The Education of an Idealist

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.

I felt an immense sense of privilege at being able to chronicle the experience of men and women being reunited with their elderly parents who had been too infirm to flee. And I was moved by the elation of children who relished the simple pleasure of playing outside again. With the pause in fighting, a motley crew of journalists from the UK, the US, and France had rushed to the area to cover this breaking—and rare good news—story. We drove ourselves hard during the day, interviewing dozens of people and crossing front lines that hadn’t been traversed in months. With regular phone service to the outside world cut off across Bosnia, we ducked into UN bases to file our stories—an exercise rarely without technical hassle. We had to first connect our computers to a regular phone jack and then dial up a number in Austria that would, on a good day and after some suspense, let off a long beep indicating that a virtual “handshake” had occurred. Then, when our stories had been uploaded, we went for drinks.

I felt like I stood out as a novice among veterans. Emma Daly of the British Independent accompanied Laura and me on our interviews. Although Emma was also making her first trip to central Bosnia, I seemed perpetually cold and wet while she was somehow prepared for all weather contingencies, pulling the necessary attire from her compact suitcase—whether fleece, down jacket, or raincoat. In a belt wallet under her shirt, she also kept rolls of small bills, which were essential in towns where banks had long since been destroyed. “How did you know to bring all that?” I asked enviously.

Initially, I wore a camouflaged vest and helmet given to me by George Kenney, the first of the US officials to resign from the State Department to protest the government’s Bosnia policy. I thought it would protect me from stray bullets and shrapnel, but when I saw what the battle-hardened journalists wore, I realized that Kenney’s vest lacked the lifesaving ceramic plates of a standard flak jacket. It would be largely useless in the face of gun- or mortar fire.

Luckily, my colleagues were so focused on gathering material for their own stories that, at first, they paid me little mind. By the time they began teasing me for the goofiness of my flimsy vest and the inappropriateness of my Nine West boots (no match for this war zone’s winter mud), I blushed more with a sense of belonging than with shame. I felt exhilarated by the camaraderie; the press corps offered a solidarity I had felt before only on my sports teams. This was a club to which I very much wanted to belong.

Much of my life over the nearly two years I spent in the Balkans would entail pitching story ideas to editors in major American cities like Boston, Washington, and San Francisco. I would end up with more than a dozen different employers, from the wire service UPI to regional newspapers around the United States like the Dallas Morning News and the Baltimore Sun. But my core relationships were with the Boston Globe, U.S. News & World Report, and later, The Economist, The New Republic, and the Washington Post. Whenever I had a piece published, the newspaper or magazine kindly cut out the clipping and mailed it to Mum and Eddie’s Brooklyn home, my only American address. Once I started taking frequent trips from relatively peaceful Croatia into Bosnia, Eddie dedicated himself to intercepting mail that included articles with a Bosnian dateline so that Mum would not realize my location.

Mort had convinced me that the only way President Clinton would intervene to break the siege of Sarajevo was if he felt domestic pressure to do so. As a journalist, therefore, I believed I had a critical role to play. I wanted not only to inform members of Congress and other decision-makers, but to try to make everyday readers care about what was happening to people thousands of miles away.

Many journalists in Bosnia brought a similar focus to their work. High-minded though it sounds, we wanted our articles to matter and our governments’ actions to change. I was aware that this aspiration was more reminiscent of an editorial writer’s ambition than that of a traditional reporter, whose job was to document what she saw. But when I wrote an article—no matter how obscure the publication where it appeared—I hoped President Clinton would see it. I wanted him to do more than he was doing to help the people I was meeting, most of whom were desperate and believed that only the United States could save them.

When I reported my heart out and my editors weren’t interested, I was crushed. I blamed myself for not figuring out how to bridge the distance. The editors did their best to remind me of the US context so I could keep my readers foremost in my mind. They drilled into my head one of the basic truisms of reporting: if I did not make the stakes of the issue clear and compelling, most people would not read past the first paragraph.

While I despised trying to “sell” the suffering around me, the experience helped refine—in a way that would prove valuable later on—my own sense of what animated Americans or, alternatively, what was likely to cause their eyes to glaze over. As the months passed and I became a more capable reporter, I went back and forth about whether I should pursue journalism as a permanent career. Since nothing we were writing had thus far managed to sway Western decision-makers, I wondered if I could find a different path that was less about describing events and more about directly trying to shape them. Once, when I reported on a diplomatic gathering that included European foreign ministers and Secretary of State Warren Christopher, I noted in my journal: “I would like to be one of them.” On another occasion, after covering a massacre of children who were struck by a shell while jumping rope in a Sarajevo playground, I wrote to myself that I wanted to “be on the other side of the microphone,” in a position to make or change US policy.

