Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Samantha Power has pushed for a military strike against Syria.
A New U.S. Player, Put on World Stage by Syria
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Samantha Power, the American ambassador to the United Nations, will be
on the spot as her performance at the General Assembly this week will
help determine the country’s future course in Syria.
A New U.S. Player, Put on World Stage by Syria
Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Samantha Power has pushed for a military strike against Syria.
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Published: September 22, 2013
UNITED NATIONS — Nearly a year before the world woke up to images of
Syrians dying in a large-scale chemical weapons attack, Samantha Power
was quietly pushing President Obama for a military strike to stop what
she calls the “grotesque tactics” of President Bashar al-Assad. For a
fleeting moment this month, it seemed she had prevailed.
Multimedia
Related
Times Topic: Crisis in Syria
-
Rebels View Coalition Leadership Outside Syria as Detached From the Suffering (September 23, 2013)
Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Samantha Power, the American ambassador to the United
Nations, speaking at the Center for American Progress this month.
Now Ms. Power, a former senior aide on the National Security Council and
a former war reporter who emigrated from Ireland, must negotiate for
peace in a new public role as Mr. Obama’s ambassador to the United
Nations. The president’s abrupt decision not to use force in Syria has
thrust her into the middle of contentious talks to create a United
Nations Security Council resolution mandating the elimination of Mr.
Assad’s chemical arsenal by the middle of next year.
She will be on the spot on Monday, her diplomatic debut, as Mr. Obama
arrives in New York for the United Nations General Assembly. A woman
known for her closeness to the president and the soaring prose of her
Pulitzer Prize-winning book on genocide, “A Problem From Hell,” Ms.
Power is the lead American negotiator in the difficult, gritty business
of arguing with the Russians, Syria’s patrons, who have already rejected
the notion of using force if Mr. Assad does not comply.
Even her supporters wonder if the untested Ms. Power will be tough
enough, a question with big implications. Secretary of State John Kerry
will work with her on the resolution, but her role is so central that
her performance — in her first weeks on the job — will help determine
America’s future course in Syria.
“Most diplomats in a career of 40 years would never get this kind of
opportunity to make such a difference at such a critical moment,” said
Edward C. Luck, the dean of the School of Peace Studies at the
University of San Diego and a former senior United Nations adviser on
peacekeeping issues. “The stakes could not be higher.”
At the United Nations headquarters last week, where security was tight
in preparation for Monday’s meeting of world leaders, Ms. Power, who
turned 43 on Saturday, looked harried as she swept through the corridors
with her entourage. In brief comments to reporters, she deflected
questions about how she would handle Russia’s resistance to authorizing
the use of force if Mr. Assad refused to comply.
“We are determined to have an enforceable and binding resolution,” Ms.
Power said, in the kind of bland, bureaucratic language she might have
shunned as a writer for The New Yorker, which she once was. Beyond that,
“I think I’m not going to comment.” She declined to be interviewed for
this article.
Over the past two and a half years, Ms. Power — who in her role in the White House in 2011 helped orchestrate the American intervention in Libya
— was unable to persuade the president to do the same in Syria, even
after evidence of small-scale chemical weapons attacks emerged this
year.
One person close to Ms. Power said she had been advocating military
action at least since then, and as far back as December of last year.
The Aug. 21 sarin gas attack, which American intelligence agencies say
killed more than 1,400 Syrians, nearly a third of them children, forced
the issue onto Mr. Obama’s agenda.
“I don’t think she ever expected that every issue would be decided her
way,” the person said, insisting on anonymity to share private
conversations. “But she did want to be working for a president who was
fully engaged, wrestling with this problem of how to respond to mass
atrocities.”
Ms. Power was in Ireland at a family reunion when the attack occurred.
She called for an emergency session of the United Nations Security
Council, knowing that she would not be back in time to attend, and
missed it, drawing sharp criticism from conservative commentators. She
cut her trip short and returned two days later.
She also took to Twitter, keeping up her pointed assault on the Assad
government. “Reports devastating: 100s dead in streets, including kids
killed by chem weapons,” one post read. “U.N. must get there fast & if true, perps must face justice.”
In Washington, Ms. Power was confirmed in her new job
by the Senate on Aug. 1 in an overwhelmingly bipartisan 87-to-10 vote.
Yet she is polarizing. Conservatives like Senator Marco Rubio, the
Florida Republican, are suspicious of remarks she made in 2002 about
Israel, since disavowed, that solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
might require “alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous
political and financial import.” The antiwar left feels betrayed by her
hawkishness.
When Russia blocked a Security Council resolution on Syria this month,
Ms. Power said flatly that “Russia continues to hold the council
hostage.”
The next day, Sept. 6, after Mr. Obama had decided to seek authorization in Congress for a military strike, she argued in a speech at the Center for American Progress
in Washington that failure to act would “give a green light to outrages
that will threaten our security and haunt our conscience.”
