The Education of an Idealist

Once, after I rose to end an interview with an elderly Muslim woman in Serb-held territory, she hugged me goodbye. Writing later that night in my journal, I noted, “She squeezed me like I was one of her own. I was ashamed.” I don’t know now if I was ashamed because I had been practicing my new craft while she was sobbing in pain at the loss of her sons, because I felt the United States was not doing enough to prevent such devastation, or some combination.

When I drove with Stacy Sullivan of Newsweek to UN headquarters for the daily press briefing in Sarajevo, we typically passed a cluster of photographers in an expectant scrum at the entrance to the main road, which was known as Sniper Alley. The still and video photographers had their cameras ready, knowing that someone was likely to get shot by a Bosnian Serb sniper as he or she made a mad dash across this exposed portion of road. Elizabeth Rubin, a writer with Harper’s who would become a close friend, once saw a woman who managed to survive the crossing yell back at one of the perched photographers, “No work for you today, asshole. I made it alive.”

Until that summer, I had believed that if my colleagues and I conveyed the suffering around us to decision-makers in Washington, our journalism might move President Clinton to stage a rescue mission. This had not happened. The words, the photographs, the videos—nothing had changed the President’s mind. While Sarajevans had once thought of Western journalists as messengers on their behalf, they had now begun to see us as ambassadors of idle nations. No matter how many massacres we covered, Western governments seemed determined to steer clear of the conflict.

Even if Clinton and his advisers did not think it reasonable to get involved to prevent atrocities, I thought they should have seen how failing to shore up a fragmenting part of Europe would impact traditional US security interests. The occurrence of such a conflict in the heart of Europe made NATO look feckless, and the failed state gave unsavory criminal elements—like arms traffickers and terrorists—a foothold in Europe. I knew that thousands of foreign fighters were making their way to the country, including the battle-hardened mujahedeen from Afghanistan. But I only later learned that a still-young terrorist group known as al-Qaeda was active there, and that two of the September 11th hijackers as well as attack architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed ended up fighting in Bosnia.[2]

On several occasions during the long summer of 1995, when I dropped by the home of someone who had lost a loved one in the capital, I was shooed away. “Why should we talk to you?” one woman screamed at me before slamming her door. “The world knows, your government knows, and you do nothing.”

Just as the war had come to feel normal, so too had the idea that nobody would stop it.

At the same time, I noticed that I had gradually lost my fear. While once I had shivered for hours after evading Serb shelling or sniper fire, now I no longer worried about the crack of gunfire or the crash of a mortar exploding nearby. Three years into their agony, Sarajevans were joking, “If you run, you hit the bullet; if you walk, the bullet hits you.” I had begun to feel a similar fatalism, gradually giving up the superstitions that I had originally seized upon for safety—my Pirates baseball cap, my back-street route to the press briefing, and my ritual beer as I pounded away on my laptop after a long day’s work.

I knew I had been lucky—every reporter had close calls, and mine were nowhere near as hair-raising as those of others. But they began to add up. As I was driving in Serb territory along an icy road, my car turned 180 degrees and spun into a ditch that was surrounded by mines. Once, in Sarajevo, shrapnel burst through the window and landed on the desk where Stacy and I often worked side by side. In the same month, a large mortar attack flattened a house several doors from where I was charging my computer. One day, as Stacy, Emma, and I exited our car near the Bosnian president’s office, Serb snipers fired on us repeatedly, forcing us to race across the parking lot in a panicked search for cover. Our assailants were just a few hundred yards away, and certainly could have hit us if that had been their goal. Instead, they seemed more interested in amusing themselves.

The spike in violence weighed heavily on Mum, Eddie, and Stephen, who were each tracking the news from New York. When I called home, my brother, who was back for the summer after his junior year in college, grabbed the phone. Stephen and my mother had a fraught relationship: she struggled to get him to focus on school and to lay off drugs and alcohol, while he insisted he didn’t need her advice, saying he took after his father, which was just what she was worried about. At the same time, he was protective of her. If one of the patients she was close to died, he was tender, assuring her she had done all she could and frying her up a fish he had caught for dinner.

