US: Samantha Power Nominated New UN Ambassador by President Barack Obama

by AfroAmerica Network on June 6, 2013

Dr. Samantha Power, the renown human and women rights advocate was nominated by US President Barack Obama today June 5, 2013 to be the UN Ambassador. If confirmed she will take over from Dr. Susan Rice, who was appointed US National Security Advisor , replacing Tom Donilon.

(Photo: Jennifer Kanyamibwa, Rutgers Institute for Women Leadership Scholar and Rutgers Douglass Women College Student Council President introducing Samantha Power. 2008. Source. Rutgers University).

Dr Samantha, a scolar, journalist, human rights advocate, Pulitzer Prize winner and the 2008 Susan and Michael J. Angelides Lecturer at the prestigious Rutgers Institute for Women Leadership, is not new in high level US politics.

She has been close to US President Barack Obama since he was a senator. In 2005, she took a year off from teaching at Harvard University and joined President Obama’s office as a foreign policy fellow. Once in office, President Obama appointed Dr. Samantha Power to serve on National Security Council as the special assistant to the president and Senior Director running the Office of Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights. According to Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth, “She [Samantha Power was] clearly the foremost voice for human rights within the White House, and she [had] Obama’s ear (see here).”

Human rights issues have been the persistent hallmark of the career of the 42-year old Samantha Power. Born in Dublin, Ireland and raised in the United States, she has extensively travelled the world as a journalist, witnessing the “evil at its worst”, according to President Obama. As a correspondent for Time Magazine and The New Yorker, after graduating from Yale and Harvard Law School, she reported on the major humanitarian crises of the late 20th Century and beginning 21st Century: Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan.

In 2002, she published a book about her experiences ”A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,” that won the Pullitzer Prize and, allegedly, was the basis of the interest in her by the US Senator Barack Obama.

In 2008, while introducing Dr. Samantha Power to a full-house at the Busch Campus Center, Rutgers student and IWL Leadership Scholar and later President of Rutgers Douglass Women College Student Council, Jennifer Kanyamibwa, whose family suffered in the Rwandan tragedy described in Samantha Power’s book, emphasized the impact of Dr. Samantha Power’s work on her life and “gave special thanks to Power for her inspiring work to inform the world about the tragedy (see here).”

Samantha Power has described herself as a “genocide chick.”

She needs to be confirmed by the US Senate before taking office and according to analysists, she will be. Once confirmed, she have to deal with very pressing issues, such as crises and humanitarian tragedies in Syria, Democratic Republic of the Congo(DRC), Central African Republic, Mali, Somalia, and Darfur.