That sentiment flows from bearing witness to human rights atrocities. On
assignment for The New Yorker in 2004, Ms. Power was among the first to chronicle the bloody ethnic cleansing in Sudan,
where she visited refugee camps and slipped into rebel-held areas in
Darfur to see villages that had burned to the ground. As a young
freelancer in Bosnia, she reported on the systematic rape of Muslim
women.
“Samantha is somebody who believes deeply that American power flows from
our values as much as our military might, and that in the world, when
we act in accordance with our values, we strengthen our ability to
lead,” said Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former State Department official and
a Princeton professor who knows Ms. Power well.
But the reporter who once risked arrest in the Balkans and harangued
Clinton officials over late-night drinks now has a driver, a security
detail and a household staff. She lives in the ambassador’s residence at
the top of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel with her husband, Cass Sunstein, a
Harvard Law professor and former regulatory chief in the Obama
administration, and their children, Declan, 4, and Rian, 1.
Friends say she is unaccustomed to being called Madam Ambassador, or to
having people rise when she enters a room. Her @AmbassadorPower Twitter account
provides a hint of how she sees herself. “United States ambassador to
the United Nations,” it reads. “Mother, human rights defender, teacher,
writer and member of the @RedSox nation.”
Inside the clubby, protocol-laden confines of the United Nations, where
her predecessor, Susan E. Rice, had a reputation for brusqueness, Ms.
Power is viewed as “a softer personality, but with a toughness,” said
one veteran United Nations diplomat, who insisted on anonymity in
talking about a counterpart. She has been generally well received. It
does not hurt that her second book was an admiring biography of Sergio
Vieira de Mello, a much-loved United Nations diplomat who was killed in
Iraq.
“She is already kind of a celebrity there,” Mr. Luck said.
Ms. Power brought much of it with her. She once posed for Men’s Vogue
magazine in a slinky dress and four-inch heels, with bare arms and legs
and her signature mane of red hair loosely tamed. In 2009, she and Mr. Sunstein were pictured in Esquire on the squash court, wearing tennis whites, under the headline “The Fun Couple of the 21st Century.”
Her first week on the job at the United Nations offered a hint of her
agenda: she visited a summer academy for international refugees in
Manhattan, headlined a Google+ hangout with human rights activists
around the world, then flew to Los Angeles to speak to youth advocates
for Invisible Children, a group dedicated to capturing the fugitive
Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony, accused of enslaving children as soldiers.
Ms. Power, who aides say has been in daily negotiations on Syria, has
described the United Nations process she is facing as “a rare moment of
promise at the Security Council after two and a half years of deadlock
and paralysis.” If she can help break that deadlock with a vote that
results in Syria giving up its chemical weapons, foreign policy analysts
say it could help lay the groundwork for broader talks on ending
Syria’s bloody civil war.
But if she winds up with a toothless resolution, it could be an
embarrassment, setting the tone for the rest of her ambassadorship. Of
all people, she does not want to be the ambassador who becomes bogged
down in a drawn-out diplomatic negotiation while thousands of Syrians
remain at risk.
“She is facing the same dilemma that many diplomats face,” said Vali
Nasr, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International
Studies. “Except for most of them, their convictions and ideals are not
in the public domain in the form of a Pulitzer-Prize winning book.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: September 23, 2013
An earlier version of this article misstated the country in which Samantha Power was born. Ms. Power was born in England, but she emigrated to the United States from Ireland.
Rebels View Coalition Leadership Outside Syria as Detached From the Suffering
By KAREEM FAHIM
While the main opposition group’s leaders shuttle among fancy hotels,
they seem increasingly powerless to affect the course of the war.
Rebels View Coalition Leadership Outside Syria as Detached From the Suffering
By KAREEM FAHIM
Published: September 22, 2013
ISTANBUL — With empty pockets and clothes smudged with dirt, the Syrian
rebel fighter smuggled himself across the border and traveled 18 hours
by bus to plead with Syrian opposition leaders meeting in a luxury hotel
here to send help back home.
Associated Press
Members of the General Assembly of the Syrian
National Coalition, meeting in Istanbul. The group is facing criticism.
Multimedia
Related
Times Topic: Crisis in Syria
-
Syria Meets First Test of Accord on Weapons (September 21, 2013)
The fighter, Hassan Tabanja, a former electrician, needed money to
provide food, weapons and ammunition for dozens of men fighting
alongside him against the government of President Bashar al-Assad. But
after two days of scant results at the main opposition coalition’s
meeting here last weekend, Mr. Tabanja sat on the patio glaring at the
men in suits all around him.
What they had provided, he said, “will barely get me back to Syria.”
