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Shrink the Change

I heard one question more than any other during my time as UN ambassador: “But what can one person do?”

Even committed, motivated people felt overwhelmed by the gravity of challenges in the world, from climate change to the refugee crisis to the global crackdown on human rights. I worried about individuals experiencing a kind of doom loop in which, because they could not single-handedly fix these large problems, they would end up opting to do nothing. Whenever my own thoughts about the state of the world headed toward a similarly bleak impasse, I would brainstorm with my team about how we might “shrink the change” we hoped to see.

I had come across this phrase in a book called Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, by professors Chip and Dan Heath. Cass had given me the book when I worked at the White House, and I had ordered many copies for my US government colleagues. The Heath brothers stressed that, counterintuitively, big problems “are most often solved by a sequence of small solutions, sometimes over weeks, sometimes over decades.” “Shrink the change” became a kind of motto for me and my team, along with President Obama’s version of the point: “Better is good.”

Sometimes human achievements were big and sweeping—like helping end the Ebola epidemic. But more often, the changes we as individuals were able to make in the world were smaller. “Even if we can’t solve the whole problem,” I would say, “surely there is something we can do.”

FROM THE BEGINNING OF MY TIME at the UN, securing the release of political prisoners seemed like an achievable and worthwhile initiative. I used private meetings with foreign ministers, public statements, and social media to call for the release of individuals being held around the world for “crimes” like exposing officials’ lawbreaking or advocating for free speech.

Efforts like this naturally rankled foreign governments, so I was fortunate to have a supportive colleague in Secretary Kerry. When a foreign minister called him to complain about “Samantha’s tweets,” Kerry would occasionally vent to his staff that I was making his job harder. But we talked and emailed several times a week, and we met whenever we were both in Washington. He never urged me to temper my criticisms of abusive governments.

When I once raised with him the Egyptian foreign minister’s objections to my advocacy, for example, Kerry just rolled his eyes. “Soon they will have no one left to lock up,” he noted, and that was the end of it. My style was not his style, but we had an unspoken understanding: Kerry would try to influence governments his way, generally through private channels, while I would conduct quiet diplomacy and exert public pressure.

In September of 2015, Chinese president Xi Jinping planned to hold a summit at the United Nations to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the 1995 World Conference on Women that had been hosted in Beijing. Xi’s conference provided an occasion to highlight an inconvenient fact: women’s voices were still being silenced in many countries, including China. Indeed, recently, the Chinese government had even locked up a group of women for having the temerity to campaign against sexual harassment. These women, who became known as the Beijing Five, had only been released after sustained international pressure.

Knowing that the Chinese-led “Beijing+20” summit would of course ignore the plight of the world’s female political prisoners, my team and I decided to use the unique spotlight of a major global gathering to show solidarity with imprisoned women and to pressure governments to release them. These efforts coalesced into a campaign called #Freethe20, through which we aimed to help free twenty female political prisoners from thirteen countries.^* Our list not only included prisoners in countries with which the administration had adversarial relations (like Venezuela and Syria), but also women incarcerated by governments with which the United States wanted to maintain strong ties (like China and Egypt). This balance made our stance on human rights more credible, and it comported with my view that our important relationships could withstand human rights pressure.

For each of the women we planned to profile, we reached out to their families, directly or through human rights organizations, to gauge whether they wanted their wife, sister, or daughter included. But we also needed clearances from numerous US officials, including the ambassadors posted to the countries where the women were jailed. Some resisted, worrying that a prisoner’s inclusion on our list would add unnecessary tension to our dealings with the country. Even with Kerry’s support, we only received sign-off for the final woman after I had put out a press release announcing the campaign’s launch for the next day.

Twenty days before the Beijing+20 conference, in front of the diplomatic press corps at the State Department, I shared the story of the first prisoner, a courageous forty-four-year-old Chinese lawyer named Wang Yu. In addition to representing the Beijing Five, Wang had defended Ilham Tohti, the Uighur scholar jailed for highlighting the Chinese government’s abuses against its brutalized Uighur minority. Now Wang herself was imprisoned for “subversion of state power,” which carried a potential life sentence.

