きっかけは1989

今年6月に国連大使に指名されたサマンサ・パワーさんが今月のVogueに取り上げられていました。大変落ち着いた語り口ですが1970年生まれなのでまだ43才とお若い方です。

価値観重視、米外交に反映も＝人権・人道問題に敏感−新補佐官・大使
（2013/06/06-15:39）
　【ワシントン時事】オバマ米大統領が安全保障担当の大統領補佐官に任命したスーザン・ライス国連大使と、ライス氏の後任に指名したサマンサ・パワー氏は、人権・人道問題に敏感な積極介入論者として知られる。２人が米外交・安保チームの要職に就くことで、オバマ政権２期目の外交が価値観重視の性格を強めていく可能性もある。
　「同じような危機に再び直面したら、劇的な行動に賛成すると誓った。必要なら身を焼かれてもいい」。ルワンダ虐殺（１９９４年）の際、クリントン政権高官だったライス氏が２００１年、パワー氏とのインタビューで当時の対応を振り返った時の言葉だ。
　ライス氏はルワンダの惨状を傍観した自らの振る舞いを悔い、ジャーナリストだったパワー氏も米国の姿勢に疑問を抱いていた。２人は１０年後の１１年、オバマ政権高官として、市民の保護を名目にしたリビア空爆を実現させ、カダフィ政権崩壊に大きな役割を果たした。米国がライス補佐官−パワー大使のラインで、人権や市民的自由の擁護を国際社会に訴える場面は増えるとみられる。

Vogueはファッション雑誌なので、この記事では政治的な話はそれほど深入りしていません。いつものようにAnnie Leibovitzが写真を撮っています（笑）この人道的な問題に関心を抱いて、取り組むようになったこれまでの人生を振り返っているものです。

Samantha Power Takes on the Job of a Lifetime as Ambassador to the U.N.
by Robert Sullivan | photographed by Annie Leibovitz

1989年といえばベルリンの壁やソ連の崩壊など大きな歴史的転換点ですが、彼女は民主化運動を弾圧した中国の天安門事件にショックを受けたことがきっかけだったと述べています。

After high school, Power attended Yale, where she fed her sports obsession, playing squash, covering volleyball for the school paper, and scoring a slot on WYBC’s radio program, Sports Spotlight. “It was me and all the guys, and I had a crush on the head of the little, mini sports department,” Power says. She would likely be at ESPN today, except that in the summer of 1989, while interning at an Atlanta TV station, she happened to see a raw satellite feed that showed Chinese government forces cracking down on protesters. When she returned to Yale, she had transitioned. “I had a nascent idealism,” she explains. “I became a history major and just got very interested in what was going on.”

その後、ボスニア紛争やルワンダの虐殺などを経験して、A Problem from Hellという本に結実するのですが、Anne-Marie Slaughterさんがハーバード大学での彼女の教授だったんですね。



What was going on in 1992, the year she graduated, was the Bosnian War. The U.N., with a mandate to keep peace, was standing around as Serbian forces killed Bosnian Muslims by the thousands. Power managed to get herself to Sarajevo and scrambled for work, eventually becoming a freelance war correspondent. “She was eager to learn and just wicked smart,” says Laura Pitter, senior counterterrorism researcher for Human Rights Watch, who had arrived six months earlier. The two shared armored cars, used car batteries to power laptops, and lived in Sarajevo’s infamously bombed-out Holiday Inn. Power eventually began stringing for The Washington Post. “It was just brutal,” says Power, who was witnessing the U.N. operating in the world for the first time. “It was just like, ‘Why are you letting these people die? I mean, your soldiers are there.’ ”

Meanwhile, yet another genocide had occurred, in Rwanda, in which an estimated 800,000 people had been killed. The U.S. government’s failure to intervene set Power to writing A Problem from Hell, her 2002 book that traces the history of American foreign policy since World War II and explores U.S. government inaction in the face of genocide. Anne-Marie Slaughter, then Power’s professor at Harvard Law School and later her Obama administration colleague, remembers Power’s being consumed with the book, which started as a paper. “She did something no one else had done and really made us see that issue differently,” says Slaughter, who is now president of the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank.

A Problem from Hell, which would become a best-seller and win Power her Pulitzer, made her not just a foreign policy wonk of high renown but a kind of star among young people. “She has had more influence on the career paths of young women in public policy schools around the world than almost any other single figure,” says her friend Michael Ignatieff, the former leader of Canada’s Liberal Party, who teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School and the Munk School of Global Affairs in Toronto. “I’ve got students who say ‘I want to go into human rights because of A Problem from Hell.’ ”

A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (2013/12/24) Samantha Power 商品詳細を見る

Vogueの記事で積読状態になっていたA Problem from Hellを読みましたが、トルコのアルメニア人の虐殺からアメリカという国は人道的介入に及び腰であったと主張する本で、カンボジアやイラクなど各時代でのアメリカの対応を、Genocideという言葉を生み出したRaphael Lemnikの取り組みを縦軸にしてまとめた大変スケールの大きい本でした。ピューリツァー賞の受賞もうなづけるものです。

オバマ大統領とは上院議員だった頃からの付き合いで２００８年の選挙でも外交アドバイザーで参加しています。ホワイトハウスではAtrocities Prevention Boardの設立にも深く関わったようですね。

She became a congressional staffer after a now-famous dinner with then-Senator Barack Obama, which, as is often told, involved the senator’s calling her after reading her book. In Power’s version, Senator Obama showed up at a steak house purely on a staffer’s urging. “He was late and just seemed completely not psyched to be there and seemed like, ‘Why did I have this meeting set up again?’ ” she remembers. But their chemistry was instantaneous, and a few hours later, she was signed on. By 2008, she was foreign policy adviser on a winning presidential campaign.

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After the election, President Obama quietly appointed her his special assistant and senior director for multilateral affairs and human rights, and Power went on to establish herself as a driven policy person who formed, at the president’s request, a commission called the Atrocities Prevention Board—an attempt to build a human rights perspective into U.S. foreign policy. She also became known among her colleagues for producing two children—her son, Declan, born in 2009, and daughter, Rían, in 2012—while somehow keeping up with White House demands. Gayle Smith, a senior director at the NSC, describes her as that person who’d just barely arrive at the morning meeting, looking for a pen, and yet was on it, seemingly balanced, or as balanced as anyone can be. “She has a great sense of the ridiculous,” says Smith. “The sheer ludicrousness of the kinds of hours one keeps here. . . . I mean, how do you deal with one of the most pressing issues that may be unfolding on the planet when your kid just threw up on his playmate?”

これだけの激務をこなしながら二人の小さなお子さんを育てるのは大変でしょう。やはりwork life balanceの難しさを語っています。オバマ政権が終わる頃には学校に通い始めるようですが、公務は少し休むのかもしれませんね。

Power’s new role, maybe even more than her last, doesn’t allow for many of these family moments. “The work-life balance is the thing I struggle with most,” she says. “When this job came available, it was such an incredible opportunity to work so closely with the president. But everything’s a cost-benefit, right? And the benefits of this and the influence of this job are sufficiently great that there were more costs I was willing to take on the family side.” As committed as she is to her new post, she can see the end of President Obama’s term. “I think about it every day, when Rían will be four and Declan will be eight. It’s just my sense of when a different kind of prioritization can kick in.”

VogueのAnnie Leibovitzが撮影した写真にあったキャプションが以下です。

Liberal hawk, human-rights champion, mother of two—Samantha Power takes on the job of a lifetime as America’s ambassador to the U.N.

Liberal hawkという言葉が象徴しているように、軍事力を行使するという面においてはブッシュ＝チェイニーと何ら変わりがないことになってしまわないか心配です。もちろん、彼女の本を読むと人道的介入は不可欠だと思わされるのですが、だからといって軍事力を積極的に行使していいのかは自分としては躊躇してしまいます。ええ、独裁や弾圧がいけないとは思っていますけど。。。Shutdown騒動があったようにその前にそんな軍事作戦を実行する資金がないというアメリカの現実が立ちはだかっているので、歯止めはあるのですが。。。

A Problem from Hellは国連英検に興味がある方にはオススメの本です。お固い国際関係の本とは違って、読ませる本です。

Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin (2013/06/24) Raphael Lemkin 商品詳細を見る

Raphael Lemkinについては彼の自伝についてWSJの書評がありました。

The Father of Genocide
Outraged by the Ottomans' massacres of Armenians, a young Polish lawyer pushed to have the crime of genocide enshrined in law.
By YASCHA MOUNK
July 23, 2013 6:23 p.m. ET