The Education of an Idealist

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.

We checked into a gloomy, virtually empty hotel near the main road and went up to our separate rooms. Just as I was drifting off to sleep, I heard a sudden banging on the door. Before I had the chance to answer, several large armed men barged in, shouting at me to get up and go with them.

They reeked of alcohol, and my hands shook so much that I had trouble packing. One of the creepiest and most commanding of the lot led me outside into the backseat of a car, where, to my great relief, my male colleagues were already sitting. As I tried to settle my nerves, I watched out of the corner of my eyes as the Serb soldier who had taken me to the car began flicking through my passport.

“Sam-an-ta,” he leered in a tone of mock admiration. I looked away, fearing that eye contact might increase the risk of physical contact.

“Sam-an-ta,” he said again. “Are you virgin?” My head began to spin. I thought about trying to bolt from the car.

“I said, are you virgin?” he repeated. I stared out the window, determined to pretend I was not hearing what I heard.

“Sam-an-ta, answer me,” he said sharply. “Are you virgin?” Lacking recourse, I snapped back at him, “It is none of your business. Leave me alone.”

He asked again. “Stop,” I said with as much conviction as I could muster.

He came closer, and I could see he looked puzzled—and slightly wounded. He held up my passport and said, “You born September twenty-one. I thought you virgin.”

I felt suddenly faint. “No, no, no,” I said, “you mean Virgo. You mean, ‘Are you Virgo?’ Yes! My birthday is September twenty-first. I am a Virgo.”

We were soon released without physical harm. Bosnian women and girls were not so lucky. Some 20,000 of them are estimated to have been raped during the conflict.

Being a woman covering the war affected my experience in other ways. The culture that female reporters confronted in the Balkans was traditional and patriarchal, with deep-rooted sexism. That said, those with power may well have viewed women as less threatening than men, sometimes offering us better access to the people and events we wished to cover. I cannot pinpoint the difference gender made, and other female correspondents may not agree, but I found some of my sources underestimated me—and thus may have been more forthcoming than with male reporters.

One night I joined my friend Stacy Sullivan, Newsweek’s freelance correspondent, on an outing across Sarajevo to try to find water for a long-overdue bath. We were pulled over, arrested for violating the curfew, and confined to a Sarajevo prison cell. When I got permission to make a phone call, instead of calling the US ambassador, I telephoned the Bosnian prime minister, whom I had often interviewed and who was a notorious flirt. He seemed to enjoy flexing his muscles to secure our release, and we headed home within several hours. A couple of months later, I agreed to meet the prime minister for an interview at a Zagreb hotel as he passed through on his way to lobby the Clinton administration in Washington. When I arrived at the hotel room that the prime minister’s aide had directed me to, I expected to be greeted by his entourage. Instead, the prime minister himself met me at the door—barely dressed.

I was so shocked that instead of fleeing immediately as I should have, I crossed the threshold into his suite as if on autopilot—only to spend the next fifteen minutes dodging his repeated efforts to embrace me while I futilely urged him to commence our scheduled interview. Finally, when he made clear that he had little interest in being questioned about the war afflicting his people, I left.

I do not know a female correspondent who wasn’t caught off guard by an aggressive sexual come-on from a source. Because we women had become such close friends, we often traded stories and warned one another away from particular people. “Ewwwwwwwww …” was the subject we gave the emails we sent to one another recounting our latest experiences with unwelcome male attention. We even found ourselves occasionally expressing gratitude for those local and international officials who didn’t make lewd comments or direct advances.

Now, however, I am struck by the fact that we didn’t publicize these incidents. Perhaps this was because such aggressive acts were so run-of-the-mill that they didn’t seem noteworthy. We may also have compared our experiences to those of Bosnian women whom we interviewed who had been raped and brutalized. Mainly, though, I think we believed that the burden was on us to evade harm.

9

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“TELL CLINTON” (#ulink_f06a33a5-6415-555c-955d-a35800748cdc)

Just after US diplomats helped broker a cease-fire between Bosnian Muslim and Croat fighters in central Bosnia, Time asked Laura to report on the nascent peace, and she invited me along. Laura and I ended up spending several weeks traveling around the ravaged area, which had been inhabited mainly by Muslims and Croats before the war. The Bosnian Serb paramilitaries had first introduced the chilling term “ethnic cleansing” in places like Banja Luka to describe how they sought to “purify” the land they controlled of its Muslim and Croat residents. But it hadn’t taken long for Muslim and Croat militias to adopt the same sinister strategy of purging the “other” from the territory they controlled.

As we drove through the areas where the US-brokered cease-fire was taking effect, we could often tell which ethnic group held an enclave only by noting who was being insulted in the graffiti scrawled on apartment building walls. Sometimes our best clue as to who had been victimized was either a church’s cross or a mosque’s minaret poking out from a large pile of rubble. The scenes reminded me of a Macedonian satirist’s brilliant summation of the ethos behind the killing: “Why should I be a minority in your state when you can be a minority in mine?”

After ten months of ferocious fighting, the civilians we met were shell-shocked, blinking in the afternoon winter sunshine like people who had just emerged into the daylight after watching a horror movie in a darkened theater. One woman stood in her front yard looking at her home, which had been in enemy hands for more than a year, trembling at the sight of what little was left. I asked a group of soldiers how they had gone so quickly from firing grenades across a front line to tossing their rivals packs of cigarettes. “Our commanders told us to fight,” one soldier said simply. “Now they are telling us to stop.”

My time in central Bosnia deepened my understanding of American power, which I could now see encompassed far more than fighter jets. The United States had brokered the cease-fire not by resorting to military action, but by exerting unrelenting diplomatic pressure on both sides. Although almost everyone we met had lost a loved one in the fighting, the new agreement allowed people to dare to hope that the war—or at least their experience of the war—might end. The superpower had made a horrific situation much better.