I TOOK A SHORT TRIP back to Washington in September of 1994. I was twenty-three years old and had lived in the former Yugoslavia for less than ten months. Encouraged by Mort, who often seemed blind to hierarchy and propriety, I contacted two people that I still cannot believe I had the gumption to engage.

First, I called Strobe Talbott at his home. Strobe was a longtime Time magazine correspondent who had become Deputy Secretary of State in the Clinton administration—the second in line at the State Department. I had his number only because I had met him through Mort before he entered government. The conversation was then—and remains now—cringeworthy in the extreme:

“Hello, Strobe, you may not remember me. This is Samantha Power.”

“Yes, of course, how are you?” he said warmly.

“I’m good, but I actually spent the last year in Bosnia, and I was wondering if you’d like to have a chat.”

There was a long pause.

“I suppose you’d like to offer recommendations,” he said dryly, filling the silence.

“I may be presumptuous enough to phone you at home at nine o’clock at night, but I’m not so presumptuous to think I could make informed recommendations. I just know what I see … but it might be useful to meet,” I offered.

“I would like to, but I’m kind of busy with Haiti right now,” Strobe replied.

I put my face in my hands and mouthed to myself, “Haiti! Of course he’s busy with Haiti!!” The newspapers were then filled with reports that Clinton’s national security team was meeting around the clock, preparing a large military deployment to help restore the country’s democratically elected president to power.

Strobe hurried off the call. But I was not finished making a fool of myself on my homecoming visit.

Thanks again to an introduction from Mort, I met the next day with Steve Rosenfeld in his office at the Washington Post, where he was the editorial page editor. He understandably assumed I was interested in career advice. “So you want to be a journalist?” he asked. “No,” I answered. “Or maybe,” I said, not wanting to offend him. I shifted the topic. “I hear you are sort of a dove on Bosnia,” I began.

As Rosenfeld looked over my shoulder at CNN’s Haiti coverage on a nearby television, I tried to make a persuasive case for why he should write editorials urging Clinton to do more to stop the Bosnian atrocities. He was surprisingly polite, but also firm that the United States should stay out of the conflict.

After half an hour, when he tried to end our meeting and get back to work, I persisted.

“I know you have to go,” I said. “Just two or three last points, if I may.” Fifteen minutes later, I was still talking.

While I was becoming a decent reporter, I was a woefully ineffective advocate.

IN 1994 AND 1995, I traveled regularly to Sarajevo. Doing so was to be transported into another galaxy: the dystopian landscape was burned and broken, yet people went on living as if no longer noticing the plastic sheeting on their windows or the charred cars turned into barriers to shield them as they crossed the road. Parts of the city felt instantly familiar—Mum and I had watched the 1984 Winter Olympics together in Atlanta, cheering for “Wild Bill” Johnson, the daring American skier, as he captured his gold racing down hills that were now teeming with Serb heavy weapons. Scott Hamilton had skated to gold in the Zetra Stadium, which was now destroyed and surrounded by graves.

Only once inside the city could I feel how close the attacking Serbs were, and how claustrophobic the trapped inhabitants must have felt. The mountains seemed to grow out of the river that split the city in half. By holding the high ground, the Bosnian Serb Army was able to choose its targets at will. I found it hard to believe that men who called themselves soldiers were setting their rifle sights on women carrying their water jugs home. But by the time the siege was finally brought to an end, the Bosnian Serb militants would end up killing some 10,000 people in the city.

By 1994, the cemeteries in Sarajevo had already been so overwhelmed that the town’s biggest parks and football fields had been converted into graveyards. Since few families who lost loved ones could afford a proper cement marker, they used simple wooden plaques, often scavenged from a table or bookshelf. I felt sick when I saw, at the Lion Cemetery, the relatively recent birthdates on the grave markers—children, teenagers, and twentysomethings seemed to account for the majority of the deaths. And alongside the Bosnian Serb leaders’ determination to kill the city’s residents came a desire to humiliate and torment those who survived. They bombed libraries, concert halls, and universities. As businesses closed or were destroyed, unemployment soared.

To pay for food, English professors sought out jobs as interpreters for the UN. Engineers turned to rummaging among destroyed cars for batteries with a charge. Poets and medical students who had never dreamed of holding a gun joined the army so they could defend their city and all it represented.