Stephen and I were not especially close, but we were always warm with each other. So it shocked me when he confronted me about the risks I was taking.

“What you are doing is so selfish, sis,” he said on the phone, asking, “Don’t you ever think about Mum?”

My brother had a point. For all the time I’d spent trying to convey to others what it was like to be a Bosnian under siege, I had not really stopped to imagine what it must have been like to be the parent of someone who had chosen to go live in a war zone.

The call with Stephen reoriented me. “Maybe it’s time,” I thought, and the words of folk singer/songwriter Michelle Shocked sprung into my mind: “The secret to a long life’s knowing when it’s time to go.” I began to think seriously about an exit strategy.

Like many of my contemporaries who had graduated college but were not sure what they wanted to do in their careers, I had considered applying to law school and had taken the LSAT during my year with Mort at Carnegie. The prospect of actually becoming a lawyer hadn’t much appealed to me at the time, and I never followed through with submitting applications. After a few months of working in the Balkans, however, the idea had resurfaced.

The one area where the so-called international community seemed to be making progress was in building new institutions to promote criminal justice. A tribunal was being assembled in The Hague to punish war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Self-conscious about simply recording what was happening around me, I wondered whether, if I became a lawyer, I could do something more concrete to support the victims of atrocities or to punish wrongdoers. Immersing myself in lessons on the rule of law seemed an antidote to the violence and impunity around me.

After a year in the region, I had sent an application to Harvard Law School along with several of my press clips. I thought Harvard’s prestige might add credibility to my writings and policy recommendations, and the law school brochure described a wide range of international law offerings. I also liked the prospect of being just a train ride from Mum and Eddie. In the spring of 1995, I was notified that I had been admitted.

Still unsure of whether I actually wanted to attend, I reached out to Mort for advice. He was vehemently opposed. “Why would you stop doing something valuable in order to go sit in a classroom for three years?” he asked.

He then called his friend, Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, whom President Clinton had recently asked to lead the American effort to broker peace in Bosnia, and asked him to use his negotiating skills to talk me out of going to law school. When I answered the phone and heard Holbrooke’s nasal voice, which I knew only from television, I was startled. He told me that he knew many women who had mistakenly gone to law school because they felt they needed a credential to be taken seriously. “You do not need a piece of paper to legitimize yourself,” he said, before adding—to my amazement—“Mort says I should hire you.”

The prospect of working as a junior aide to Holbrooke as he tried to bring the war to an end was tantalizing beyond words. I thanked him for calling and told him I would seriously consider what he had said. After we hung up, I called Eddie and told him about the conversation. “If I work for Holbrooke,” I exclaimed, “I can eliminate all the middle men!” What I meant was that, in order to influence US policy, I would no longer need to convince editors to accept my stories. I could make my case directly to the top decision-makers in government.

Eddie loved the idea, and, in a spontaneous burst of lyricism, immediately launched into one of Shakespeare’s best-known monologues, from Julius Caesar:

There is a tide in the affairs of men,

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

On such a full sea are we now afloat;

And we must take the current when it serves,

Or lose our ventures.

Knowing I didn’t always grasp precisely what he was getting at, after he finished his oration, he declared, “Go for it!”

But something held me back from taking this fantasy job with Holbrooke. I had begun to fixate on the notion that in law school I could acquire technical, tangible skills that would ultimately equip me to make a bigger difference than I would by putting words to paper, even as an aide to the US envoy. I decided to send in a letter of acceptance to Harvard in order to hold my place, but continued to internally debate whether to attend, self-conscious about the luxury of privileged indecision.

In July of 1995, however, all of this faded from mind as the Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladić launched an all-out assault on the UN-declared “safe area” of Srebrenica, and in the ensuing days orchestrated the largest single massacre in Europe since World War II.

