The Education of an Idealist. Samantha Power
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