Back in 1992, in the early months of the war, Sarajevo residents had opportunities to be evacuated and become refugees. But many stayed because they expected that the war, which they had never believed would happen in the first place, would end quickly. Others remained because, irrespective of whether they were Muslims, Croats, Serbs, or Jews, they knew that the Serb extremists’ primary goal was to destroy the spirit of tolerance and pluralism embodied in the city’s multiethnic character. “If we leave, they win,” Sarajevans would say defiantly. Unfortunately, once they had passed up the chance to depart, they did not get another opportunity.

As dangerous as the Bosnian capital was, I knew I was in a privileged position compared to the residents scrambling for safety around me. I had a UN press badge and thus permission to leave as well as enter; almost everyone else was stuck.

While some Western officials talked about the conflict as if it were historically preordained—“they have been killing one another for centuries”—the lives of the young people before the war were not dissimilar from those of the average young American. They would meet up for an espresso or a beer after work, and would dance at raves or to the music of popular bands like U2. The values they learned were the same as those we had been taught. Mosques, Catholic churches, Orthodox churches, and a synagogue dotted the downtown. One in every five marriages in Bosnia (and one in three in Sarajevo) had been ethnically mixed.

My childhood in Ireland had coincided with the period of sectarian tensions and terrorism known as “The Troubles,” which had started shortly before I was born. The people of Northern Ireland would ultimately endure thirty years of conflict in which some 3,600 lives were lost. The deadliest attack in the Irish Republic’s history occurred in 1974, a couple of months before my brother’s birth, when Loyalist paramilitaries set off a series of rush-hour bombs in my hometown of Dublin, killing twenty-six people, including a pregnant woman. As the conflict escalated, a growing number of refugees from the North—more than 10,000 overall—poured across the border.

These events did not affect my life in any immediate way. Even after violent incidents in Dublin, I do not recall ever fearing that my mother would not make it home from the hospital or my dad from the pub. At the same time, my early years in Dublin meant that I never saw civil strife as something that happened “over there” or to “those people.”

When I spoke with my friends and family back in the States and in Ireland, I tried to translate what Bosnians were experiencing, but I must have sounded preachy as I urged my friends to put themselves in different shoes:

Imagine if you were sitting at home and you suddenly found that your telephone line had been cut. You couldn’t even call your parents to tell them you were okay. Imagine having to sleep in every layer of clothing you owned to survive without heat. Imagine not being able to send your kids to school because it was safer to keep them in your dark basement than for them to take a short walk down the block. Imagine hearing your child’s tummy growling and not being able to help because the next UN food delivery was not for another week. Imagine getting shot at by people whose weddings you had attended. This is what is happening right now to people like us.

When I first visited, although the war had already been under way for nearly two years, I spoke to many Bosnians who still held out hope that the United States would rescue them. Their knowledge of the political dynamics in Washington was striking. The columns of American opinion writers (particularly Anthony Lewis and William Safire of the New York Times) were translated and, despite the shortage of paper and ink, widely circulated. Electricity was intermittent, and smuggled batteries for shortwave radios were only sold at exorbitant prices. Nonetheless, many residents knew which members of the US Senate were pushing for air strikes, while some even tracked when these politicians were up for reelection. Often my Bosnian neighbors informed me of obscure happenings in the Clinton administration. “Have you heard Steve Oxman is out and Richard Holbrooke is in?” a waiter in a café asked in 1994, alerting me to the news that Clinton had replaced his assistant secretary of state for European and Canadian affairs.

Some days, when President Clinton seemed on the verge of using military force, and the Bosnian Serb Army was afraid of provoking him, the atmosphere was so calm that I went jogging. Other periods were extremely dangerous, and I could do little more than pray the shells would not find me. On occasion, when it felt like the mortars were landing closer and closer, I was too frightened to do more than seek shelter in the bathtub of the hotel or apartment where I was staying. The most lethal days started peaceful and turned deadly: daring to trust the early quiet, people would venture outside, and Bosnian Serb forces would then hit crowded bread and water lines, markets, and school playgrounds.

Despite these horrors, for the first several years of the war, Sarajevans treated Western visitors with immense magnanimity. Even after losing loved ones—that very day—they would insist on pouring their hearts out in order to alert the world to their suffering. They would share their most intimate memories.

“Tell Clinton,” one bereaved father said as he ushered me to the door after describing the loss of his son. It was a phrase I heard often.

Amid the darkness, the resilience of the people of Bosnia was inspiring. They asserted their dignity in large and small ways. People scraped together resources to stage elaborate weddings. They went on having babies, perhaps aided by the fact that birth control pills were hard to get in the besieged city. Women who walked to work did so in high heels, even though their impractical shoes would impede their escape when bullets started flying. As Bosnians waited hours in line for their turn at the water pump, they imposed rules and created penalties for those who cut the queue or took more than their share. Poets, novelists, and musicians kept writing. Though the main theaters had been reduced to rubble, artists found places to perform plays and music.