THE DAY BEFORE SREBRENICA FELL, I borrowed a satellite phone from colleagues in Sarajevo and called Ed Cody, the foreign editor of the Washington Post, to pitch a story on the Bosnian Serbs’ march toward the town. Cody said he didn’t deem another Bosnian Serb Army incursion newsworthy, especially as readers had seen a lot in recent months about attacks on UN safe areas.

I argued with him, pointing out that some 30,000 Muslims in Srebrenica had no protection. But I knew that American readers were fatigued and that I had to clear a higher bar to place a story in the Western press than in the early days of what was already a three-year-old conflict.

As I rambled on, hoping to persuade him that this crisis was different, Cody cut me off. “Well,” he said, “it sounds like tomorrow, when Srebrenica falls, we’ll have a story.” I was stunned by the cynicism in his words, but I failed to change his mind.

Twenty-four hours later, Bosnian Serb forces stormed into the town of Srebrenica; on July 12th, my article ran on the front page of the Post under the banner headline: BOSNIAN SERBS SEIZE “SAFE AREA.” When I called Mort, he was disconsolate. “This is the pits, the lowest moment yet,” he said.

Western reporters like me were unable to get access to Srebrenica in the days that followed. The best we could do was speak with alarmed UN officials and Bosnian government sources, and report what was being broadcast on Serbian TV—primarily, images of Mladić in the town, carting Bosnian Muslim men and boys away on buses while assuring them, “No one will harm you.” Still in Sarajevo, I began reporting unverifiable claims that Muslim prisoners like those we saw on TV were in fact being executed. On July 14th, I wrote an article in the Boston Globe titled MASSACRES REPORTED NEAR SREBRENICA, which relayed the Bosnian government’s allegations that hundreds of prisoners had already been murdered. I also quoted an eyewitness saying that “while the TV cameras were there, the Serbs were good. Then the media disappeared, and the soldiers started taking people off the buses.” The whereabouts of some 10,000 people were unknown.

Ten days after Srebrenica’s fall, I heard ever more terrifying reports about what was happening out of sight. Bosnian foreign minister Muhamed Sacirbey claimed that 1,600 Bosnian men and boys detained in a stadium near Srebrenica had been shot. Meanwhile, Bosnian Serb radio openly reported that of the Muslim fighters who had fled Srebrenica, “most were liquidated.” I shuddered at what I was hearing. But blocked by Bosnian Serb forces from getting to Srebrenica, neither I nor my colleagues had any way of corroborating the claims. I hoped they were exaggerated or false. I had also already begun reporting on the brazen Serb assault on a second UN “safe area” around the town of Žepa. There, some 20,000 civilians were trapped, protected by just 79 UN peacekeeping troops.[fn1]

On August 10th, at the UN in New York, US ambassador Madeleine Albright presented evidence to the Security Council that Bosnian Serb soldiers had executed as many as 2,700 people, burying them in shallow mass graves. Albright circulated a set of US satellite images showing a small farming village fourteen miles west of Srebrenica. The “before” photos, grainy though they were, clearly showed prisoners crowded into a soccer field, along with pristine fields nearby. The “after” photos were taken a few days later; the prisoners were gone, and the earth in the neighboring fields had been disturbed in three areas, creating what looked like mass graves.

Albright linked the photos to firsthand testimony from a fifty-five-year-old Muslim who said he had been in a group of men who had been machine-gunned there. The man had miraculously survived, hiding among the corpses of his friends and relatives. At nightfall he had escaped to Bosnian territory before the bodies around him were bulldozed into one of the large graves that lay waiting.

MY FRIEND DAVID ROHDE, the Christian Science Monitor’s Eastern Europe correspondent, was on vacation in Australia visiting his girlfriend when the Serbs took Srebrenica. In the weeks that followed, he read horrific testimonies disseminated in the media from survivors like the one Albright quoted. Without permission from the Bosnian Serb authorities, he managed to elude the military and police and spend two days around Srebrenica searching for evidence of the alleged executions.

On the first day, he entered an abandoned building on the grounds of a local soccer stadium—the same place Foreign Minister Sacirbey had referred to in his alarming speech about mass executions. David found human feces, dried blood, and several dozen bullet holes up and down the walls.

