally figure out how to communicate what we need to do.”

  We discussed the fact that people were already urging him to run for President in 2008. On this issue, Obama was adamant: despite the buzz generated by his arrival in Washington, he would not enter the race.