I felt an immense sense of privilege at being able to chronicle the experience of men and women being reunited with their elderly parents who had been too infirm to flee. And I was moved by the elation of children who relished the simple pleasure of playing outside again. With the pause in fighting, a motley crew of journalists from the UK, the US, and France had rushed to the area to cover this breaking—and rare good news—story. We drove ourselves hard during the day, interviewing dozens of people and crossing front lines that hadn’t been traversed in months. With regular phone service to the outside world cut off across Bosnia, we ducked into UN bases to file our stories—an exercise rarely without technical hassle. We had to first connect our computers to a regular phone jack and then dial up a number in Austria that would, on a good day and after some suspense, let off a long beep indicating that a virtual “handshake” had occurred. Then, when our stories had been uploaded, we went for drinks.

I felt like I stood out as a novice among veterans. Emma Daly of the British Independent accompanied Laura and me on our interviews. Although Emma was also making her first trip to central Bosnia, I seemed perpetually cold and wet while she was somehow prepared for all weather contingencies, pulling the necessary attire from her compact suitcase—whether fleece, down jacket, or raincoat. In a belt wallet under her shirt, she also kept rolls of small bills, which were essential in towns where banks had long since been destroyed. “How did you know to bring all that?” I asked enviously.

Initially, I wore a camouflaged vest and helmet given to me by George Kenney, the first of the US officials to resign from the State Department to protest the government’s Bosnia policy. I thought it would protect me from stray bullets and shrapnel, but when I saw what the battle-hardened journalists wore, I realized that Kenney’s vest lacked the lifesaving ceramic plates of a standard flak jacket. It would be largely useless in the face of gun- or mortar fire.

Luckily, my colleagues were so focused on gathering material for their own stories that, at first, they paid me little mind. By the time they began teasing me for the goofiness of my flimsy vest and the inappropriateness of my Nine West boots (no match for this war zone’s winter mud), I blushed more with a sense of belonging than with shame. I felt exhilarated by the camaraderie; the press corps offered a solidarity I had felt before only on my sports teams. This was a club to which I very much wanted to belong.

Much of my life over the nearly two years I spent in the Balkans would entail pitching story ideas to editors in major American cities like Boston, Washington, and San Francisco. I would end up with more than a dozen different employers, from the wire service UPI to regional newspapers around the United States like the Dallas Morning News and the Baltimore Sun. But my core relationships were with the Boston Globe, U.S. News & World Report, and later, The Economist, The New Republic, and the Washington Post. Whenever I had a piece published, the newspaper or magazine kindly cut out the clipping and mailed it to Mum and Eddie’s Brooklyn home, my only American address. Once I started taking frequent trips from relatively peaceful Croatia into Bosnia, Eddie dedicated himself to intercepting mail that included articles with a Bosnian dateline so that Mum would not realize my location.

Mort had convinced me that the only way President Clinton would intervene to break the siege of Sarajevo was if he felt domestic pressure to do so. As a journalist, therefore, I believed I had a critical role to play. I wanted not only to inform members of Congress and other decision-makers, but to try to make everyday readers care about what was happening to people thousands of miles away.

Many journalists in Bosnia brought a similar focus to their work. High-minded though it sounds, we wanted our articles to matter and our governments’ actions to change. I was aware that this aspiration was more reminiscent of an editorial writer’s ambition than that of a traditional reporter, whose job was to document what she saw. But when I wrote an article—no matter how obscure the publication where it appeared—I hoped President Clinton would see it. I wanted him to do more than he was doing to help the people I was meeting, most of whom were desperate and believed that only the United States could save them.

When I reported my heart out and my editors weren’t interested, I was crushed. I blamed myself for not figuring out how to bridge the distance. The editors did their best to remind me of the US context so I could keep my readers foremost in my mind. They drilled into my head one of the basic truisms of reporting: if I did not make the stakes of the issue clear and compelling, most people would not read past the first paragraph.

While I despised trying to “sell” the suffering around me, the experience helped refine—in a way that would prove valuable later on—my own sense of what animated Americans or, alternatively, what was likely to cause their eyes to glaze over. As the months passed and I became a more capable reporter, I went back and forth about whether I should pursue journalism as a permanent career. Since nothing we were writing had thus far managed to sway Western decision-makers, I wondered if I could find a different path that was less about describing events and more about directly trying to shape them. Once, when I reported on a diplomatic gathering that included European foreign ministers and Secretary of State Warren Christopher, I noted in my journal: “I would like to be one of them.” On another occasion, after covering a massacre of children who were struck by a shell while jumping rope in a Sarajevo playground, I wrote to myself that I wanted to “be on the other side of the microphone,” in a position to make or change US policy.

I TOOK A SHORT TRIP back to Washington in September of 1994. I was twenty-three years old and had lived in the former Yugoslavia for less than ten months. Encouraged by Mort, who often seemed blind to hierarchy and propriety, I contacted two people that I still cannot believe I had the gumption to engage.

First, I called Strobe Talbott at his home. Strobe was a longtime Time magazine correspondent who had become Deputy Secretary of State in the Clinton administration—the second in line at the State Department. I had his number only because I had met him through Mort before he entered government. The conversation was then—and remains now—cringeworthy in the extreme:

“Hello, Strobe, you may not remember me. This is Samantha Power.”

“Yes, of course, how are you?” he said warmly.

“I’m good, but I actually spent the last year in Bosnia, and I was wondering if you’d like to have a chat.”

There was a long pause.

“I suppose you’d like to offer recommendations,” he said dryly, filling the silence.