The Education of an Idealist. Samantha Power
Srpska, their own ethnically “pure” republic. Bosnia’s capital of Sarajevo had hosted the Winter Olympics only eight years before, but by April of 1992, Bosnian Serb rebels, backed by the remnants of the powerful Yugoslav National Army, began bombarding the city. Across the country, Bosnian Serb Army snipers and heavy weapons began firing at Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and others.
Not long before I joined Carnegie, a group of intrepid journalists had uncovered a network of concentration camps where Serb guards were starving and beating men to death, and disposing of their bodies in mass graves. The Bosnian Serb militia also set up rape camps where they sequestered Muslim and Croat women and systematically brutalized them. For the people of Bosnia, history had not “ended,” and the “New World Order” had brought terror and misery.
Campaigning for president, Bill Clinton had compared the atrocities in Bosnia to the Holocaust, promising that he would “stop the slaughter of civilians” if elected. Mort’s top priority was to use his platform at Carnegie to pressure the Clinton administration to translate those words into action. He turned the redbrick building at the corner of 24th and N Street into a hub where the most influential voices from the former Yugoslavia shared their perspectives with Washington’s top officials and journalists.
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.[fn4] 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