The Education of an Idealist

“I may be presumptuous enough to phone you at home at nine o’clock at night, but I’m not so presumptuous to think I could make informed recommendations. I just know what I see … but it might be useful to meet,” I offered.

“I would like to, but I’m kind of busy with Haiti right now,” Strobe replied.

I put my face in my hands and mouthed to myself, “Haiti! Of course he’s busy with Haiti!!” The newspapers were then filled with reports that Clinton’s national security team was meeting around the clock, preparing a large military deployment to help restore the country’s democratically elected president to power.

Strobe hurried off the call. But I was not finished making a fool of myself on my homecoming visit.

Thanks again to an introduction from Mort, I met the next day with Steve Rosenfeld in his office at the Washington Post, where he was the editorial page editor. He understandably assumed I was interested in career advice. “So you want to be a journalist?” he asked. “No,” I answered. “Or maybe,” I said, not wanting to offend him. I shifted the topic. “I hear you are sort of a dove on Bosnia,” I began.

As Rosenfeld looked over my shoulder at CNN’s Haiti coverage on a nearby television, I tried to make a persuasive case for why he should write editorials urging Clinton to do more to stop the Bosnian atrocities. He was surprisingly polite, but also firm that the United States should stay out of the conflict.

After half an hour, when he tried to end our meeting and get back to work, I persisted.

“I know you have to go,” I said. “Just two or three last points, if I may.” Fifteen minutes later, I was still talking.

While I was becoming a decent reporter, I was a woefully ineffective advocate.

IN 1994 AND 1995, I traveled regularly to Sarajevo. Doing so was to be transported into another galaxy: the dystopian landscape was burned and broken, yet people went on living as if no longer noticing the plastic sheeting on their windows or the charred cars turned into barriers to shield them as they crossed the road. Parts of the city felt instantly familiar—Mum and I had watched the 1984 Winter Olympics together in Atlanta, cheering for “Wild Bill” Johnson, the daring American skier, as he captured his gold racing down hills that were now teeming with Serb heavy weapons. Scott Hamilton had skated to gold in the Zetra Stadium, which was now destroyed and surrounded by graves.

Only once inside the city could I feel how close the attacking Serbs were, and how claustrophobic the trapped inhabitants must have felt. The mountains seemed to grow out of the river that split the city in half. By holding the high ground, the Bosnian Serb Army was able to choose its targets at will. I found it hard to believe that men who called themselves soldiers were setting their rifle sights on women carrying their water jugs home. But by the time the siege was finally brought to an end, the Bosnian Serb militants would end up killing some 10,000 people in the city.

By 1994, the cemeteries in Sarajevo 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.

10

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THE SECRET TO A LONG LIFE (#ulink_b5169ce4-b348-5e96-b817-6aa48a33bee0)

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 still make it into the Bosnian capital.

The Serbs had attempted to take Mount Igman, and the Bosnian Army had suffered significant casualties defending the narrow eighteen-mile road that snaked through the mountain. The entire pass remained vulnerable to Serb artillery, with the last fifteen miles in the line of sight for Serb heavy machine guns and cannons. People who used the road often drove at breakneck speed around sharp bends without any idea what might be coming in the opposite direction. Honking in a blind spot was ill-advised because it would attract attention from Serb gunmen. Yet when a car veered even one foot off the path, there was no guardrail to prevent it from slipping off the shoulder. The drop was precipitous, and the Bosnian Army had mined the side of the mountain to prevent Serb soldiers from staging a stealth attack on foot.

Many people died on Mount Igman, including a number of peacekeepers and, later that summer, three US officials: President Clinton’s Bosnia special envoy Robert Frasure, National Security Council aide Nelson Drew, and the Defense Department’s Joseph Kruzel. The French soldier transporting the American diplomats into Sarajevo had been driving at a rapid clip when he accidentally veered off the side of the road while trying to avoid an approaching convoy. The diplomats’ armored personnel carrier went tumbling more than three hundred yards down the mountain, causing anti-tank rockets in the vehicle to explode.

From the relative shelter of a Bosnian government checkpoint at the top of the mountain road, Roger and I braced ourselves for the perilous journey. As we set off, we could see the hulks of vehicles hit by Serb gunfire or destroyed after drivers had taken the hairpin turns too quickly. Driving the heavy armored vehicle provided by the Times, Roger was aiming for the unachievable combination of speed and maneuverability at once. Whenever we shaved the edge of the road, I turned my body toward the gearshift—as if I could personally avoid the land mines that the outer part of the vehicle might accidentally set off.

As we hurtled down the mountain at a velocity that we hoped would outpace the Serb gunners who might have us in their sights, Roger began to lose control of the vehicle. Our downward momentum from the steepness of the descent caused the steering wheel to elude his grasp and spin wildly. Sweating profusely, all I could do as we lunged from right to left was press my hand against the roof of the five-ton vehicle as Roger tried to keep hold of the violently shaking steering wheel and force the car toward the center of the road. At one point in particular, I felt sure we were about to plunge down the mountain as the car careened out of control toward the edge—but somehow, in a mystery that neither of us understand to this day, Roger managed to haul us back onto the trail.