Thanks to the Mission’s human rights adviser Kelly Razzouk, Kurtis Cooper, and others on our press team, we unearthed unforgettable details about each woman and made full use of social media to publicize their cases. Although our emphasis was on each individual prisoner, the women’s experiences cast light on the larger judicial systems that abetted injustice: the coopted judges that presided over their trials, the draconian laws used to sentence them, the inhumane conditions in which they were imprisoned, and the persecuted organizations and movements for which they worked.

Every day for twenty days, I posted a video to Facebook in which I described the featured woman’s work and the charges against her. Then we hung a jumbo picture of the woman in the large glass windows in the lobby of the US Mission, directly across the street from the entrance to UN Headquarters. Dignitaries attending the UN General Assembly, as well as anyone walking down First Avenue, had little choice but to pass this expanding series of portraits.

I reached out to Kelly Ayotte, the Republican senator from New Hampshire, who agreed to introduce a resolution in support of the campaign. The resolution, cosponsored by the then-twenty female US senators, Republican and Democrat, called for the immediate release of the prisoners. “Our message is simple,” the senators said in a press release. “World leaders and foreign governments . . . should empower women, not imprison them.”

On the day I hung the poster for Wang Yu, China’s Ambassador to the UN, Liu Jieyi, telephoned me with “an urgent message” from Beijing. I had a respectful relationship with Liu, but he sounded mystified by what I was doing. He explained that Beijing saw our campaign as an aggressive act. He cautioned that continuing would not contribute positively to the atmosphere between our countries, and he urged me to reconsider.

I said I understood his government’s perspective—and assured him that releasing Wang and China’s other political prisoners in time for them to participate in the summit would do wonders to improve that atmosphere.

Soon after, I profiled Ta Phong Tan, a forty-seven-year-old Vietnamese blogger arrested in 2011. Tan, a former police officer, had written about corruption in Vietnam’s judicial system and was serving a ten-year prison sentence for publishing “anti-state propaganda.” Her mother had died after setting herself on fire to protest her daughter’s prolonged detention.

Not long after we publicized Tan’s story, I received a call from Vietnam’s UN ambassador. She also expressed her government’s displeasure with our decision to feature Tan and another Vietnamese prisoner named Bui Thi Minh Hang. But a few days later, we learned that Tan was going to be freed, and Kelly soon emailed me a photo of her landing in Los Angeles to start a new life.

I was amazed. When we developed the concept for the campaign, I did not expect that many of the women would actually be released. Nonetheless, I thought it worthwhile to make repressive governments pay at least a reputational cost for their actions. Yet our modest effort already seemed to be producing some tangible results.

Sanaa Seif was a twenty-one-year-old Egyptian arrested the previous year for peacefully demonstrating without a permit. Within forty-eight hours of featuring her, Kelly informed me that Sanaa had been pardoned—along with ninety-nine others. At our daily morning meeting, Kelly arrived carrying the photo of Sanaa that we had hung in the window of the Mission. Only now, the image had the word “RELEASED” stamped in large red letters across the bottom.

We would never know precisely how our campaign impacted various governments’ decisions to release the women. Our efforts only supplemented ongoing advocacy by their families and lawyers. But news of a prisoner’s release was exhilarating to US officials who had labored to secure the sign-off from a reluctant embassy or who had hunted down compelling details to share with the public. Unambiguous victories in government were rare. And we were all moved to know that these women, whom we felt we knew, would be reunited with their families.

In an atmosphere of repression and democratic backsliding around the world, I found it gratifying to focus less on the overall human rights “recession”—an abstraction that could be paralyzing—and more on specific people. Once freed, these women would again be able to raise their voices on behalf of important causes.

“We are up to six,” Kelly told me three months after we launched the campaign.

“Now we are at twelve,” she said in August of 2016, following Wang Yu’s release.

By the time I left government in January of 2017, fourteen of the twenty women we profiled had been freed. Two more would be released from jail the following month.

We had made only a microscopic dent in a colossal problem. But as I said to Kelly, “For each one of these women, and those around them, it is the universe.”

