By Samantha Power with Howie Kahn
On Sergio Vieira de Mello and the work of making peace in broken places.
Samantha Power is a journalist, activist, and professor at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. She has campaigned widely to stop the genocide in Darfur and acted as a foreign policy adviser to Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama.
In February, she published Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World. The book tells the story of the lifelong UN diplomat killed in the 2003 bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad, the Canal Hotel, while serving as special representative of the secretary general. Her previous book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 2003. This interview took place in November 2007 and March 2008.
The Canal Hotel, the UN's headquarters in Baghdad,
after being bombed in 2003.
Howie Kahn: Why Vieira de Mello?
Samantha Power: I think brokenness is the operative issue of our time. Broken souls, broken hearts, broken places. And I don't know of any historical figure, or any contemporary figure, who, as much as he did, bumped up against brokenness and tried to bring his experience to bear to mend—not fix—but mend, heal, and improve people's lives. I thought, at a time when we all talk about transnational threats and global challenges, it makes sense to do a book on a global guy, a guy who lived in that world, who crossed borders. All of our contemporary heroes are still very parochial in a way—still national, still people who operate within states rather than among them.
It took until the end for me to really understand what the book was: It's like The Education of Henry Adams, but about a peacemaker, a humanitarian, someone who deals with these broken places. It allows people to access him at the beginning of the book as an idealist and to learn with him in his moments of adaptation, to witness the mistakes he's making so that we don't have to make the mistakes ourselves.
HK: This is somebody who's rising through the ranks and is, by conventional social standards, a success. But that's not what he's experiencing internally. In terms of political biography, he's atypical. He struggles. In Iraq, he has a new, higher office but also tremendous obstacles. And, as you say, he has no nation. He's dealing with refugees, but he's also a displaced person himself.
SP: That's a very good point. The second-to-last chapter of the book describes the US attempt to rescue Sergio when he was trapped under the rubble: Sergio died un-owned. He died because nobody was looking out for him. He could have survived, I'm pretty sure—he was alive for three and a half hours. But the United States had done no prewar military planning to respond to large-scale terrorist attacks against civilian targets. And when the explosion occurred, the Americans who risked their lives by rushing into the rubble lacked the equipment, the training, and the leadership to carry out a sophisticated rescue effort.
HK: I'm wondering to what degree you want people to come away from this with a sense of activism. You never make a plea.
SP: I try not to. I find overt pleas generally unpersuasive. When I wrote the first draft of A Problem from Hell, I was angry at the sad lack of a US response to genocide. Then I got a little bit of distance from the book. I went back to the draft, and as a reader, I found myself arguing with Samantha the author, instead of with the US government officials who were making the policies. I had gotten in the way of my own argument, and in the way of my own cause. The book was lousy. But it had the ingredients of something better. I went back to the drawing board, understanding that I had to let the stories do the work and get the hell out of the way.
With Chasing the Flame, the readers of early drafts thought I was too absent, too self-abnegating. I could perhaps afford to be absent from A Problem from Hell—it was describing genocide and did not require much authorial intervention. But with Chasing, readers wanted more guidance. The chapters on Bosnia are a good example. Readers told me, "Here Sergio is behaving as 'Serbio,' acting way too deferentially to the Serb militants, and I am getting really pissed off at him. But you, author, led me to believe I was reading a book about a modern hero. Please help me reconcile!"
I tried to step in at such moments to clarify what I think Sergio's mistakes mean. I tried to do so in a way that is not didactic or portentous and that leaves readers with a sense of how things might be made different. If there were no pathway out of the muck, you'd get to that brink and would feel pretty bad about the possibility for change in the world. If there were no takeaway about how our country could be different, or about what we could contribute as citizens, then these book projects would be a bit of a waste. The Sergio book might be a good read, but it would not be an important one.
HK: How did human rights become your topic?
SP: Bosnia. The images of the concentration camps. I graduated from Yale and went to work as an intern for Mort Abramowitz, then president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which was in the same building as US News & World Report. I did research for Mort on Bosnia, and as I learned about the scale of the tragedy, I became so consumed that—in a classic journalist story—I pestered the chief of correspondents at US News to let me freelance for them, and he agreed to take my collect calls. I was twenty-two.
HK: With no international reporting experience.
SP: I covered the Yale women's volleyball team my freshman year for the Yale Daily News, and I had taken a wonderful nonfiction writing class at Yale. Those were my formal reporting experiences. But I was young and obsessed. I think it was one of those "can implies ought" things, as the philosophers say. I wasn't planning on moving there, into a war zone. But I went to a conference in Slovenia, drove with a friend from the conference into Bosnia, and wrote a story that would become my first freelance piece. From Bihac, a town forgotten to history. Conveniently, the article was about the one UN-protected "safe area" that actually remained safe. So, literally, my first story was about how a place could stay safe during a war.
