The Education of an Idealist. Samantha Power
good Serb is a dead Serb.” I eventually dropped out of my Croatian language class because my teacher refused to use words that originated in Serbia, and I began the familiar practice of building my own flash-card library. Luckily, I would later find a wonderful teacher in Bosnia.
Laura Pitter was the person who most eased my transition. She proved every bit as bighearted as she had seemed when we first met the previous summer. She immediately invited me to accompany her to interviews. “You are going to do great here,” she said, as if reading my doubts. “Remember, you know the story.”
After I had been in Croatia for two weeks, I telephoned NPR, using the number the foreign editor had given me before I left Washington. I tentatively asked the person who answered if she would be interested in “something” on a cease-fire between Bosnia’s Muslims and Croats that had just been brokered by US diplomats. The voice on the other end seemed practiced in fielding calls from strangers. “Sure,” she said, to my shock. “How about a forty-five-second spot? We will call you back from the studio within the hour.”
Before I had a chance to inquire about specifics, I heard a dial tone.
I turned to Laura, who was sitting cross-legged on her couch, writing her own story on a laptop. “What’s a spot?” I asked.
When NPR called back, Laura said, they would conduct a sound check and then would expect me to do three things: get listeners’ attention with my opening, describe my nugget of news, and efficiently conclude.
I practiced and practiced, ducking into the bathroom so Laura wouldn’t hear my affected inflections. I found the sign-off the most difficult: “For NPR, this is Samantha Power reporting from Zagreb.” I just could not believe that NPR would want me to say this; they barely knew me! But Laura insisted it was standard. When the phone rang, I tried not to let my nervousness show and successfully delivered the “spot” on my third try.
I telephoned my mother later that evening, but she beat me to my news. “I nearly crashed my car on the way home!” she told me, clearly overjoyed and amazed by the speed with which I seemed to have gotten settled. Whatever her misgivings, she had never strayed from my corner. Eddie, meanwhile, had already contacted NPR to secure a copy of the tape. “They said your name twice!” he declared.
Not long after, Fred Cuny passed through Zagreb and welcomed me to the region by inviting me to dinner with a few of his friends. He told us that his team had completed the dangerous operation at Sarajevo Airport. “We got our time down to seven minutes!” he boasted, explaining that the specially designed equipment they had snuck into the city was already filtering and chlorinating previously undrinkable river water. When he and his team opened the pipes for the first time, he recalled, they were accidentally doused in five hundred gallons of water. He described a jubilant scene of soaked engineers, arm in arm with Bosnian staff who laughed merrily as they imagined what running water would mean for their families and neighbors.
I was in awe of what Fred had done. By improvising a water system, he had helped blunt the impact of one of the cruelest tactics in the Bosnian Serb siege. He had also enhanced his relevance in Washington, giving him more sway in the ongoing debate about whether the United States should use military force to try to end the carnage. Because of the Bosnian Serb Army’s terror tactics and what he saw as the minimal risk to US forces, Fred believed it should. He seemed to know more than most US officials about the location and capabilities of Bosnian Serb heavy weapons. While other humanitarians avoided contact with the US government in order to show their independence and neutrality, he relished sharing all he knew.
The day after our dinner in Zagreb, Fred returned to Sarajevo. He was driving with ABC News anchor Peter Jennings when they heard a shell crashing into the main market two blocks away. Sixty-eight people were killed in what was the deadliest massacre of the war. Fred was incensed. He raged against the US government, telling Jennings on camera that two American fighter planes had been flying overhead when the Bosnian Serb Army struck. “They were stunting up there, just flying around in circles and playing,” he said. “They could have done something.”
I was getting a complicated introduction to American power. Since April of 1993, the United States and its NATO allies had been patrolling a no-fly zone that prevented Serb fighter jets from carrying out aerial bombardments over Bosnian territory. US-piloted F-16s were frequently visible in the sky, and their overhead passes—with sonic booms like those heard at a baseball game on the Fourth of July—were awesome displays of might.
Yet the UN Security Council resolution authorizing the no-fly zone only permitted NATO to shoot down aircraft that were dropping bombs from the air; its pilots did not have permission to attack those who were using their artillery and mortars to slaughter people.
Fred called me the night of the market massacre, his voice still trembling as he spoke: “This is a failure of humanity,” he said. “They will not stop until they are stopped.”
Sitting in my Zagreb apartment and watching CNN footage of market vendors carrying away the bloodied remains of their mutilated friends, I found myself rooting for the first time in my life for the United States to use military force.
Despite President Clinton’s promises during the 1992 presidential campaign to stop the killing, the deaths of eighteen American soldiers in Somalia during the first year of his presidency left him deeply concerned about US forces becoming entangled in messy, peripheral conflicts around the world. He was fearful that even limited action in Bosnia would lead to “another Somalia,” or, worse, “another Vietnam.” This reminded me of the peril of applying analogies in geopolitics, best encapsulated in Mark Twain’s line: “A cat who sits on a hot stove will never sit on a hot stove again. But he won’t sit on a cold stove either.” The conflicts in Somalia, Vietnam, and Bosnia had little in common with one another. In addition, the UN Security Council had imposed an arms embargo on Bosnia, which disproportionately impacted Bosnia’s Muslims, as they did not have access to weapons from Yugoslavia’s vast national army arsenal. They could not rescue or defend themselves. American planes were already flying overhead. I did not believe Clinton should deploy ground forces to Bosnia, but I thought he should tell Bosnian Serb soldiers to leave their positions and should order US planes to destroy their weapons, so they could not kill civilians with impunity.
I called Mort and awakened him at four a.m. in Washington. I urged him to contact all the people he knew in the Clinton administration—but mainly, I just needed to hear his voice.
“What will it take?” I pleaded.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But this may finally get them to move.” He was referring to Clinton and his national security team. He paused. “Then again, it may not.”
The fact that Fred was so close to the market when the massacre occurred was an uncomfortable reminder of what I was getting myself into. While Westerners were not targeted nearly as frequently as they later would be in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, journalists, aid workers, and diplomats still faced serious risks, and could easily be hit in “wrong place, wrong time” incidents. I could tell myself Fred knew the ropes and I would be safe with him. But any feeling of security in Bosnia was deceptive. Who lived and died in the war was viciously random.
MY FIRST SPRING IN THE REGION, I traveled with two male colleagues to the towns of Prijedor and Banja Luka in the so-called Republika Srpska. The local Serb authorities had made non-Serbs turn over their properties and businesses before gunmen forced many to flee and herded thousands into concentration camps, where they were tortured, starved, and killed. The paramilitaries had instructed Serb residents to mark their homes to denote the ethnic “purity” of those within. So many Muslims and Croats had been expelled or murdered that we referred to the area as the “heart of darkness.”
As the three of us absorbed the desolate, almost apocalyptic sight of roads lined with gutted, bombed-out houses that had once been owned by Muslims and Croats, we did not speak. The homes that remained flew white flags or had Serbian nationalist symbols spray-painted near their front doors. These marked, lit residences—bustling with life, but often wedged between the carcasses of what had been the homes of their neighbors—gave off a sinister glow.
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