On the second day, using a faxed copy of one of the blurry US satellite photos, he found the fields Albright had referenced. There, he discovered empty ammunition boxes, Muslim prayer beads, photographs, and various personal items. Finally, and most tellingly, as he would write in the Christian Science Monitor, he saw “what appeared to be a decomposing human leg protruding from the freshly turned dirt.”

In addition, in a dozen interviews with Serb soldiers and civilians in the area, he met not a soul who reported seeing or hearing about Muslim prisoners. Thousands of Bosnian Muslim men and boys seemed to have simply vanished.

After writing a story on the graves, David traveled back to Bosnian-held territory, where he found nine Muslims who said they had played dead in the fields of Srebrenica where the mass executions occurred. When he showed the survivors the items he had found in the fields, one man gasped after seeing the 1982 elementary school diploma of his brother from whom he had been separated. He asked David where he had found the document, and David said he had picked it up fifty feet from a mass grave. The man, David wrote in the Monitor, “stared blankly and then quietly faded into a crowd of soldiers.”

David emailed me after his encounter with the survivors, writing:

I cannot articulate the combination of sadness and disbelief that washed over me when these men would accurately describe the soccer field I visited … and then go on to talk about 1,000 people being gunned down. I kept asking them more and more detailed questions, hoping they would get things wrong, but they didn’t … These people aren’t lying.

The evil of what transpired in Srebrenica, which David did more than any other reporter to expose, helped me decide what I should do next. I could continue to write articles about the Bosnia carnage in an effort to move President Clinton. I could pursue a possible job with Holbrooke and work from within the US government to push for the same outcome. Or I could attend Harvard Law School and, although it would take a few years, try to become a prosecutor who could bring murderers to justice. Working at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague now seemed like the worthiest goal, and the one that would ultimately have the most impact. We would not bring back the men and boys who had been executed, but we could make sure that Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladić and others like him faced justice.

Jonathan Moore, the former US diplomat and refugee expert I met working at Carnegie, had become someone I turned to at critical moments. With school beginning at the start of September, I needed to make a final decision, so I telephoned him and asked what I should do.

Jonathan didn’t hesitate. “Get the hell out of there,” he urged me. “You need to break out of the compulsion for power, glory, ego, relevance, contribution. Get out. Get out before it gets you, and you forget what got you in.”

I didn’t think self-consciously about power, glory, and ego, but Jonathan knew I didn’t mind seeing my name in print. He also knew that I was drawn to joining the US government’s Bosnia team because I couldn’t bear to move away from the center of the action.

“But Holbrooke—” I tried.

“Forget Holbrooke,” he said. “There will be other jobs. Reading books will do you good.”

THE PERSON WHO I KNEW would be on the other side of the argument—echoing Mort’s conviction that I stay—was of course Fred Cuny. But once Fred had gotten the water flowing in Sarajevo, he had gone in search of his next ambitious project. A few months later, he had ended up in Chechnya to assess how he could help people being subjected to a comprehensive Russian carpet-bombing campaign. But I couldn’t get Fred’s perspective because he had gone missing.

In early 1995, I had been visiting Mum and Eddie when Fred happened to be coming through New York after his first visit to Chechnya. When he walked into the sports bar he had chosen as our meeting place, he exclaimed “Sammie!” and embraced me in a large Texas hug. When we talked about what he had seen, however, he was uncharacteristically despairing.

“The Serb forces in Bosnia are cruel,” he said, “but they are always trying to figure out how they can get what they want without provoking US intervention. They bomb, they probe, they watch, they pause, they bomb again. Russia’s forces in Chechnya know they are free to do anything they please. They know nobody will stop them. There are no lines they won’t cross. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

While Sarajevo had recorded as many as 3,500 heavy detonations per day, he said, the capital of Chechnya had counted that number each hour. He said that some 400,000 Chechens had been displaced in three months of fighting, and as many as 15,000 Russian and Chechen civilians had been killed.