THE #FREETHE20 CAMPAIGN AFFIRMED what I had seen during my years in journalism: people were more likely to respond when they could focus on a specific individual—like David Rohde when he disappeared in Bosnia.

Government officials were no different. During the Ebola crisis, Jackson Niamah, the Liberian health worker, had reached typically stoic diplomats with his chilling prophecy that “if the international community does not stand up, we will all be wiped out.” Likewise, we had held a succession of meetings highlighting ISIS’s brutality before I invited Nadia Murad, a twenty-one-year-old Yazidi woman, to appear before the Council. When she described how ISIS had executed her mother and six of her nine brothers and then forced her into sexual slavery, her testimony drove home in a visceral way the savagery that the US-led coalition was working to end.^*

When ISIS began disseminating propaganda showing executions of Iraqis and Syrians they suspected of being gay, I approached Vitaly, with whom I usually found common ground on confronting ISIS. But when I raised the possibility of collaborating in the Security Council on an effort to oppose anti-gay acts of terror, he replied, “Not possible.” No matter how vocal the Russian government was about terrorism, when the victims were gay, it preferred to remain silent. And it had long used its clout to ensure the Council stayed silent as well.

Because Chile had made such strides domestically on LGBT rights, I asked its ambassador, Cristián Barros, to join the United States in convening the Council’s first ever discussion of violence against LGBT people. Cristián sighed, knowing how upset some countries would be if we proceeded. Then, with a twinkle in his eye, he said, “We will do it, Samantha. We will be all alone, but we will be there.”

It turned out we were not alone—around two hundred foreign diplomats participated in the informal Council meeting. Everyone sat in sober silence as we heard from two LGBT witnesses who had been terrorized by ISIS. One was a twenty-eight-year-old Syrian named Subhi Nahas, who sat next to me as he detailed the beatings he had endured, his harrowing escape to Turkey, and his eventual resettlement in San Francisco. The other was an Iraqi in his mid-twenties who was so terrified of being hunted down that he used a pseudonym (“Adnan”) and spoke to the Council by telephone from an undisclosed location in the Middle East.

Subhi’s and Adnan’s testimonies made clear that ISIS was tapping into a deep societal hatred. Even once the terrorists were defeated, gay people would not feel secure in Iraq and Syria. Still, we had provided two young men a visible platform to tell their stories and assert their dignity. Given the heavy media coverage of the session, their words would be heard far from New York—possibly by an immigration official adjudicating an LGBT person’s asylum claim, possibly even in the deepest reaches of Iraq and Syria, where many of their friends remained in hiding.

A few days later, I received an email from “Adnan.” Written in English, it read:

I was honored to take part in that historic event, it was the greatest thing I do in my life so far . . . Words cannot describe how much I am thankful to you. And I believe that I am conveying the thoughts of thousands of people in the middle east.

He signed his email with his real name, which I had not known.

Nine months later, a gunman who pledged loyalty to ISIS murdered forty-nine people at Orlando’s Pulse dance club, a popular nightspot for the city’s LGBT community. The massacre was the worst terrorist attack on US soil since September 11^th. Digesting the news, I tried to ward off the desire to throw my hands up in disgust at the hatred in the world. Instead, I called David Pressman and said I wanted to find some way to respond in the Security Council.

We both knew that the horror of the Pulse attack might be enough to get reluctant countries in the UN to put their biases aside—even if only temporarily. After the surprising turnout for our informal Security Council session with Subhi and Adnan, we decided to test how far other countries were willing to go in opposing anti-gay violence. “I think this is the time,” I said.

David, who had been playing in a local park with his twin toddler sons when I called, left his partner and kids and headed straight to the UN. After a day of furious diplomacy in New York and in capitals around the world, the UN Security Council, joined by Russia and Egypt (whose representatives did not want to be seen blocking a condemnation of ISIS), agreed to a statement that “condemned in the strongest terms the terrorist attack in Orlando . . . targeting persons as a result of their sexual orientation.”

