SAMANTHA POWER’S SPECIAL PLEADING
The Plank on TNR.com
rchive/2008/08/20/samantha-power-s-special-pleadin g.aspx
Aug 20 2008
DC
Some 38, maybe 39 years ago, I received a phone call from someone I
had vaguely known. She was frantic. "Biafra," she cried, with reason
enough, I agreed, to be frantic. "Poets, poets, we must save the
poets of Biafra," she went on. Which is where she lost me.
After the birth of our son in 1968 I had become involved in what was
loosely called the Biafra movement. The provoking moment for me was
very simple: we were on our bed with three-day old Jesse and there on
the tube were three, four, five year olds, gaunt in face, bloated in
belly, starving. The next morning I enlisted in the American Committee
to Keep Biafra Alive. Recalling now that moment from the genocide
against the Ibo people of Biafra brings back what are frankly bitter
memories: the fiction of the territorial integrity of United Nations
member states as a shield against rescue of those damned within
these member states. There were enough international relief efforts,
all right, but what was collected and purchased, food and medicine,
mostly, was warehoused in Sao Tome and Fernando Po, two small islands
off the coast of west Africa, never to be delivered to Biafra because
that would violate the, yes, territorial integrity of Nigeria. Many
good people were just plumb afraid to intrude on a black intra-African
dispute. Of course, some day, Nigeria will itself implode and maybe
the brainy, industrious, morally conscientious and tolerant people
of Biafra will have their freedom…and the opportunity to show what
a true black African democracy is like.
I’ve rambled. So back to the poets. I didn’t understand why we had
to rescue Ibo poets but not Ibo musicians, farmers, gas station
attendants, mothers, fathers, children. In every disaster, there are
those who wish to save whom they think the most deserving.
All of this came to mind when I read in Tuesday’s Times the special
pleading by Samantha Power for U.N. personnel and other, mostly
non-governmental (NGO) aid workers posted to countries beset by
terror. Yesterday was the fifth anniversary of the Baghdad murder of
Sergio Vieira de Mello, the subject of Power’s recent hagiography,
Chasing the Flame, and 21 other international public servants. Who
were their killers? The same bloodthirsty men (and women) who target
soldiers, civilians and just anybody who happens to be in a market,
a bus, a mosque almost anywhere in Iraq and the rest of the Muslim
crescent. I don’t mean to be churlish but the fifth anniversary of the
murder fest, although a slim excuse for a meditation on the world’s
responsibility to protect its would-be protectors, was the author’s
last chance to gin up some interest in her book. There are, after all,
only so many book emporia and Unitarian churches you can go to with it.
Ms. Power notes really quite out of the blue in her piece that
five years minus a week after the slaying of Viera de Mello and
his comrades, forces of the Taliban took down in Afghanistan (as if
these were the only victims in the interim) "three female educators
and a driver from the International Rescue Committee," a group with
a slightly different record than other relief organizations since it
was organized by Albert Einstein to save Jewish and other victims of
Naziism. The I.R.C. was thought to have gone slightish rightish since
it also salvaged the lives of people in West Berlin whose food was
blockaded by the Soviet Union and of refugees from Hungary in 1956,
Cubans escaping the Castro regime after 1960, Chinese fleeing the
Mao regime, Asian nationals from Uganda, and the avalanche of human
wreckage from Paraguay, Guatemala, Burma, Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos,
Armenians and Jews from the U.S.S.R., refugees from the Red Army
invasion of Afghanistan all the way on through to the genocides in
Yugoslavia and Rwanda to which the United Nations itself (with Kofi
Annan in the lead role) was complicit. (The I.R.C. long ago had on
its staff the former literary editor of The New Republic. His name
was Varian Fry.)
And now also back to Ms. Power’s special pleading for U.N. officials
and other aid workers. I am sure they are estimable men and women. As
it happens, on the very day when Power’s op-ed appeared in the Times,
there was a dispatch (from Paris) reporting that "a suicide bomber"
(the Times refuses to calls such individuals "terrorists," oh so
gentle) had killed in Algeria "at least 43 people, mostly civilians
and young people who had been waiting to take an entrance exam"
for a police academy. At least 11 other utterly innocent Algerians
were cut down by two car bombs today. How many thousands of ordinary
men and women and children have been murdered in the streets and
in railroad station and on their way to prayer since the attack on
the office of the U.N. in Baghdad five years ago? Thousands upon
thousands upon thousands. Power is still mourning her friend and his
comrades. Fine. He is no more dear to me, and shouldn’t be any dearer
to you, than one of the young academy applicants killed yesterday
east of Algiers.