Samantha Power: Irish expat in a position of Power
IN April of last year, US President Barack Obama announced new forms of sanctions against perpetrators of atrocities, a policy shift barely noticed by most of his fellow citizens but one that could have profound implications for American foreign policy for decades to come.
The most influential person to steer the president in this direction was Irish-born Samantha Power, the woman chosen by him to be the next US ambassador to the United Nations.
Power, former senior foreign policy adviser to Obama, has seen the most appalling atrocities first hand. From 1993 to 1996, she covered the wars in the former Yugoslavia as a reporter for US News and World Report, The Boston Globe, and The New Republic. She was a young journalist in Bosnia in July 1995 at the time of the Srebrenica massacre and spent much of her time there frustrated at the failure of the international community to take effective action against the likes of Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic.
She also witnessed the horrors of Darfur in the Sudan.
As the author of the 2003 Pulitzer prize-winning A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide, Power provided the intellectual leverage for a growing genocide prevention movement that has sought to pressurise the US government to honour the victims of the Holocaust by living up to a slogan “never again”.
In her book, Power writes that she returned from Bosnia “haunted by the murder of Srebenica’s Muslim men and boys, my own failure to sound a proper early warning, and the outside world’s refusal to intervene even once the men’s peril had become obvious”.
She was not slow to point out that the US “had never in its history intervened to stop genocide and had, in fact, rarely even made a point of condemning it as it occurred”.
It was fitting, therefore, that Obama made his announcement of sanctions on Iran and Syria at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.
While invoking the international community’s vow of “never again”, Obama also cited the difficulties of fulfilling that pledge in the 21st century, recalling mass killings in Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia and elsewhere. “We are haunted by the atrocities we did not stop, by the lives we did not save,” he said.
This is not the first time that Obama has shown a willingness to intervene. Spurred on by Power — who refers to herself as the “Genocide Chick” — his administration played a key role in the overthrow of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi.
However, it has been unable to contribute much to a reduction in violence in Syria. According to Holocaust Memorial Museum fellow Michael Dobbs, writing in Foreign Policy magazine: “Auschwitz survivor, Elie Wiesel, drew attention to this contradiction in introducing Obama to the Holocaust museum audience by noting that Bashar Assad is still in power in Syria alongside number one Holocaust denier, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. ‘Have we learned anything?’ Wiesel asked plaintively.”
Guided by Power, Obama’s answer was to point to action that the US government can take in response to mass atrocities short of military intervention. To prove it, he signed a presidential order targeting companies and individuals that assist the governments of Syria and Iran in supplying technology used to crack down on political opponents and human rights activists.
Other steps include the formation of an Atrocities Prevention Board chaired by Power and designed to co-ordinate US government action on stopping genocide. The US secret service has also been instructed to make intelligence gathering on mass atrocities a priority — a contrast to Bosnia and Srebrenica, when it was an afterthought.
Which brings us to her nomination as US ambassador to the UN, a move often seen as a stepping stone to the role of secretary of state, formerly filled by her boss, Hillary Clinton, whom Power once branded a “monster”. This will be the highest-profile role that she has ever taken on.
A graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, she moved to the US from Castleknock in Dublin at the age of nine. She spent 2005 to 2006 working in Obama’s office when he was a senator. In 2008, Power was conferred with an honorary doctorate of law by the National University of Ireland at University College Cork.
Delivering the traditional tribute, Prof Caroline Fennell, then the college’s dean of law, described Power as someone who “celebrates or perhaps manifests occasional and necessary dissent. She admires and celebrates those who do not always toe the party line”.
Praising her “fresh and clearly audible but distinctive voice”, Fennell described her as not just an insightful chronicler of atrocities, but as a determined and active humanitarian.
She has clearly been a strong, independent and persuasive voice for human rights. That voice can sometimes create turbulence as when Power described how the UN has a knack for “killing the flame — the flame of idealism that motivated some to strive to combat injustice and that inspired the vulnerable to believe that help will soon come”.
That kind of straight-talking should make for interesting times ahead at the UN.
