Читать книгу The Education of an Idealist - Samantha Power - Страница 18

From the moment I arrived at Harvard Law School, I feared I wouldn’t last. While in Bosnia, I had imagined how satisfying it would be to learn the law and eventually hunt down Balkan war criminals as a prosecutor at The Hague. But as I struggled to adjust to my new life back in the United States, all I could think about was the place I had left behind. Had I remained just a few weeks longer, I kept thinking, I would have witnessed history.

As I began classes, the US-led NATO bombing campaign quickly wiped out the Bosnian Serb Army’s heavy weapons and communications capabilities, leaving Serb forces unable to defend many of the towns they had ethnically cleansed over the previous three and a half years. Jubilant Muslim and Croat soldiers took advantage of the friendly warplanes in the sky and reclaimed lost territory. For the first time since 1992, my Bosnian friends in Sarajevo could get in their cars and leave the capital, visiting loved ones they had not even been able to speak with by telephone.

My new, shared apartment was in Somerville, the next town over from Cambridge. I amassed a steep phone bill, frantically calling my reporter friends in Bosnia and making them hold their phones in the air so I could hear the background sounds of honking horns and celebratory music. I surrounded myself with reminders of what I had left behind, hanging on my bedroom wall a map of Sarajevo that showed the gun emplacements around the city, and placing on the living room mantel a 40-millimeter shell that had been engraved and turned into a decorative sculpture.

My instincts continued to reflect the fact that I had spent the better part of the summer living in a city under fire: the loud scrape of a desk being moved or a library cart being pushed sent me ducking for cover. Meanwhile, simple conveniences—like a light switch—suddenly delighted me. When I visited the local supermarket, I was now paralyzed by all the options. In Sarajevo, I had counted myself fortunate to find a carton of juice priced like a bottle of Bordeaux, but in Cambridge, I was confronted by more than a dozen flavors of Snapple alone. For two years, my journal reflections had been decidedly grim, but trivial discoveries now passed for big news: “We have cantaloupe Snapple!” I marveled in one entry soon after school started.

My reacclimation to America happened slowly, and it didn’t help that I spoke to Mort daily to discuss developments in Bosnia.

“I wish Fred were here to see this,” I told him a few days after NATO brought the fighting to an end.

“He would ask why the hell you’re in law school,” Mort answered.

I wondered the same thing.

I didn’t lack the ability to focus—I could bury myself in the library for hours without noticing the setting sun. But while I admired the poise of my classmates who threw themselves into Socratic debates with their peers and professors, I just couldn’t make myself care about the topics we were studying. In 1L, Scott Turow’s memoir of his first year at Harvard Law School, he compares studying case law to stirring concrete with his eyelashes; this description seemed a perfect encapsulation of how I felt reading Civil Procedure cases late into the night.

I was also not that quick a study. I became flustered when called upon in class, stammering answers that other students quickly tore apart while a hundred pairs of eyes drilled into my back. When my professors interrogated me, I tried to keep my composure by making an insistent mental note, “This professor is not Ratko Mladić, he’s not Ratko Mladić, he’s not …” But hours after class ended, my cheeks often still felt flushed with embarrassment.

ON OCTOBER 29^TH, 1995, nearly two months into law school, I picked up the Sunday New York Times at the bottom of my Somerville stoop. There, in the upper left-hand corner, was a huge headline: SREBRENICA: THE DAYS OF SLAUGHTER.[3] A reporting team had spent weeks preparing a special investigation that contained previously unpublished details of the systematic murder of Srebrenica’s men and boys.