For Mr. Tabanja and many other government opponents inside Syria, the
leaders of the coalition who claim to represent them abroad have long
seemed detached from their suffering, and frugal or mysterious with the
money they have raised. As the leaders have shuttled among world
capitals and bickered in fancy hotels, they have appeared increasingly
powerless to affect the course of Syria’s war: more than 100,000 people
have died, millions have been displaced, and extremist groups are
gaining ground.
The leaders complain that their efforts to win recognition and support
have been thwarted by the world’s indifference and the competing agendas
of their own tightfisted patrons, but their words have failed to
assuage many of the people relying on them for help.
“It’s a political game,” said Mr. Tabanja, after he was shooed away by
guards surrounding Ahmad al-Jarba, the leader of the main opposition
group, the Syrian National Coalition. “They are like puppets in the hands of their enemies,” he said. “They are prolonging the presence of Assad.”
This dim view of the coalition has gained greater significance after an agreement by the United States and Russia
to rid the Syrian government of its chemical weapons stocks, a deal
that has renewed talk of an international conference aimed at ending the
war with a political settlement. The opposition leaders complained that
Mr. Assad had outmaneuvered his international adversaries to stay in
power, and they feared that their coalition would be sidelined in any
settlement.
The sense that the opposition leadership was becoming even more marginal
deepened last week during some of the fiercest rebel infighting of the
war, when fighters linked to Al Qaeda battled other rebels in the
northern Syrian town of Azaz, near the border with Turkey.
The coalition seemed like a bystander as events highlighted the growing
turmoil among the opposition fighters in areas nominally under rebel
control: after two days of silence, the coalition finally released a
statement on Friday condemning the extremist group, the Islamic State of
Iraq and Syria.
Frustrated that events were spinning beyond their control, the coalition
leaders tried to find other ways to assert their importance during the
three-day Istanbul conference last weekend. With rare unanimity, and
what appeared to be the blessing of their foreign patrons in the Persian
Gulf, they elected a prime minister,
Ahmad Tomeh, to lead what they say is an interim government. The
opposition leaders also voted to incorporate an alliance of Kurdish
parties, broadening the coalition’s support.
Some Syrian activists saw the moves as a sign of hope. “I think they are
improving, slowly,” said Yakzan Shishakly, a Syrian-American activist
who runs a humanitarian foundation and was at the Istanbul hotel. But he
added: “We are waiting to see if they make a difference. We want to see
an impact on the ground.”
Others saw a possibly desperate attempt by the coalition to be included
in any negotiations before Mr. Assad made a deal with foreign powers on
his own terms.
“Nothing has changed,” said Hassan Hassan, a columnist who writes about Syria for The National,
an English-language newspaper based in the United Arab Emirates. “It’s a
face-saving move to prove they are still relevant.”
Mr. Tomeh, the new prime minister, “seems like he means well” and wisely
focused his first statements on the need to provide relief to Syrians,
Mr. Hassan said. But it would be difficult to change Syrians’
perceptions of the coalition, which has been accused of mismanagement,
corruption and favoritism.
“The problem is not with him,” Mr. Hassan said. “It’s with the institution.”
Mr. Tomeh, a dentist and Islamist dissident from the eastern province of
Deir al-Zour, spent several years as a political prisoner and has
stayed in Syria through much of the war.
He contrasted what he called his own moderate beliefs with those of the
extremists now menacing Syria, groups that the coalition has been
accused of coddling. “Things can’t stay this way,” he said, though he
did not have a solution to the growing influence of the radical groups.
“We don’t want a military confrontation,” he said.
Mr. Tomeh said that he would form a cabinet within a month, and that the
interim government then should serve inside Syria, “to be close to the
people.” But he conceded that it might not be possible because of the
fighting, a position likely to reinforce the perception that the
coalition is aloof.
Even its critics acknowledge that the coalition faces daunting
challenges, especially in delivering aid. Although its Persian Gulf
patrons have often bypassed the group and sponsored their own fighters
and causes, the coalition announced last week that it had distributed
about $5 million in humanitarian relief, provided by Qatar, in several
Syrian provinces.
But in other places, the opposition is simply invisible.
An opposition activist in the north-central Syrian province of Raqqa,
who uses the nickname Abu Bakr, said that less than 10 percent of the
aid in the province came from the coalition. “We barely hear about
relief distribution done by them,” he said. “They don’t have offices
inside.”
Rami Jarrah, a Syrian political activist based in Turkey, said the
coalition had little contact with local councils set up to administer
rebel-held areas, or with battalions fighting under their banner.
“They are totally disconnected,” Mr. Jarrah said. “They are more of a
burden now than they’ve ever been. It seems hopeless.”
At the Istanbul conference, as the coalition members ate at the buffet,
Mr. Tabanja, the fighter, smoked a cigarette at the Burger King
downstairs. He said he failed to see how the coalition would achieve its
goals without people like him.
“If you have a roof without a base, how do you expect that to last?” he said.
copy http://www.nytimes.com
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário