The Education of an Idealist. Samantha Power
They reeked of alcohol, and my hands shook so much that I had trouble packing. One of the creepiest and most commanding of the lot led me outside into the backseat of a car, where, to my great relief, my male colleagues were already sitting. As I tried to settle my nerves, I watched out of the corner of my eyes as the Serb soldier who had taken me to the car began flicking through my passport.
“Sam-an-ta,” he leered in a tone of mock admiration. I looked away, fearing that eye contact might increase the risk of physical contact.
“Sam-an-ta,” he said again. “Are you virgin?” My head began to spin. I thought about trying to bolt from the car.
“I said, are you virgin?” he repeated. I stared out the window, determined to pretend I was not hearing what I heard.
“Sam-an-ta, answer me,” he said sharply. “Are you virgin?” Lacking recourse, I snapped back at him, “It is none of your business. Leave me alone.”
He asked again. “Stop,” I said with as much conviction as I could muster.
He came closer, and I could see he looked puzzled—and slightly wounded. He held up my passport and said, “You born September twenty-one. I thought you virgin.”
I felt suddenly faint. “No, no, no,” I said, “you mean Virgo. You mean, ‘Are you Virgo?’ Yes! My birthday is September twenty-first. I am a Virgo.”
We were soon released without physical harm. Bosnian women and girls were not so lucky. Some 20,000 of them are estimated to have been raped during the conflict.
Being a woman covering the war affected my experience in other ways. The culture that female reporters confronted in the Balkans was traditional and patriarchal, with deep-rooted sexism. That said, those with power may well have viewed women as less threatening than men, sometimes offering us better access to the people and events we wished to cover. I cannot pinpoint the difference gender made, and other female correspondents may not agree, but I found some of my sources underestimated me—and thus may have been more forthcoming than with male reporters.
One night I joined my friend Stacy Sullivan, Newsweek’s freelance correspondent, on an outing across Sarajevo to try to find water for a long-overdue bath. We were pulled over, arrested for violating the curfew, and confined to a Sarajevo prison cell. When I got permission to make a phone call, instead of calling the US ambassador, I telephoned the Bosnian prime minister, whom I had often interviewed and who was a notorious flirt. He seemed to enjoy flexing his muscles to secure our release, and we headed home within several hours. A couple of months later, I agreed to meet the prime minister for an interview at a Zagreb hotel as he passed through on his way to lobby the Clinton administration in Washington. When I arrived at the hotel room that the prime minister’s aide had directed me to, I expected to be greeted by his entourage. Instead, the prime minister himself met me at the door—barely dressed.
I was so shocked that instead of fleeing immediately as I should have, I crossed the threshold into his suite as if on autopilot—only to spend the next fifteen minutes dodging his repeated efforts to embrace me while I futilely urged him to commence our scheduled interview. Finally, when he made clear that he had little interest in being questioned about the war afflicting his people, I left.
I do not know a female correspondent who wasn’t caught off guard by an aggressive sexual come-on from a source. Because we women had become such close friends, we often traded stories and warned one another away from particular people. “Ewwwwwwwww …” was the subject we gave the emails we sent to one another recounting our latest experiences with unwelcome male attention. We even found ourselves occasionally expressing gratitude for those local and international officials who didn’t make lewd comments or direct advances.
Now, however, I am struck by the fact that we didn’t publicize these incidents. Perhaps this was because such aggressive acts were so run-of-the-mill that they didn’t seem noteworthy. We may also have compared our experiences to those of Bosnian women whom we interviewed who had been raped and brutalized. Mainly, though, I think we believed that the burden was on us to evade harm.
Just after US diplomats helped broker a cease-fire between Bosnian Muslim and Croat fighters in central Bosnia, Time asked Laura to report on the nascent peace, and she invited me along. Laura and I ended up spending several weeks traveling around the ravaged area, which had been inhabited mainly by Muslims and Croats before the war. The Bosnian Serb paramilitaries had first introduced the chilling term “ethnic cleansing” in places like Banja Luka to describe how they sought to “purify” the land they controlled of its Muslim and Croat residents. But it hadn’t taken long for Muslim and Croat militias to adopt the same sinister strategy of purging the “other” from the territory they controlled.
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