As I sat reading—clenched in what felt like a full-body grimace—I understood what writers reflecting on the Holocaust meant when they described the human capacity to “know without knowing.” I had covered the fall of Srebrenica and had read all of my friend David Rohde’s articles about it. Laura, who had left journalism to attend graduate school, had spent her summer working for Human Rights Watch, gathering the testimonies of people who had survived the massacres. Yet my reaction to the Times exposé confirmed how wide the chasm can be between holding out hope that something is not true and actually absorbing devastating facts in all of their finality. I had experienced the brutality of the war up close. Yet before reading the Times piece, I had somehow believed that Srebrenica’s missing men and boys were no longer alive, and yet had not necessarily believed that they were dead.[fn1]

I looked back at my own actions and wondered why I hadn’t done more. “I don’t know how that could have been me there,” I wrote in my journal. “I was the correspondent in Munich while the bodies burned in Dachau … I had power and I failed to use it.” In beating myself up, I was clearly exaggerating my actual power back in Sarajevo. I was a freelance journalist, running my laptop off of a jury-rigged car battery. President Clinton led the most formidable superpower in the history of the world. He had a vast intelligence apparatus at his disposal. And he certainly knew more contemporaneously than I did about the crimes Mladić and his executioners were carrying out in Srebrenica. The President of the United States had not needed my help if he was to be spurred to action.

Nonetheless, I felt at sea. My law school classmates and I were of a generation that had unquestioningly embraced the slogan “never again.” Yet I was sure very few of my peers were actually aware of the Times investigation that had sent me spiraling, and even those who had seen it would probably have considered it “too depressing” to read. Powerless to affect the fate of men already killed, I decided that I could at least raise awareness on campus about what had happened.

In a move that at the time felt as bold as choosing to live under siege in Sarajevo, I asked my Contracts professor for permission to make an announcement before class. “I apologize for using this forum,” I said nervously after taking the floor. “But I just wanted to draw your attention to something that will be in your mailbox later.” I previewed the article, which documented “the largest single massacre in Europe in fifty years.” My lips quivered as I rushed to try to finish. “So please read it. Thanks.”

After class I met up with a new friend, Sharon Dolovich, who had done her PhD in political theory at Cambridge University and was seemingly curious about all subjects. While most of our classmates had shied away from discussing the upsetting events in the former Yugoslavia, Sharon pumped me for details on my recent experiences and seemed genuinely moved by the revelations about Srebrenica. Sharon and I dropped by the law school copy room to collect the five hundred Xeroxes I had ordered earlier in the day. Together, we solemnly stuffed a stapled copy of the article into the mailbox of each first-year law student. I knew enough not to linger and watch our classmates sift through their mail, which also included notices for an upcoming ice cream social, various law journal meetings, and book discounts at the Harvard Coop. If the Srebrenica article was to be tossed into the nearby blue recycling tub, I did not want to see it. A few of my classmates approached me later to thank me for alerting them to what had happened. But I got the feeling that most found me off-puttingly intense.

After saying goodbye to Sharon, I made my way to the law library. I had already fallen behind in my Property reading and needed to prepare for the next day’s class. After a restless hour in a carrel, I wandered to the nearest phone to collect my answering machine messages. I heard the voice of my friend Elizabeth Rubin, who had just returned to New York from Sarajevo.

“Power, I don’t know if you’ve heard,” she said. There was a pause, and then what sounded like muffled crying. “It’s David.”

Another pause. “Um … he’s been abducted.”

I flashed back to all that my friend David Rohde had written, doing more than any reporter to uncover Ratko Mladić’s summary executions. My mind jumped to Fred Cuny and his last days. “No! No! No!” I said, holding back tears as I raced to the bike rack and began fumbling with my lock so I could get home.

When I reached my apartment, I stood in the kitchen with no idea what to do. What more could I contribute to finding David that the US government, the UN, and the press corps weren’t already doing? I defaulted to what I usually did when I was in a bind, calling Mort.

He was constructive and typically specific. He told me to call Richard Holbrooke—who, in a fortunate coincidence of timing, had just arrived in Dayton, Ohio, for peace talks with the warring factions. He also told me to call Strobe Talbott and Steve Rosenfeld—both of whom I had haplessly lobbied the year before. “Get the Post to write something,” Mort advised.

