![]() Samantha Power with Barack Obama in the White House in 2013. It culminated in her book A Problem from Hell So she dropped out of the law course and embarked on what ended up being a five year project on genocide. “The idea was you go to law school and you go get the bad guy somehow.” But she became absorbed instead in the question of why and how successive US administrations since the second world war had failed to respond effectively to genocide, for all the vows of “never again”. “I know this probably sounds not believable but I sincerely wanted policymakers to do something about the specific horror show in front of me.”Īt Harvard she imagined being a war crimes prosecutor at The Hague. ![]() It just seemed absurd but it did kind of follow me in a way that I found very discomfiting,” Power says. His implication that she was a calculating careerist still rankles: “It drove me crazy. When, at the height of the war, Power left Bosnia for Harvard Law School, one older male reporter told her – somewhat derisively but more prophetically than he could have imagined – that she was on her way to becoming secretary of state. “I think it was because of Mort that I had this annoying habit, which was to be constantly thinking: ‘What should Washington be doing?’ Which was ridiculous for a twentysomething stringer who barely knows how to file.” Looking back, she puts that drive down in part to a short stint working at a Washington thinktank, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the influence of its president at the time, Morton Abramowitz, a retired diplomat who became her mentor. She was already focusing on how she might change events rather than merely describe them. ![]() Power was a decade or so younger than most, but even then was full of self-confidence and optimism about what she could achieve. We were part of a shifting group of journalists and aid workers who set up home in a Sarajevo bed and breakfast called The Hondo. I first met Power in Bosnia in the 1990s. It was the unfolding genocide in Bosnia that drew her there as a 23-year-old freelancer. It was watching TV pictures of the Chinese government crushing the Tiananmen protests in June 1989, and the famous image of a lone protester standing in front of a tank, that turned her from sports journalism to foreign policy. I wanted policymakers to do something about the specific horror show in front of meīefore entering government, Power had a single all‑encompassing preoccupation: how to respond to genocide and mass atrocities. “But it’s really abated a lot.” The pressure will return however, as the book is published and scrutinised, because it will be not just the painful episodes from Power’s youth that are being dissected, but also the decisions taken by the Obama administration that were at odds with her own beliefs and recommendations. “This period, after finishing the book, would be a perfect candidate,” she says. She doesn’t believe in neat ideas of “closure” – “There’s no moment where you just tie a bow around that stuff” – but she has noticed that since burrowing into her childhood, the demons have remained largely at bay. ![]() At 48, Power has now written a memoir, The Education of an Idealist, that charts not only her steep upward trajectory, but also her excavation of her Irish immigrant roots, where the clues to her bouts of breathlessness and pain lay hidden. The panic attacks persisted in the rare lulls during the hectic years of her stellar career that followed. That should have been a clue that something was a little bit amiss.” “I was like, what is wrong? I can’t breathe. “I had them in the summer of 1995 when there was a brief ceasefire,” she says. The symptoms would ambush her during the holidays, and later, while she was a freelance correspondent covering the Bosnian war, when the shelling stopped.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |