The Education of an Idealist. Samantha Power
end of the day, when the office began to empty out, I stayed on, poring over the reports on Bosnian concentration camps and trying to understand how such depravity had befallen the place Schu and I had visited just a couple of summers before.
Leaving the office each night, I was usually so shaken by what I had read that I did not feel steady enough to ride my bike home, choosing instead to walk with it by my side.
As I read back issues from the early 1980s of public news sources like the Radio Free Europe digest, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, I began compiling a detailed chronology of the road to Yugoslavia’s destruction. My timeline was a straightforward collection of dates and events, but one that nonetheless showed Yugoslavia’s downward spiral. I had started it so I could keep the sequence straight in my mind and help Mort with his op-eds and speeches. But one night it struck me that such a chronology might find a broader readership. Just as Mort was trying to make himself a quick study on the conflict, so too were many journalists, NGO advocates, members of Congress, and Clinton administration officials.
Five months into my internship, I went to Mort with a lengthy printout of my timeline, held together with a large black paper clip, and asked him if he thought it might be worth publishing. He was focused on something else and didn’t seem to process my question—but he assented. Over the next several weeks, through all-nighters and weekend labor, I tried to improve its quality. In June of 1993, reasoning that speed was as important as substance, I took my floppy disk to a printer and asked them to make one thousand copies.
When I turned up to collect the order a week later, I was taken aback by the sight of a half-dozen large brown boxes that would nearly fill my small office. My amateur creation had been artfully compressed into a small book with a gray cover bearing my name and the title I had landed on: Breakdown in the Balkans. When word got out that such a chronology was available, the Washington think tank, diplomatic, policy, and media communities quickly emptied the Carnegie stock. I soon heard from Fred, who called on a satellite phone from Sarajevo to congratulate me on publishing the “hugely useful” Breakdown, which he said he was passing out to government officials and aid workers.
I felt immense satisfaction—of a kind I had never experienced personally or professionally before. But now that people were actually reading it, I began obsessing about all that I had left out. “The gaps, the gaps,” I would say, deflecting compliments that came my way. Simultaneously, I chastised myself for craving the recognition I was starting to get. “Clearly, I am out, as always, for me, myself, and I,” I wrote in my journal. “I need so much to remember why the book came about in the first place.” I knew that conditions in Bosnia were deteriorating rapidly, and that if my chronology was to land in the hands of Fred’s besieged Sarajevan neighbors, they would likely burn it along with their other books to keep warm.
The war raged unabated. Four US diplomats—George Kenney, Marshall Harris, Jon Western, and Stephen Walker—had already resigned to protest what they saw as the weakness of the US response to the Bosnian war, the largest wave of resignations over US policy in State Department history. I read about these men in a lengthy Washington Post profile and was gripped by their testimonies. Jon Western, a thirty-year-old intelligence analyst, had sifted through hundreds of photos and videos of what he recalled as “human beings who look like they’ve been through meat grinders.” As he told the Post, the intelligence he needed to consume for his job described preteen girls raped in front of their parents, a sixty-five-year-old man and his thirty-five-year-old son forced at gunpoint to orally castrate each other, and Serb torturers who made Muslim prisoners carve crosses in each other’s skulls.
Western and the other US officials who resigned had initially tried to change policy from within, but having made no headway, had finally quit. They felt they could no longer be part of a US government that wasn’t doing more, reasoning that they could at least draw media attention to what they saw as America’s moral abdication.
After reading the Post profile, I grandiosely wrote in my journal: “My only regret is that I don’t work at the State Department so I can quit to protest policy. Instead, I sit impotent and incapable.”
Following my summer at CBS in Atlanta, when people had asked what I wanted to do with my life, I had begun answering that “I wanted to make a difference.” But at Carnegie I saw that this was an abstraction. Now I had a focus—a specific group of people in a specific place who were being pulverized, and I wanted to do something to support them.
As a liberal arts major who had no particular knack for foreign languages, I still worried I had little to contribute. But I had managed to assemble the chronology, and I was seeing up close the vast number of ways researchers, columnists, journalists, government officials, and aid workers were involved in the enterprise of American foreign policy. All seemed to be struggling with how to define the US role in the world now that the Cold War was over, as well as how to manage a sudden flurry of nationalist and independence movements.
I remained acutely aware of all that I lacked—I wasn’t an engineer like Fred, a trained diplomat like Mort, or a doctor like Mum and Eddie. I was focused, but I did not know how to channel my interests. A frustrated journal entry from the time ended simply: “… Act, Power.”
Ben Cohen, a British journalist and activist, was the person who gave me the idea of traveling to the Balkans. “You should see the war up close,” he told me. “And you should write something.”
After I met Ben at a Carnegie event, we struck up a fast friendship. A Sephardic Jew whose ancestors escaped to Bosnia during the Spanish Inquisition, he was more knowledgeable about the country’s politics, history, and literature than anybody I knew in Washington. Though he was devastated by all that had happened, he brought a dark humor to our discussions.
Ben arranged an invitation for me—the “author” of Breakdown in the Balkans—to attend a conference being held in peaceful Slovenia, the newly independent former Yugoslav republic. After the conference, he insisted, we should drive to Bosnia.
Given my chronic expectation that something terrible was bound to happen whenever life was going well, I feared heading into what appeared to be a blazing inferno of a war zone. I also didn’t see what I could add to the existing coverage of the war, as the experienced reporters in the region were doing phenomenal work. But Ben kept pushing. And with my internship nearing its end, I had begun considering what jobs would enable me to keep working on issues related to the conflict.
Thanks to Ben, I already had one published article. Not long after we first met, he had proposed collaborating on an op-ed critiquing the direction of international diplomacy on Bosnia. Joined by George Stamkoski, a Macedonian friend of Ben’s who became our third co-author, we produced what in retrospect seems a rather pedestrian essay and began “shopping” it to various newspapers.
We tried every mainstream publication in the United States, and when each one turned us down, we sent it to outlets in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada for which we could find fax numbers. Eventually, Ben called me with “good news and less good news.” Our piece had finally been accepted, he said. “But it might be hard to find.” The essay would be appearing in Pakistan’s Daily Jang, but he wasn’t yet sure if it would be in the Urdu or English edition.
I didn’t care: I faxed an illegible copy of the op-ed (in English!) to Mum’s office, and stuffed it into Mort’s mailbox.
When I called Fred Cuny in Sarajevo to get his advice about traveling to Bosnia, he agreed with Ben: I should experience what was happening myself. He also invited me to watch his team in Croatia preparing for the water restoration mission he was planning to undertake