Unable to get through to Holbrooke, I (somewhat absurdly) asked the hotel receptionist in Dayton to pass on a message—verbatim:

David Rohde has been abducted in Serb territory. Please make him the lead item in the peace talks.

I was able to reach Strobe, who started our conversation as courteously as ever. He told me that Secretary of State Warren Christopher had that day raised David’s case with Serbian president Milošević in Dayton. Instead of expressing gratitude, though, I snapped, “That’s not enough.”

Strobe continued, “Milošević understands that he will bear the consequences if anything happens to David.”

“The consequences!” I said, sarcastically. “What consequences?!” Strobe must have wondered why he ever took my calls.

“Well, if you’re going to take that view, then there’s nothing more I can say,” he responded, and the call quickly ended.

When I connected with Rosenfeld, I begged him to write an editorial demanding that the US government secure David’s release before proceeding with the Dayton talks. “He’s the only Western eyewitness to the mass graves,” I implored. “He’s in profound danger.”

Rosenfeld explained that the next day’s paper had already gone to press. “Well, if we don’t do something quickly, it will be too late,” I warned. “You have to understand: people don’t just disappear in Bosnia. We have a short window to shame David’s captors into not harming him, but it is closing.”

Rosenfeld gave me an opening. “If you want to write something,” he offered, “we will run it.”

Less than thirty-six hours after I heard Elizabeth’s message, the Washington Post ran my op-ed, the first opinion piece I had penned since the Daily Jang. The essay, printed November 3, 1995, concluded: “I relay David’s odyssey because he is my colleague and my dear friend. American officials claim they can do no more than ‘raise the issue at the highest levels.’ David did more. Why can’t they?”

I went to class and tried not to think about the barbaric treatment my friend was likely suffering—if he was even still alive. When I returned home a few hours later, I saw that the tape on my answering machine had been filled. Strangers—lower-level State Department officials, Hill staffers, journalists, and Post readers from all walks of life—had located my home number through directory assistance and left messages asking how they could help. One man moved me immensely with his simple words of support. “Howdy, my name is Bill,” his message began. “I am a truck driver. I just wanna know what I can do for David.”

Much more importantly, by nightfall, the Serb authorities acknowledged that David was in their custody. Had they planned to kill him, they would never have admitted to detaining him. I now believed that his family, who had staged a protest outside of the Dayton airbase where the Bosnia peace talks were taking place, would get him back.

David was released ten days after he was seized. Once free, he revealed that a source had given him a map with the exact location of four additional mass graves near Srebrenica. Blacklisted from entering Bosnian Serb territory because of his reporting in August, he doctored the date on his expired press pass and drove into Serb territory, where he found the first of the gravesites and evidence of murder: piles of coats, abandoned shoes, Muslim identity documents, even canes and shattered eyeglasses.

But as was David’s wont, he had pushed his luck, trying to find even more. He was arrested at rifle-point at the second grave, just as he was preparing to photograph two human femurs he had discovered. Because he was carrying a camera, a map with suspected gravesites circled, and film stuffed into his socks, the Bosnian Serbs labeled him a spy.

“Mr. David,” his interrogator repeatedly asked him at the remote police station where he was held, “What is your rank? Who is your commander in the CIA? And what is your mission?”

His captors forced him to stand through the night, denying him sleep. They threatened him with a lengthy stay in a Bosnian Serb prison camp, and even with execution. After three days of threats, fearful that he would be shot if he continued to hold out, David considered telling the interrogators whatever they wanted. But a friendly guard whispered in his ear that he knew David was a journalist. He urged him to stand firm. This gave US diplomacy and public advocacy time to succeed.

I was thrilled by David’s release and rushed to Logan Airport to be part of the crowd that welcomed him. After the dark discoveries of the previous months, the sight of David being reunited with his family felt like a sudden burst of light.

Close to midnight, I heard a knock on the front door of my Somerville apartment and saw David outside. We stayed up until daybreak, talking about what he had seen and gone through. We also began a debate, which we continue to this day, about 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.