When David and I had arrived at the UN, we had fought simply to include the phrase “vulnerable populations” in Security Council resolutions—which Russia rejected as code for LGBT people. Now, for the first time in history, the Security Council had condemned attacks on the basis of sexual orientation, establishing a standard that could subsequently be invoked by persecuted LGBT people in any country.

Several days later, I convened the “Core Group” of UN ambassadors who had worked together on LGBT rights. Instead of meeting at the UN, I suggested we gather at the legendary Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. Tree Sequoia, Stonewall’s bartender for decades, greeted our group of sixteen ambassadors, recalling what it was like when Stonewall had been raided by the New York City police in 1969. This incident sparked protests, helping launch a national gay rights movement that few people had anticipated.

Tree escorted us to a dark wood-paneled back room that reeked of the sour smell of hops. After the ambassadors had taken their seats, I kicked off the discussion by taking note of the fact that the same police force that had once raided Stonewall now participated in the New York City Pride March.

“You never know,” I said. “We can only do what we can do. But one day, someone might look back on the brave testimonies of two gay men from the Middle East at the Security Council or one sentence in a UN statement condemning attacks on the LGBT community as the first step on a long road to something far more meaningful.”

The other ambassadors seemed fired up. Some had been nervous about whether to pursue the creation of a UN position dedicated to protecting LGBT people. But at the Stonewall Inn, we pledged to forge ahead.

Exactly two weeks later, over the fierce resistance of the same coalition that had opposed granting benefits to the UN’s LGBT staff, we secured the creation of the first UN position to monitor and publicly report on LGBT rights around the world. Human Rights Watch called it “a historic victory for the human rights of anyone at risk of discrimination and violence because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.”

I viewed it as a very small step—one that built on the small steps before it.

THE ANNUAL UN GENERAL ASSEMBLY gathering in September of 2016 was a bittersweet occasion. Advising President Obama, I had attended and helped shape each of his seven previous appearances at these meetings. This would be his last.

A few days before Obama’s arrival, New York City workers began erecting barriers to close off roads near the UN. As she had every year during this event, María struggled to navigate the five heavily policed blocks that separated the Waldorf and Rían’s preschool. And Cass again resolved to remain in Cambridge for the week, to avoid being manhandled by security as he tried to reach our apartment.

I would not miss these disruptions after I left the UN. But when heads of state gathered for the General Assembly, I still could not shake the sense that together—as Cass’s dad had written from San Francisco in 1945—we could accomplish something. This potential had not been realized nearly as often as I had hoped, but I would miss assembling coalitions to combat the world’s hardest problems, as well as that tingling sense of possibility.

On one of the last nights of UNGA week, I had dinner with a foreign minister who had also become a friend. I had worked closely with him over the years and was grateful for the tough votes he had instructed his UN ambassador to take. He had a marvelous sense of humor that most ministers did not display, and I had grown very fond of him.

We spent the dinner discussing China, Syria, the upcoming US presidential election, and his country’s ethnic tensions. Then, toward the end of the meal, I offhandedly mentioned that I had gotten permission from New York City for the UN’s human rights office to paint in rainbow colors the First Avenue crosswalk that many VIPs would use to enter the UN. The Dutch ambassador had floated this idea during our Stonewall meeting. Now, foreign ministers and heads of state were traversing our rainbow “Path to Equality” as they walked into an institution that had only recently recognized LGBT rights.

For a split second, I thought I caught a flash of interest on the minister’s face, but he quickly changed the subject. Despite our friendship, I had never asked him about his personal life.

As we got up to say good night, I heard myself whisper in his ear, “Any chance you would like to come see the crosswalk?”

Suddenly, he broke out in a broad, mischievous smile. In that moment, he saw that I knew and understood what he still could not advertise in his own country.

At 12:30 a.m. on a breezy September night, the minister walked slowly across the rainbow crosswalk toward the UN, where the flags of his country, my country, and all the countries of the world flew each day.

Thanks to the streetlamp, I was able to see his expression as he approached my side of First Avenue. He bore a look I had not seen before. It combined relief, delight, and a deep calm.

It was the look of someone being fully himself.