But at least I had gone to Bosnia and kind of broken the seal. Even though I hadn't gone any place truly dangerous yet, I had discovered I could go over to Bosnia and write a piece for a major news magazine. That was a revelation. When I got back to Washington in August 1993 having written my single freelance piece, I knew there was no way I could stop. So I moved to the Balkans that December.
HK: During what tour did you meet Sergio?
SP: Not the very first trip to Bihac—Sergio was rarely in the safe places—but when I moved to the region full-time in the end of '93. We had friends in common, and he invited me out for meals a bunch of times. I describe our first meal together in the introduction to the book: He would take high-level calls, order wine, and discuss geopolitics and the future of the planet all at once.
HK: So he wanted to hang out with you: "Let me show you Bosnia…" What was he like to the twenty-three-year-old you?
SP: He was hugely charming, as he was to women and men of all ages. I learned a lot about Bosnia and the UN from him, but I didn't get to know him very well. When the charm is piled on like that, it doesn't do much for me. But now having written the book, I regret that I didn't get to know him better, as the Sergio I know now is very deep and complex. As I got to know him over the past four years through his letters and journals and through interviews with his associates, I started to think, I really missed out on this deeper guy, this reflective person. We all did.
HK: Do you think the UN is a functional organization?
SP: This is a distracting point. Not fully functional, no. But the UN's dysfunctions are less the problem of the organization as such. They are the problem of governments and what they choose to pursue and neglect. Citizens have the power to make governments act differently; the UN as an organization does not. Sergio's success would have been more robust, or more frequent, if governments had lined up behind him. Secretary-General Kofi Annan lining up behind him was not the same thing. There are plenty of changes that the UN as an organization can make to decrease its many inefficiencies, but the UN will continue to look dysfunctional until member states decide to prioritize global problems, which will require political pressure from below.
HK: A Problem from Hell is an argument to me. It's a lot of evidence. And Chasing the Flame is a lot of questions. The message seems to be that asking questions must become a top priority in the political arena.
SP: But at a certain point you can overproblematize. You can know too much. I guess you can ask too many questions. In the 1990s, one could find very sound reasons to talk oneself out of acting humanely in the world, especially as the era lacked a vision or driving set of values. So many constructive policy ideas were nitpicked to death. It was death by a thousand paper cuts.
Working out in the field, away from the major capitals, Sergio was a little shielded from this. When it came to deciding how many refugees to move, he was often able to pull the trigger by himself. When he got back to capitals, that was when he was bombarded with questions. Some were helpful—they would have helped him sharpen his arguments and improve his planning. But some resulted in the creation of lowest-common-denominator consensus, which didn't mean the best of all worlds but the worst…
HK: So, at what point does it become more valuable to do what you do in Washington instead of as a…
SP: As a hack?
HK: I was going to say as a professor. One could argue that the training you give your students is hugely important.
SP: I learn a tremendous amount from them, and I hope that I have brought into the classroom some insights from the field, from the NGO world, from the land of US policy, from the UN. But I also think it is important to try to apply one's ideas in the realm of practice. I admire greatly those who are putting themselves on the line and slogging it out in the imperfect real world. I also think I would be a better teacher and a more credible analyst if I had attempted some of what I have recommended. As my recent aborted experience in electoral politics attests, it will be challenging for me to tailor what I know how to do to what actually needs doing. I have spent years studying bureaucracy and systems, and the one thing I know is that—unless the ship is steered by a transformer—entering into one of those systems would probably mean doing a lot of tweaking. If that were the case, it might be better to try to make a contribution from the outside. So my basic view on this is that, even after my idiotic blunder, which revealed only some of my many limitations, if a President Obama still thought there was some way for me to be useful, I would feel I had an obligation to put my money where my mouth is. Do I relish the prospect of life in a Washington bureaucracy? Not exactly. I like the freedom to do five things at once that are a little different from one another. And of course, all of us prefer doing things we have figured out how to do to entering foreign worlds where we bump up against our many weaknesses.
HK: What exactly couldn't Obama get right in the first debates?
SP: Phoniness.
HK: He can't give those McCainian cue-card answers?
SP: The debates reward those who have mastered the two-minute sound bite, which Obama quickly did. But it was a chore for him to wedge complicated thoughts and intricate policy details into these cookie-cutter slots. Obama decided to run for president after hundreds of thousands of people told him that it was his time, that the country needed him. But it was through the last fifteen months on the campaign trail that what Martin Luther King and he call the "fierce urgency of now" crystallized in him. Once he understood that his becoming president would be not only hugely beneficial for the values he cared about but necessary, his campaign took on a heightened urgency, and the voters felt it. He has an unusual ability to make voters see and feel his authenticity. It doesn't feel like politically contrived authenticity, but the real deal. And you can't fake authentic. It is what gives you a deft touch and convinces people that you are running for them and not for yourself, which I really believe is true in Barack's case. Humor and self-deprecation come naturally to him. At the National Security Summit in November, he was talking about energy in a very serious professorial mode and about the way each American had a role to play, beginning with changing their lightbulbs and reducing electricity use to conserve energy. At just the minute he mentioned lightbulbs, the lights in the room went off, and he said, "You see what kind of presidential leadership I offer. As soon as I ask, change happens." It was great and self-parodic, too. People went nuts. He's got the timing.