I WAS BY THEN SPENDING most of my time in Sarajevo, the epicenter of the war. The situation was deteriorating badly. While I was working there in June and July of 1995, an average of three hundred shells rained down on the city each day. With no end to the war in sight, I was starting to feel increasingly like a vulture, preying upon Bosnian misery to write my stories.

Even when my articles received prominent placement in a newspaper or magazine, potentially bringing my reporting to the attention of millions of people, I had a nagging sense that I was falling short. I grew practiced at interviewing survivors of violence, but I still couldn’t shake the feeling that by asking questions designed to elicit appalling detail, I was exploiting someone’s personal trauma for “my story.”

There would come a moment in every interview where I would feel a rush of recognition—“I have what I need”—and then would hasten to wind down the conversation so I could get to a power source for my laptop and start writing. I would then begin to feel guilty for having invaded someone’s home, drunk (at their insistence) their scarce coffee or tea, and left.

Once, after I rose to end an interview with an elderly Muslim woman in Serb-held territory, she hugged me goodbye. Writing later that night in my journal, I noted, “She squeezed me like I was one of her own. I was ashamed.” I don’t know now if I was ashamed because I had been practicing my new craft while she was sobbing in pain at the loss of her sons, because I felt the United States was not doing enough to prevent such devastation, or some combination.

When I drove with Stacy Sullivan of Newsweek to UN headquarters for the daily press briefing in Sarajevo, we typically passed a cluster of photographers in an expectant scrum at the entrance to the main road, which was known as Sniper Alley. The still and video photographers had their cameras ready, knowing that someone was likely to get shot by a Bosnian Serb sniper as he or she made a mad dash across this exposed portion of road. Elizabeth Rubin, a writer with Harper’s who would become a close friend, once saw a woman who managed to survive the crossing yell back at one of the perched photographers, “No work for you today, asshole. I made it alive.”

Until that summer, I had believed that if my colleagues and I conveyed the suffering around us to decision-makers in Washington, our journalism might move President Clinton to stage a rescue mission. This had not happened. The words, the photographs, the videos—nothing had changed the President’s mind. While Sarajevans had once thought of Western journalists as messengers on their behalf, they had now begun to see us as ambassadors of idle nations. No matter how many massacres we covered, Western governments seemed determined to steer clear of the conflict.

Even if Clinton and his advisers did not think it reasonable to get involved to prevent atrocities, I thought they should have seen how failing to shore up a fragmenting part of Europe would impact traditional US security interests. The occurrence of such a conflict in the heart of Europe made NATO look feckless, and the failed state gave unsavory criminal elements—like arms traffickers and terrorists—a foothold in Europe. I knew that thousands of foreign fighters were making their way to the country, including the battle-hardened mujahedeen from Afghanistan. But I only later learned that a still-young terrorist group known as al-Qaeda was active there, and that two of the September 11

hijackers as well as attack architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed ended up fighting in Bosnia.[2] (#litres_trial_promo)

On several occasions during the long summer of 1995, when I dropped by the home of someone who had lost a loved one in the capital, I was shooed away. “Why should we talk to you?” one woman screamed at me before slamming her door. “The world knows, your government knows, and you do nothing.”

Just as the war had come to feel normal, so too had the idea that nobody would stop it.

At the same time, I noticed that I had gradually lost my fear. While once I had shivered for hours after evading Serb shelling or sniper fire, now I no longer worried about the crack of gunfire or the crash of a mortar exploding nearby. Three years into their agony, Sarajevans were joking, “If you run, you hit the bullet; if you walk, the bullet hits you.” I had begun to feel a similar fatalism, gradually giving up the superstitions that I had originally seized upon for safety—my Pirates baseball cap, my back-street route to the press briefing, and my ritual beer as I pounded away on my laptop after a long day’s work.

I knew I had been lucky—every reporter had close calls, and mine were nowhere near as hair-raising as those of others. But they began to add up. As I was driving in Serb territory along an icy road, my car turned 180 degrees and spun into a ditch that was surrounded by mines. Once, in Sarajevo, shrapnel burst through the window and landed on the desk where Stacy and I often worked side by side. In the same month, a large mortar attack flattened a house several doors from where I was charging my computer. One day, as Stacy, Emma, and I exited our car near the Bosnian president’s office, Serb snipers fired on us repeatedly, forcing us to race across the parking lot in a panicked search for cover. Our assailants were just a few hundred yards away, and certainly could have hit us if that had been their goal. Instead, they seemed more interested in amusing themselves.

The spike in violence weighed heavily on Mum, Eddie, and Stephen, who were each tracking the news from New York. When I called home, my brother, who was back for the summer after his junior year in college, grabbed the phone. Stephen and my mother had a fraught relationship: she struggled to get him to focus on school and to lay off drugs and alcohol, while he insisted he didn’t need her advice, saying he took after his father, which was just what she was worried about. At the same time, he was protective of her. If one of the patients she was close to died, he was tender, assuring her she had done all she could and frying her up a fish he had caught for dinner.

Stephen and I were not especially close, but we were always warm with each other. So it shocked me when he confronted me about the risks I was taking.

“What you are doing is so selfish, sis,” he said on the phone, asking, “Don’t you ever think about Mum?”

My brother had a point. For all the time I’d spent trying to convey to others what it was like to be a Bosnian under siege, I had not really stopped to imagine what it must have been like to be the parent of someone who had chosen to go live in a war zone.