The Education of an Idealist. Samantha Power
with a magazine piece I was writing. For my mother, a major perk of winning the Pulitzer was that it would cheer me up. But I later learned that she was so excited about the news that she told all of the hospital nurses she worked with, as well as her favorite patients.
IN TRUTH, I FELT a profound disconnect between my personal good fortune and the state of the world. Around the time the American occupation of Iraq began spiraling out of control, the Western media started reporting about mass atrocities in a place called Darfur.
Most notably, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof traveled to the Chad-Sudan border, writing ten impassioned columns in less than a year to draw attention to the massacres being perpetrated by the Arab-led Sudanese government against African ethnic groups. The more I read of Kristof’s reporting, the more I suspected that the Sudanese military and affiliated militia were perpetrating genocide. The Sudanese government, led by Omar al-Bashir, seemed intent not only on crushing a nascent rebellion in Darfur, but also on destroying the lives of many Africans there. I felt compelled to investigate what was happening.
Articles about the atrocities in Sudan frequently quoted a former US official named John Prendergast. John had previously served as an Africa adviser to President Clinton, and was now working as an analyst with the International Crisis Group, the nongovernmental organization that Mort had helped create back in 1995 (and that I had briefly worked for during law school). Although the organization generally tailored its recommendations for policymakers, John seemed more focused on convincing Americans at the grassroots level to pressure their elected officials to take action to stop atrocities. He argued, just as I had in my book, that because genocide was rarely seen to implicate “traditional” national security interests, citizens would need to make political noise if they wanted Washington to do more.
When I finally had the chance to hear John speak at an event in New York, I approached him after the Q&A and asked if he would be willing to give me a tutorial on Sudan. He had first visited the country in 1987 and had traveled there on many occasions, often for months at a time. After establishing that we were both lovers of baseball, we agreed to meet up in May of 2004 for a Kansas City Royals–Boston Red Sox game. Our outing ended up launching what would be one of the most important professional collaborations—and friendships—of my life.
As we sat side by side along Fenway’s third base line, we talked about how our desire to fit in as kids had helped spark our love of baseball. We also discussed the role that tenacity—and serendipity—had played in our respective careers. The son of a frozen-food salesman, John is a six-foot-one former high school basketball player with a perennially unshaven look and shoulder-length hair that began turning silver in his twenties. He moved around a lot as a child and attended five colleges before graduating from Temple University. In 1984, when he saw television footage showing the famine in Ethiopia, he decided to make his way to Africa. Traveling around the continent, John began writing reports for UNICEF and Human Rights Watch on government and militia abuses against civilians.
Over the years, as he documented crimes that powerful perpetrators didn’t want exposed, John was taken hostage in the Congo, survived mortar fire in Somalia, and was imprisoned in Sudan. But he was upbeat when he talked about Africa and its potential. He predicted that we were entering a period in which Americans—especially young people on college campuses—would rise up to demand a different kind of foreign policy from Washington. “It’s all about pressure,” he said. “Governments will do the right thing, or less of the wrong thing, if people make clear that they care.”
We also plunged right into talking about our personal lives, each of us quickly sizing up the other as incurably single. John had a magnetic personality, and I had been advised that women flocked to him. He told me he had ended a short-lived marriage and was now dating several women at once. My most lasting relationship was still with Schu in college, and I saw nothing on the horizon likely to change that. We didn’t verbalize that day what we later realized we had decided: this was a friendship that was going to last forever. We were not going to endanger it with a romance neither of us could sustain.
We did, however, almost immediately begin brainstorming about how we might collaborate. I floated the idea of traveling to Darfur together, telling him about the “X test.”
“If the most we’re able to do is bear witness and use what we see to activate more Americans to care,” I said, “it will be worth it, right?”
John did not need convincing. By the time the final out of the game was recorded, we had decided on a date for the trip.
THE EASIEST WAY TO REACH DARFUR was not via the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, but by crossing the border from neighboring Chad. John and I traveled there during the summer of 2004 and spoke with dozens of Darfuri refugees about the horrors they had endured. The woman who made the deepest impression was Amina Abaker Mohammed, a twenty-six-year-old Muslim mother of six who was a member of one of the three ethnic groups being targeted by the Sudanese government. As John and I sat cross-legged in the sand under the shade of a tree, Amina stoically recounted what she had experienced. What she said defied belief.
Amina lived in a Darfuri farming village near a town called Furawiyah. The previous year, she had begun to hear that the Sudanese government and nomadic Arab bandits known as janjaweed[fn1] had begun attacking non-Arab ethnic groups, including hers.
Amina reported that, six months before, a Sudanese military aircraft had fired four rockets near her home. Although one rocket failed to explode, she said, the others left large craters in the ground. She and her husband refused to abandon their land, but they dispatched five of their six children to the nearby mountains for shelter. Amina’s oldest child, ten-year-old Mohammed Haroun, remained with her to help take care of the family’s precious livestock.
Shortly after dawn on January 31st, 2004, Amina said, she and Mohammed arrived at the wells to draw water for their animals. They heard the sound of approaching planes, and fifteen minutes later, Sudanese aircraft began bombing the area. She and her son were separated. Amina saw Sudanese soldiers come tumbling out of trucks and Land Cruisers, followed by hundreds of menacing janjaweed on camels and horses. Most of the janjaweed wore turbans around their heads and mouths so that only their eyes were visible. In the initial onslaught, she saw dozens of her neighbors and hundreds of animals killed.
Amina scrambled with several donkeys to a red-rock hillock 300 yards away. Though she thought Mohammed had escaped, when she looked behind her, she saw that he had remained at the wells to try to wrangle the family’s panicked sheep. As a circle of several hundred janjaweed tightened around her son, Amina ducked behind the hillock to pray.
By nightfall, the sounds of gunfire and screaming faded, and Amina returned to the spot where she had last seen Mohammed. She found a grisly scene. Rummaging frantically around the wells by moonlight, she saw the dismembered bodies of dozens of people she knew, but was unable to find her firstborn.
Suddenly, she spotted his face—but only his face. Mohammed had been beheaded. “I wanted to find the rest of his body,” she told me. But she was afraid of the janjaweed, who remained nearby, celebrating their conquest with a roast of stolen livestock. She carried what she found of her son to the mountain where her other children were hiding. “I took my child’s head, and I buried him,” she told John and me, dabbing her tears with the tail of her headscarf. A week later, Amina and her five remaining children made the seven-day trek to Chad, where we would meet them.
Although we had only recently become acquainted, John and I hardly had to discuss our next move. We hired a Darfuri driver to take us across the Chad-Sudan border to Furawiyah, where we would do our best to confirm what Amina had told us and assemble proof of the Sudanese government’s crimes.
Advancing at less than ten miles per hour, we drove in 130-degree heat through the inhospitable terrain of western Sudan, where virtually all human life seemed to have been forced into exile or hiding. We felt utterly alone.
As we drove deeper into Darfur toward Amina’s hometown, we passed through the village of Hangala, where we found the charred remains of huts that had been set ablaze. Each had been reduced to stone walls and