HK: I'm glad you wrote this book, but it's incredibly sad that Sergio didn't get to write it. He was so opinionated—I can hear him from beyond the grave saying, "Let me add a footnote here. And here." It's tragic in the world of letters when somebody so singular and articulate doesn't get a crack at their own story.
SP: That's a very good point. I say at the end that he was stumbling toward a doctrine, even though he never had time to pull it all together. I had a big reporting challenge, which was to reconstruct what happened in his life day to day. Almost none of it was covered at the time by the media. He wasn't a traditional statesman, so until very late in his career, his statements were not captured. So much of the narrative is based on people's memories, which are selective and can be unreliable and thus have to be rigorously cross-checked.
Have you read A Bright Shining Lie, by Neal Sheehan? It's the best book ever written about Vietnam, and it served as an inspiration for the Sergio book. It's about late US lieutenant colonel John Paul Vann, who is like Sergio in terms of charisma and field presence. With Vann, the bulk of the narrative takes place in Vietnam. But Sergio was always moving around, so the reader often has to get resituated. This gives the reader the chance to experience just the kind of acclimatization Sergio went through, but the downside is that the development of local characters is weaker than I would like it to be, or weaker than it would be if Sergio remained in one place longer than two years. I mean, here I am writing a book and saying one of its lessons is to respect the local culture, and yet there are few strong local characters.
HK: I don't know. That Azerbaijanian woman who wants to evaporate into a rain and pour herself down onto the crops was pretty resonant.
SP: She is amazing. That's my favorite scene in the book.
HK: It's like reading Akhmatova.
SP: That seventy-year-old farmer woman is indeed a poet. But other than that single exchange with Sergio, I don't know anything else about her. It's fine: That would have been a different book. But I'm conscious that, by tracking Sergio, the book replicates what the UN does and what international institutions and governments do in real life.
HK: Many people see you as this beacon of hope—but I see where that could be exhausting.
SP: Both the advantage and disadvantage of doing human rights work, compared with covering the Red Sox or writing about nuclear weapons, is that people have a real expectation that you can do something concrete for them, which I try to do but often fail to do. It's a huge compliment that people think you're accessible and bring to you their concerns about suffering, wherever it occurs in the world. And believe me, if I had the time, I would try to learn more and write about much of what comes at me. I don't think Tom Friedman goes on tour and has people saying, "My cousin in Baku, he's just had this experience, is there someone you can call?" I feel I disappoint people on a regular basis, and that can be exhausting.
I had an experience on a radio show probably ten months ago. We were talking about Sudan, and a caller came on and started talking about A Problem from Hell, and how it changed his life, and how he was working as a banker and changed careers after he read the book. I was thinking "Wow" and "Thank you" and wondering what would I say to this lovely person. I'm in that "Aw, shucks," mode, wanting it to be over soon. But then he says, "But, I just want to add, you abandoned us. You set us up. We counted on your leadership, and you left us to our own devices." People joined this anti-genocide movement and expected me to apply the lessons of my book on a daily basis. Going underground to explore another, very related question—but a different question—was not what some people expected, and I let them down.
HK: What? Who did they think you'd become? Moses?
SP: I don't know. This man was very angry. He felt like he was dressed and ready for battle, but I had failed to lead. I could have written A Problem from Hell and become Raphael Lemkin [the Polish lawyer who coined the term genocide and campaigned for the adoption of international laws defining and forbidding it]. When I wrote that book, I half-thought that is what I would do—become a full-time genocide advocate.
If it weren't for John Prendergast, who is offering magnificent leadership for the anti-genocide movement, New York Times columnist Nick Kristof, Africa advocates like Gayle Smith, and the incredible young people who are already streaks ahead of me in terms of political savvy, I'd feel much worse. Now what we have to figure out is how we take Sergio and the anti-genocide movement and cross-pollinate—making the messages mutually reinforcing.
HK: Is that what's next?
SP: On Sergio, I'm working with Meredith Blake, who helped develop the social-action initiatives for An Inconvenient Truth, to develop an ambitious, three-million-dollar, two- to three-year campaign that would try to take Sergio's principles and make them household principles, build a campaign around the lessons of a life lived in broken places. We'll see what comes of it. We're hoping to implant him as a character in high school textbooks, to try to reach young people when they're at a formative stage. I joked about doing this with Lemkin, but with Sergio it's a little more realistic. Lemkin was nerdy. Sergio is a more romantic figure, more prime-time.
There are two issues here: Can words make a difference? And can the words that make a difference make change? I mean really constructive change, really dramatic change—life-saving change. What I've seen, much to my surprise and tremendous relief, is that words, if put together in the right way at the right moment, with a lot of luck thrown in, can make a difference. They can raise awareness and change perspectives. What I haven't seen is this awareness coalescing to make the kind of concrete change we need going forward. But the century is young.