The Education of an Idealist. Samantha Power
survived, hiding among the corpses of his friends and relatives. At nightfall he had escaped to Bosnian territory before the bodies around him were bulldozed into one of the large graves that lay waiting.
MY FRIEND DAVID ROHDE, the Christian Science Monitor’s Eastern Europe correspondent, was on vacation in Australia visiting his girlfriend when the Serbs took Srebrenica. In the weeks that followed, he read horrific testimonies disseminated in the media from survivors like the one Albright quoted. Without permission from the Bosnian Serb authorities, he managed to elude the military and police and spend two days around Srebrenica searching for evidence of the alleged executions.
On the first day, he entered an abandoned building on the grounds of a local soccer stadium—the same place Foreign Minister Sacirbey had referred to in his alarming speech about mass executions. David found human feces, dried blood, and several dozen bullet holes up and down the walls.
On the second day, using a faxed copy of one of the blurry US satellite photos, he found the fields Albright had referenced. There, he discovered empty ammunition boxes, Muslim prayer beads, photographs, and various personal items. Finally, and most tellingly, as he would write in the Christian Science Monitor, he saw “what appeared to be a decomposing human leg protruding from the freshly turned dirt.”
In addition, in a dozen interviews with Serb soldiers and civilians in the area, he met not a soul who reported seeing or hearing about Muslim prisoners. Thousands of Bosnian Muslim men and boys seemed to have simply vanished.
After writing a story on the graves, David traveled back to Bosnian-held territory, where he found nine Muslims who said they had played dead in the fields of Srebrenica where the mass executions occurred. When he showed the survivors the items he had found in the fields, one man gasped after seeing the 1982 elementary school diploma of his brother from whom he had been separated. He asked David where he had found the document, and David said he had picked it up fifty feet from a mass grave. The man, David wrote in the Monitor, “stared blankly and then quietly faded into a crowd of soldiers.”
David emailed me after his encounter with the survivors, writing:
I cannot articulate the combination of sadness and disbelief that washed over me when these men would accurately describe the soccer field I visited … and then go on to talk about 1,000 people being gunned down. I kept asking them more and more detailed questions, hoping they would get things wrong, but they didn’t … These people aren’t lying.
The evil of what transpired in Srebrenica, which David did more than any other reporter to expose, helped me decide what I should do next. I could continue to write articles about the Bosnia carnage in an effort to move President Clinton. I could pursue a possible job with Holbrooke and work from within the US government to push for the same outcome. Or I could attend Harvard Law School and, although it would take a few years, try to become a prosecutor who could bring murderers to justice. Working at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague now seemed like the worthiest goal, and the one that would ultimately have the most impact. We would not bring back the men and boys who had been executed, but we could make sure that Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladić and others like him faced justice.
Jonathan Moore, the former US diplomat and refugee expert I met working at Carnegie, had become someone I turned to at critical moments. With school beginning at the start of September, I needed to make a final decision, so I telephoned him and asked what I should do.
Jonathan didn’t hesitate. “Get the hell out of there,” he urged me. “You need to break out of the compulsion for power, glory, ego, relevance, contribution. Get out. Get out before it gets you, and you forget what got you in.”
I didn’t think self-consciously about power, glory, and ego, but Jonathan knew I didn’t mind seeing my name in print. He also knew that I was drawn to joining the US government’s Bosnia team because I couldn’t bear to move away from the center of the action.
“But Holbrooke—” I tried.
“Forget Holbrooke,” he said. “There will be other jobs. Reading books will do you good.”
THE PERSON WHO I KNEW would be on the other side of the argument—echoing Mort’s conviction that I stay—was of course Fred Cuny. But once Fred had gotten the water flowing in Sarajevo, he had gone in search of his next ambitious project. A few months later, he had ended up in Chechnya to assess how he could help people being subjected to a comprehensive Russian carpet-bombing campaign. But I couldn’t get Fred’s perspective because he had gone missing.
In early 1995, I had been visiting Mum and Eddie when Fred happened to be coming through New York after his first visit to Chechnya. When he walked into the sports bar he had chosen as our meeting place, he exclaimed “Sammie!” and embraced me in a large Texas hug. When we talked about what he had seen, however, he was uncharacteristically despairing.
“The Serb forces in Bosnia are cruel,” he said, “but they are always trying to figure out how they can get what they want without provoking US intervention. They bomb, they probe, they watch, they pause, they bomb again. Russia’s forces in Chechnya know they are free to do anything they please. They know nobody will stop them. There are no lines they won’t cross. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
While Sarajevo had recorded as many as 3,500 heavy detonations per day, he said, the capital of Chechnya had counted that number each hour. He said that some 400,000 Chechens had been displaced in three months of fighting, and as many as 15,000 Russian and Chechen civilians had been killed.
Yet instead of being deterred, Fred saw a problem to be tackled. In what seemed to me a complete non sequitur from his descriptions of slaughter, he concluded, “I think we can help broker a cease-fire.”
My eyes widened. “By ‘we,’ do you mean you?” I asked, hoping I had misheard. He smiled self-consciously. “Yeah, I guess so.”
Fred also thought that, by visiting, he would be in a stronger position to get the Clinton administration to do more to pressure Russia to desist. He had long impressed upon me one of his core beliefs about influence: “The only way to move people in Washington is to tell them things they don’t already know, and that requires seeing things for yourself.”
Even for Fred Cuny, who had often managed to pull off what entire governments and humanitarian agencies deemed inconceivable, getting the Russians to cease their assault in Chechnya seemed delusional. He was the expert, though, and while I teased him about his excessive confidence, I felt I didn’t know enough to challenge him.
Fred spent the next month publicly blasting the Russian government for its actions, testifying before Congress and writing a lengthy critical essay about Russia’s conduct in the New York Review of Books. His advocacy exposed how badly the Russian efforts were going and, indeed, how some 5,000 Russian soldiers had already been killed. It also encouraged greater scrutiny of the Russian military’s atrocities. By going public with his criticisms of Russia’s war, however, Fred made himself a target. For his safety, Fred’s coworkers pleaded with him not to return to Chechnya, but nobody could say no to Fred Cuny.
In March of 1995, Fred traveled back into Chechnya with two doctors from the Russian Red Cross, a Russian translator, and a local driver. When Fred’s delegation entered territory held by Chechen separatists, they were apprehended. Fred sent a calm note to the Soros Foundation, his funder, saying that his group had been delayed. His Russian translator added a postscript with a wholly different message: “We, as always, are in deep shit … If we’re not back in three days, shake everyone up.”
Then the delegation had disappeared.
Fred’s twenty-eight-year-old son, Craig, and his brother, Chris, quickly flew to the region to begin searching. They got shot at, shelled, and robbed as they spent much of the summer of 1995 trying to find him. Mort excitedly called me in Sarajevo one day with word that Fred had been found—and I was euphoric. But the report proved incorrect, one of several false sightings. Still, I clung to the belief that Fred would turn up.
In mid-August, Craig and Chris announced that Fred had been executed by Chechen rebels not long after being taken