Yet instead of being deterred, Fred saw a problem to be tackled. In what seemed to me a complete non sequitur from his descriptions of slaughter, he concluded, “I think we can help broker a cease-fire.”

My eyes widened. “By ‘we,’ do you mean you?” I asked, hoping I had misheard. He smiled self-consciously. “Yeah, I guess so.”

Fred also thought that, by visiting, he would be in a stronger position to get the Clinton administration to do more to pressure Russia to desist. He had long impressed upon me one of his core beliefs about influence: “The only way to move people in Washington is to tell them things they don’t already know, and that requires seeing things for yourself.”

Even for Fred Cuny, who had often managed to pull off what entire governments and humanitarian agencies deemed inconceivable, getting the Russians to cease their assault in Chechnya seemed delusional. He was the expert, though, and while I teased him about his excessive confidence, I felt I didn’t know enough to challenge him.

Fred spent the next month publicly blasting the Russian government for its actions, testifying before Congress and writing a lengthy critical essay about Russia’s conduct in the New York Review of Books. His advocacy exposed how badly the Russian efforts were going and, indeed, how some 5,000 Russian soldiers had already been killed. It also encouraged greater scrutiny of the Russian military’s atrocities. By going public with his criticisms of Russia’s war, however, Fred made himself a target. For his safety, Fred’s coworkers pleaded with him not to return to Chechnya, but nobody could say no to Fred Cuny.

In March of 1995, Fred traveled back into Chechnya with two doctors from the Russian Red Cross, a Russian translator, and a local driver. When Fred’s delegation entered territory held by Chechen separatists, they were apprehended. Fred sent a calm note to the Soros Foundation, his funder, saying that his group had been delayed. His Russian translator added a postscript with a wholly different message: “We, as always, are in deep shit … If we’re not back in three days, shake everyone up.”

Then the delegation had disappeared.

Fred’s twenty-eight-year-old son, Craig, and his brother, Chris, quickly flew to the region to begin searching. They got shot at, shelled, and robbed as they spent much of the summer of 1995 trying to find him. Mort excitedly called me in Sarajevo one day with word that Fred had been found—and I was euphoric. But the report proved incorrect, one of several false sightings. Still, I clung to the belief that Fred would turn up.

In mid-August, Craig and Chris announced that Fred had been executed by Chechen rebels not long after being taken captive. Chris said that while Chechen gunmen had pulled the trigger, it was the Russian government that had loaded the gun, spreading false information that Fred was an anti-Chechen Russian agent. “Let it be known to all nations and humanitarian organizations,” Chris declared at a press conference, “that Russia was responsible for the death of one of the world’s great humanitarians.”

I was devastated, both by the loss of someone who had been so exceptionally kind to me, and by the death of a humanitarian hero, whose expertise and can-do spirit seemed so necessary in a world increasingly racked by ethnic and religious conflict.

No matter how much cruelty I had seen in Bosnia, a stubbornly naive part of me could not accept the truth. For weeks, I had vivid dreams about Fred showing up at my door with a big smile and a six-pack of root beer. “You didn’t really think I could die, did you?” he would tell me. I did everything I could to fend off thoughts about his final hours. And I resorted to my time-tested approach to blunting the pain I felt at losing someone important to me: I kept moving.

Fred’s death cemented my decision to duck out of the “real world” and decompress. In late August, I packed up my belongings and booked my flight back to the United States to begin law school.

BACK IN AMERICA, I saw that David’s reporting on Srebrenica had landed like a bombshell in Washington, yielding just the kind of impact I had hoped to achieve through my own writing. Suddenly, leading members of Congress were pushing President Clinton to intervene militarily to end the war and prevent “future Srebrenicas.”

The final straw for Clinton came in late August. As I pulled myself together at Mum and Eddie’s home in Brooklyn, I heard the news that Bosnian Serb gunners around Sarajevo had struck again, hitting the same market they had attacked in February of 1994, this time killing forty-three people. Once I had established that nobody I knew had been killed, I fumed that the United States continued to allow the slaying of innocents. And in truth, I wished I were still there to cover a story that was leading the news around the world.