The Education of an Idealist. Samantha Power
had already been so overwhelmed that the town’s biggest parks and football fields had been converted into graveyards. Since few families who lost loved ones could afford a proper cement marker, they used simple wooden plaques, often scavenged from a table or bookshelf. I felt sick when I saw, at the Lion Cemetery, the relatively recent birthdates on the grave markers—children, teenagers, and twentysomethings seemed to account for the majority of the deaths. And alongside the Bosnian Serb leaders’ determination to kill the city’s residents came a desire to humiliate and torment those who survived. They bombed libraries, concert halls, and universities. As businesses closed or were destroyed, unemployment soared.
To pay for food, English professors sought out jobs as interpreters for the UN. Engineers turned to rummaging among destroyed cars for batteries with a charge. Poets and medical students who had never dreamed of holding a gun joined the army so they could defend their city and all it represented.
Back in 1992, in the early months of the war, Sarajevo residents had opportunities to be evacuated and become refugees. But many stayed because they expected that the war, which they had never believed would happen in the first place, would end quickly. Others remained because, irrespective of whether they were Muslims, Croats, Serbs, or Jews, they knew that the Serb extremists’ primary goal was to destroy the spirit of tolerance and pluralism embodied in the city’s multiethnic character. “If we leave, they win,” Sarajevans would say defiantly. Unfortunately, once they had passed up the chance to depart, they did not get another opportunity.
As dangerous as the Bosnian capital was, I knew I was in a privileged position compared to the residents scrambling for safety around me. I had a UN press badge and thus permission to leave as well as enter; almost everyone else was stuck.
While some Western officials talked about the conflict as if it were historically preordained—“they have been killing one another for centuries”—the lives of the young people before the war were not dissimilar from those of the average young American. They would meet up for an espresso or a beer after work, and would dance at raves or to the music of popular bands like U2. The values they learned were the same as those we had been taught. Mosques, Catholic churches, Orthodox churches, and a synagogue dotted the downtown. One in every five marriages in Bosnia (and one in three in Sarajevo) had been ethnically mixed.
My childhood in Ireland had coincided with the period of sectarian tensions and terrorism known as “The Troubles,” which had started shortly before I was born. The people of Northern Ireland would ultimately endure thirty years of conflict in which some 3,600 lives were lost. The deadliest attack in the Irish Republic’s history occurred in 1974, a couple of months before my brother’s birth, when Loyalist paramilitaries set off a series of rush-hour bombs in my hometown of Dublin, killing twenty-six people, including a pregnant woman. As the conflict escalated, a growing number of refugees from the North—more than 10,000 overall—poured across the border.
These events did not affect my life in any immediate way. Even after violent incidents in Dublin, I do not recall ever fearing that my mother would not make it home from the hospital or my dad from the pub. At the same time, my early years in Dublin meant that I never saw civil strife as something that happened “over there” or to “those people.”
When I spoke with my friends and family back in the States and in Ireland, I tried to translate what Bosnians were experiencing, but I must have sounded preachy as I urged my friends to put themselves in different shoes:
Imagine if you were sitting at home and you suddenly found that your telephone line had been cut. You couldn’t even call your parents to tell them you were okay. Imagine having to sleep in every layer of clothing you owned to survive without heat. Imagine not being able to send your kids to school because it was safer to keep them in your dark basement than for them to take a short walk down the block. Imagine hearing your child’s tummy growling and not being able to help because the next UN food delivery was not for another week. Imagine getting shot at by people whose weddings you had attended. This is what is happening right now to people like us.
When I first visited, although the war had already been under way for nearly two years, I spoke to many Bosnians who still held out hope that the United States would rescue them. Their knowledge of the political dynamics in Washington was striking. The columns of American opinion writers (particularly Anthony Lewis and William Safire of the New York Times) were translated and, despite the shortage of paper and ink, widely circulated. Electricity was intermittent, and smuggled batteries for shortwave radios were only sold at exorbitant prices. Nonetheless, many residents knew which members of the US Senate were pushing for air strikes, while some even tracked when these politicians were up for reelection. Often my Bosnian neighbors informed me of obscure happenings in the Clinton administration. “Have you heard Steve Oxman is out and Richard Holbrooke is in?” a waiter in a café asked in 1994, alerting me to the news that Clinton had replaced his assistant secretary of state for European and Canadian affairs.
Some days, when President Clinton seemed on the verge of using military force, and the Bosnian Serb Army was afraid of provoking him, the atmosphere was so calm that I went jogging. Other periods were extremely dangerous, and I could do little more than pray the shells would not find me. On occasion, when it felt like the mortars were landing closer and closer, I was too frightened to do more than seek shelter in the bathtub of the hotel or apartment where I was staying. The most lethal days started peaceful and turned deadly: daring to trust the early quiet, people would venture outside, and Bosnian Serb forces would then hit crowded bread and water lines, markets, and school playgrounds.
Despite these horrors, for the first several years of the war, Sarajevans treated Western visitors with immense magnanimity. Even after losing loved ones—that very day—they would insist on pouring their hearts out in order to alert the world to their suffering. They would share their most intimate memories.
“Tell Clinton,” one bereaved father said as he ushered me to the door after describing the loss of his son. It was a phrase I heard often.
Amid the darkness, the resilience of the people of Bosnia was inspiring. They asserted their dignity in large and small ways. People scraped together resources to stage elaborate weddings. They went on having babies, perhaps aided by the fact that birth control pills were hard to get in the besieged city. Women who walked to work did so in high heels, even though their impractical shoes would impede their escape when bullets started flying. As Bosnians waited hours in line for their turn at the water pump, they imposed rules and created penalties for those who cut the queue or took more than their share. Poets, novelists, and musicians kept writing. Though the main theaters had been reduced to rubble, artists found places to perform plays and music.
And while there was much to cry about, Sarajevans did not lose their sense of humor. At the start of the war, the Serb militants frequently graffitied areas they claimed should be theirs with the words “Ovo je Srbija!,” or “This is Serbia!” When they did this to a post office in Sarajevo, a resident famously responded in spray paint: “Budalo, ovo je pošta,” or “Idiot, this is a post office.” And when the siege of Sarajevo officially outlasted the siege of Leningrad, becoming the longest in modern history, a pirate radio station blared the Queen song “We Are the Champions.” The heart of the country refused to stop beating.
In May of 1995, as I was traveling into Sarajevo with Roger Cohen, the New York Times bureau chief for the Balkans, I nearly lost my life. Serb militants had shut down the airport, so we had no choice but to enter via a dirt road over Mount Igman, the one patch of land around Sarajevo that remained in Bosnian hands. What was little more than a steep mountain goat trail before the war had become the lone land route by which people, food, and arms could