The Education of an Idealist. Samantha Power
that Fred was an anti-Chechen Russian agent. “Let it be known to all nations and humanitarian organizations,” Chris declared at a press conference, “that Russia was responsible for the death of one of the world’s great humanitarians.”
I was devastated, both by the loss of someone who had been so exceptionally kind to me, and by the death of a humanitarian hero, whose expertise and can-do spirit seemed so necessary in a world increasingly racked by ethnic and religious conflict.
No matter how much cruelty I had seen in Bosnia, a stubbornly naive part of me could not accept the truth. For weeks, I had vivid dreams about Fred showing up at my door with a big smile and a six-pack of root beer. “You didn’t really think I could die, did you?” he would tell me. I did everything I could to fend off thoughts about his final hours. And I resorted to my time-tested approach to blunting the pain I felt at losing someone important to me: I kept moving.
Fred’s death cemented my decision to duck out of the “real world” and decompress. In late August, I packed up my belongings and booked my flight back to the United States to begin law school.
BACK IN AMERICA, I saw that David’s reporting on Srebrenica had landed like a bombshell in Washington, yielding just the kind of impact I had hoped to achieve through my own writing. Suddenly, leading members of Congress were pushing President Clinton to intervene militarily to end the war and prevent “future Srebrenicas.”
The final straw for Clinton came in late August. As I pulled myself together at Mum and Eddie’s home in Brooklyn, I heard the news that Bosnian Serb gunners around Sarajevo had struck again, hitting the same market they had attacked in February of 1994, this time killing forty-three people. Once I had established that nobody I knew had been killed, I fumed that the United States continued to allow the slaying of innocents. And in truth, I wished I were still there to cover a story that was leading the news around the world.
The day before law school began, I loaded up a Ryder truck in Brooklyn with two suitcases, a bicycle, and my laptop, and drove toward Boston. Just as I reached my new hometown, NPR cut into its radio program with a breaking news bulletin: “NATO air action around Sarajevo is under way.” I let out tears of relief.
By my second week of law school, US air strikes had broken the siege of Sarajevo and brought the Bosnian war to an end.
Fred and Mort had been right about what a US rescue operation could achieve, but tens of thousands of lives had been lost.
From the moment I arrived at Harvard Law School, I feared I wouldn’t last. While in Bosnia, I had imagined how satisfying it would be to learn the law and eventually hunt down Balkan war criminals as a prosecutor at The Hague. But as I struggled to adjust to my new life back in the United States, all I could think about was the place I had left behind. Had I remained just a few weeks longer, I kept thinking, I would have witnessed history.
As I began classes, the US-led NATO bombing campaign quickly wiped out the Bosnian Serb Army’s heavy weapons and communications capabilities, leaving Serb forces unable to defend many of the towns they had ethnically cleansed over the previous three and a half years. Jubilant Muslim and Croat soldiers took advantage of the friendly warplanes in the sky and reclaimed lost territory. For the first time since 1992, my Bosnian friends in Sarajevo could get in their cars and leave the capital, visiting loved ones they had not even been able to speak with by telephone.
My new, shared apartment was in Somerville, the next town over from Cambridge. I amassed a steep phone bill, frantically calling my reporter friends in Bosnia and making them hold their phones in the air so I could hear the background sounds of honking horns and celebratory music. I surrounded myself with reminders of what I had left behind, hanging on my bedroom wall a map of Sarajevo that showed the gun emplacements around the city, and placing on the living room mantel a 40-millimeter shell that had been engraved and turned into a decorative sculpture.
My instincts continued to reflect the fact that I had spent the better part of the summer living in a city under fire: the loud scrape of a desk being moved or a library cart being pushed sent me ducking for cover. Meanwhile, simple conveniences—like a light switch—suddenly delighted me. When I visited the local supermarket, I was now paralyzed by all the options. In Sarajevo, I had counted myself fortunate to find a carton of juice priced like a bottle of Bordeaux, but in Cambridge, I was confronted by more than a dozen flavors of Snapple alone. For two years, my journal reflections had been decidedly grim, but trivial discoveries now passed for big news: “We have cantaloupe Snapple!” I marveled in one entry soon after school started.
My reacclimation to America happened slowly, and it didn’t help that I spoke to Mort daily to discuss developments in Bosnia.
“I wish Fred were here to see this,” I told him a few days after NATO brought the fighting to an end.
“He would ask why the hell you’re in law school,” Mort answered.
I wondered the same thing.
I didn’t lack the ability to focus—I could bury myself in the library for hours without noticing the setting sun. But while I admired the poise of my classmates who threw themselves into Socratic debates with their peers and professors, I just couldn’t make myself care about the topics we were studying. In 1L, Scott Turow’s memoir of his first year at Harvard Law School, he compares studying case law to stirring concrete with his eyelashes; this description seemed a perfect encapsulation of how I felt reading Civil Procedure cases late into the night.
I was also not that quick a study. I became flustered when called upon in class, stammering answers that other students quickly tore apart while a hundred pairs of eyes drilled into my back. When my professors interrogated me, I tried to keep my composure by making an insistent mental note, “This professor is not Ratko Mladić, he’s not Ratko Mladić, he’s not …” But hours after class ended, my cheeks often still felt flushed with embarrassment.
ON OCTOBER 29TH, 1995, nearly two months into law school, I picked up the Sunday New York Times at the bottom of my Somerville stoop. There, in the upper left-hand corner, was a huge headline: SREBRENICA: THE DAYS OF SLAUGHTER.[3] A reporting team had spent weeks preparing a special investigation that contained previously unpublished details of the systematic murder of Srebrenica’s men and boys.
As I sat reading—clenched in what felt like a full-body grimace—I understood what writers reflecting on the Holocaust meant when they described the human capacity to “know without knowing.” I had covered the fall of Srebrenica and had read all of my friend David Rohde’s articles about it. Laura, who had left journalism to attend graduate school, had spent her summer working for Human Rights Watch, gathering the testimonies of people who had survived the massacres. Yet my reaction to the Times exposé confirmed how wide the chasm can be between holding out hope that something is not true and actually absorbing devastating facts in all of their finality. I had experienced the brutality of the war up close. Yet before reading the Times piece, I had somehow believed that Srebrenica’s missing men and boys were no longer alive, and yet had not necessarily believed that they were dead.[fn1]
I looked back at my own actions and wondered why I hadn’t done more. “I don’t know how that could have been me there,” I wrote in my journal. “I was the correspondent in Munich while the bodies burned in Dachau … I had power and I failed to use it.” In beating myself up, I was clearly exaggerating my actual power back in Sarajevo. I was a freelance journalist, running my laptop off of a jury-rigged car battery. President Clinton led the most formidable superpower