The Education of an Idealist. Samantha Power
when journalism is most effective in prodding change.
The evidence David gathered was a factor in helping convince the Clinton administration to launch the bombing raids that so quickly ended the war. Even though I was now stuck in law school, I told him that he had single-handedly given me a new appreciation for the power of the pen. He later considered attending law school because, despite being one of the most decorated reporters in the business—winning two Pulitzer Prizes—he often wished he could personally do more about the injustices he was exposing.
David’s release also showed the impact of concentrated public pressure. He was the beneficiary of the so-called identifiable victim effect—the human tendency to be more helpful to those with a name and face than to anonymous victims. As Mother Teresa famously said, “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”[4]
But I knew David had another factor working in his favor: he was American. The photo that the Washington Post used with my op-ed depicted a bespectacled young man wearing a fleece. For all of my heartfelt reporting and writing when I lived in the Balkans, I had managed to generate a far more intense outpouring for my friend than I had for Bosnia’s thousands of victims. Readers could relate to him. They could see him. And because he was one person, they could imagine that their actions could conceivably help him. Not so for the people of Srebrenica. An identifiable American life would almost always be more galvanizing than thousands of faceless foreigners in a faraway country.
I HOPED THAT THE GOOD NEWS of David’s release would help cure me of my all-consuming focus on Bosnia. When I lived in the Balkans, I often thought about how lucky I was relative to the people around me. But once back in the United States, I sometimes acted as if I had personally suffered the losses of war. Changing that would take time.
Jonathan Moore had moved from Washington back to his home in Massachusetts and was now based at the Harvard Kennedy School. I often confided in him about my struggles readjusting to life as a student in placid Cambridge. Occasionally, my self-absorption—a constant—would devolve into self-pity, and Jonathan would stop me in my tracks. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he would say, teasingly but firmly. “Have you been ethnically cleansed?!”
The first time I recall being able to make fun of myself came, strangely, during the 1995 New York City Marathon, a few days after David’s release. Before living in Bosnia, I had never loved running, always preferring what I called “real sports”—games like baseball or basketball that required strategy and skill with a ball. Living in encircled Sarajevo had changed my attitude, making me appreciate the freedom running provided. After returning to the United States, I had trained for the marathon for ten weeks, with Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” and John Barry’s cheesy movie theme “Born Free” on heavy rotation on my Walkman’s mixtape. Going for ten-mile practice runs wasn’t exactly fun, but I enjoyed no longer feeling caged up.
The night before the race, I ate a heaping pasta supper with two college friends who were also running. Afterward, we decorated plain white Hanes T-shirts with words designed to draw shouts of moral support from the crowd. Miro, who had been with me in Atlanta at the time of the Tiananmen massacre, wrote “MO” in huge block letters as a kind of pick-me-up nickname.
Instead of “SAM,” or even “POWER,” I scribbled “REMEMBER SREBRENICA.”
Then, for good measure, I added on the back, “8,000 BOSNIAN MUSLIM MEN AND BOYS, MURDERED JULY 12–13, 1995.”
As we set off the next day, crossing the Verrazano Bridge, I heard the crowds yelling, “Go Mo!” Seeing the energy that the cheers gave Miro, I immediately regretted the decision to splash a morbid Public Service Announcement across my chest. Many people along the way made a spirited effort to root for me in spite of myself, albeit while mangling their attempts at pronouncing “Srebrenica.”
“Remember Srebedeedeedee!” I heard, or “Remember Srebre-oh-whatever.”
With two miles to go, a group of rowdy spectators, seeing my pace slowing, tried to urge me on, chanting, “Go Remember! Go Go Remember!” In my heavy-handedness, I had managed to turn myself into someone with the name “Remember,” which kept me smiling until I crossed the finish line. It seemed fitting.
I RETURNED TO SARAJEVO twice during my first year in law school, once over Christmas and then again for summer break. Mort had been the driving force behind creating the International Crisis Group, a new nongovernmental organization dedicated to conflict prevention, and he asked me to help launch their first field office in Bosnia to monitor the implementation of the peace agreement that Holbrooke had negotiated at Dayton. I loved being back among my friends, seeing the universities reopened, and watching the markets and cafés bustling with life. Witnessing even a flawed peace gave me a sense of closure, which I had craved.
Unfortunately, almost as soon as I arrived back in Cambridge for my second year of law school, I found myself struggling to breathe properly. The ailment that my college boyfriend Schu had called “lungers” was back with a vengeance. In college, these bouts of constricted breathing were a nuisance, an inconvenient background occurrence that never interfered with my life. But now I was unable to concentrate on anything other than whether I would be able to take a proper breath.
On the advice of friends, I tried yoga; but like a child who has just noticed her blinking, and suddenly begins to do it intentionally, this activity only caused me to focus more on my breathing, a huge impediment to regularizing it. For the first time, I grew so rattled by this mystery ailment that I could not sleep. Even when I managed to doze off for a few hours, when I awoke, I would experience a split second of deep, regular breathing before recalling the debilitating constriction of my lungs, which would promptly return.
After several weeks of mounting torment, I took a long run along the Charles River in the hopes that it would necessitate inhaling large amounts of air. Still running after an hour, I maneuvered along the paved roads near MIT to head back to my apartment, trying to take extra-deep breaths as I ran. I was so focused on my breathing that I didn’t look where I was running and tripped on an uneven sidewalk slab. I was lucky not to spill into the oncoming traffic, but I did land in a pile of shattered glass. Both of my knees were lacerated and began bleeding profusely.
I hobbled as quickly as I could, in significant pain, to the University Health Services. When the doctor asked what had happened, I told him I had been struggling to breathe and had not paid proper attention to where I was stepping. He asked if I was experiencing anxiety.
“No,” I said, “the complete opposite. I was a journalist in Bosnia, and I think I find the lack of stress here on campus very hard to get used to.”
He asked if I would like to be prescribed something to settle my nerves. I told him I was completely fine and needed nothing other than a good knee cleaning so as to avoid an infection. As I was speaking, I glanced down and saw that my knees bore shards of gravel and glass and my white running socks had turned crimson with blood.
“On second thought,” I said sheepishly, “I’ll take whatever you recommend.”
Within forty-eight hours, the anti-anxiety medicine worked wonders; once I started breathing normally and focusing on my classwork, I pushed the incident—and my lungers—to the back of my mind. It would be years before I would begin to explore their source.
During law school, I came across the transcript of a US government press conference that had occurred while I was working as a journalist in Bosnia. On April 8th, 1994, a mid-level US diplomat named Prudence Bushnell spoke at the State Department’s daily press briefing. She described