And while there was much to cry about, Sarajevans did not lose their sense of humor. At the start of the war, the Serb militants frequently graffitied areas they claimed should be theirs with the words “Ovo je Srbija!,” or “This is Serbia!” When they did this to a post office in Sarajevo, a resident famously responded in spray paint: “Budalo, ovo je pošta,” or “Idiot, this is a post office.” And when the siege of Sarajevo officially outlasted the siege of Leningrad, becoming the longest in modern history, a pirate radio station blared the Queen song “We Are the Champions.” The heart of the country refused to stop beating.

10

THE SECRET TO A LONG LIFE

In May of 1995, as I was traveling into Sarajevo with Roger Cohen, the New York Times bureau chief for the Balkans, I nearly lost my life. Serb militants had shut down the airport, so we had no choice but to enter via a dirt road over Mount Igman, the one patch of land around Sarajevo that remained in Bosnian hands. What was little more than a steep mountain goat trail before the war had become the lone land route by which people, food, and arms could still make it into the Bosnian capital.

The Serbs had attempted to take Mount Igman, and the Bosnian Army had suffered significant casualties defending the narrow eighteen-mile road that snaked through the mountain. The entire pass remained vulnerable to Serb artillery, with the last fifteen miles in the line of sight for Serb heavy machine guns and cannons. People who used the road often drove at breakneck speed around sharp bends without any idea what might be coming in the opposite direction. Honking in a blind spot was ill-advised because it would attract attention from Serb gunmen. Yet when a car veered even one foot off the path, there was no guardrail to prevent it from slipping off the shoulder. The drop was precipitous, and the Bosnian Army had mined the side of the mountain to prevent Serb soldiers from staging a stealth attack on foot.

Many people died on Mount Igman, including a number of peacekeepers and, later that summer, three US officials: President Clinton’s Bosnia special envoy Robert Frasure, National Security Council aide Nelson Drew, and the Defense Department’s Joseph Kruzel. The French soldier transporting the American diplomats into Sarajevo had been driving at a rapid clip when he accidentally veered off the side of the road while trying to avoid an approaching convoy. The diplomats’ armored personnel carrier went tumbling more than three hundred yards down the mountain, causing anti-tank rockets in the vehicle to explode.

From the relative shelter of a Bosnian government checkpoint at the top of the mountain road, Roger and I braced ourselves for the perilous journey. As we set off, we could see the hulks of vehicles hit by Serb gunfire or destroyed after drivers had taken the hairpin turns too quickly. Driving the heavy armored vehicle provided by the Times, Roger was aiming for the unachievable combination of speed and maneuverability at once. Whenever we shaved the edge of the road, I turned my body toward the gearshift—as if I could personally avoid the land mines that the outer part of the vehicle might accidentally set off.

As we hurtled down the mountain at a velocity that we hoped would outpace the Serb gunners who might have us in their sights, Roger began to lose control of the vehicle. Our downward momentum from the steepness of the descent caused the steering wheel to elude his grasp and spin wildly. Sweating profusely, all I could do as we lunged from right to left was press my hand against the roof of the five-ton vehicle as Roger tried to keep hold of the violently shaking steering wheel and force the car toward the center of the road. At one point in particular, I felt sure we were about to plunge down the mountain as the car careened out of control toward the edge—but somehow, in a mystery that neither of us understand to this day, Roger managed to haul us back onto the trail.

I WAS BY THEN SPENDING most of my time in Sarajevo, the epicenter of the war. The situation was deteriorating badly. While I was working there in June and July of 1995, an average of three hundred shells rained down on the city each day. With no end to the war in sight, I was starting to feel increasingly like a vulture, preying upon Bosnian misery to write my stories.

Even when my articles received prominent placement in a newspaper or magazine, potentially bringing my reporting to the attention of millions of people, I had a nagging sense that I was falling short. I grew practiced at interviewing survivors of violence, but I still couldn’t shake the feeling that by asking questions designed to elicit appalling detail, I was exploiting someone’s personal trauma for “my story.”

There would come a moment in every interview where I would feel a rush of recognition—“I have what I need”—and then would hasten to wind down the conversation so I could get to a power source for my laptop and start writing. I would then begin to feel guilty for having invaded someone’s home, drunk (at their insistence) their scarce coffee or tea, and left.