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The
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was founded in 1863,
the brainchild of Jean-Henri Dunant, a Swiss businessman who had
witnessed the Battle of Solferino between France and Austria in
1859 and was shocked by the carnage that resulted from the neglect
of the wounded.
Dunant campaigned throughout Europe for a new principle, that wounded
enemy soldiers deserved the same medical treatment as troops of
one’s own nation. Five Geneva notables set up a committee in
1863 with Dunant as its secretary, the nucleus of what was to become
the International Committee of the Red Cross, and in 1864, the Swiss
government hosted a sixteen-nation international conference to recommend
improvements in medical services on the battlefield. Parties to
this first Geneva Convention agreed that hospitals, ambulances,
and medical staff should be viewed as neutral in conflict and adopted
the red cross as the symbol of the medical corps.
From its inception, the ICRC has had a unique and intimate relationship
to the Geneva Conventions. Under the 1949 Geneva Conventions and
the Additional Protocols of 1977, the ICRC has the mandate to: (a)
visit and register prisoners of war, and to deliver mail and food
parcels; (b) deliver emergency humanitarian aid to civilians in
the midst of armed conflicts; (c) trace missing persons, civilian
and military, and reunite them with their families; (d) train armed
forces to respect international humanitarian law; (e) extend and
develop the Geneva Conventions; and (f) act as go-betweens to secure
prisoner exchanges, repatriations, and release of hostages.
The ICRC now has delegations in over fifty countries, just under
half of them in Africa. Its annual budget is just over $550 million,
most of which comes from governments, chiefly the United States,
the European Union, Scandinavian countries, and Switzerland. Its
executive committee is entirely Swiss, most of its delegates are
still Swiss—though they are recruiting non-Swiss nationals.
ICRC representatives, known as “delegates” work with national
Red Cross and Red Crescent societies in the field, and most of their
local field workers come from the national societies. Institutionally,
however, the ICRC looks on the national societies warily, believing
that some of their leaderships are either corrupt or excessively
partial to the policies of the local ruling elites.
The ICRC is a unique organization in terms of its legal status under
international law, its role in establishing and upholding the Geneva
Conventions, and its history and role in bringing relief impartially
to civilian victims and the wounded of all nations. These different
roles give rise to a unique moral dilemma, whether to denounce publicly
the violators of the laws that the ICRC seeks to uphold and develop
and that provide the organization its special status, or operate
discreetly in order to preserve its ability to cross battle lines,
gain access to prisoners, and monitor their treatment. Put more
simply, the question is whether the ICRC should speak out—and
risk losing access to victims—or keep silent and become complicit
in evil.
It is a difficult call, and through most of its history the ICRC
has chosen to remain publicly silent. The organization is haunted
by its failures. Despite securing initial access to German concentration
camps as early as 1935, and despite acquiring unrivaled intelligence
about Nazi plans to exterminate the Jews, the ICRC leadership in
Geneva failed either to reveal what it knew or to make any public
protest. Courageous delegates did save Jews in Hungary and Greece,
but the organization did not secure access to the camps until 1945,
when it was too late.
This dilemma recurred in July 1992, when ICRC delegates became aware
of Serb detention camps in central Bosnia where Muslim prisoners
were being starved, tortured, and subjected to summary execution.
This time, while maintaining public silence on the matter, local
ICRC delegates provided off-the-record corroboration of information
journalists had secured from other sources, and thus helped to break
the story of the camps. There are times that the ICRC denounces
gross human rights violations, but officially the organization is
still unwilling to take public stands, for fear of compromising
its reputation for neutrality and impartiality.
As an organization dating back to the middle of the nineteenth century,
the ICRC has an immense institutional memory. It visited and transmitted
Red Cross messages and parcels for millions of POWs in two world
wars; its tracing agency helped reunite hundreds of thousands of
refugee families; its delegates have been eyewitnesses to every
major armed conflict since 1864, and its expertise in negotiating
access to all sides of a conflict is unrivaled.
Independence is its watchword. Officially, its representatives keep
their distance from other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in
the field and from the UN. During the Bosnian War, they fought tenaciously
to keep their operation separate from UN agencies, refusing convoy
escorts from UN peacekeepers, for example, on the grounds that it
would compromise their neutrality.
It is an organization which goes by the book—the Geneva Conventions,
their clauses and subclauses. This legalistic bias gives their work
precision and discipline, but there are other humanitarian organizations
(Médecins sans Frontières, for example) that are critical
of their cautious, lawyerly neutrality. But the ICRC, like its crusading
founder, also plays a central role in campaigns to “civilize”
warfare, such as banning blinding laser weapons
and antipersonnel land mines.
Since its creation, the ICRC has been trying to stay true to its
mission of being “first in and last out” of any war zone.
In the increasingly crowded and competitive field of international
humanitarian relief, that helps it stand apart. This has sometimes
paid off. During the NATO air strikes in Bosnian Serb territory
in August 1995, all the NGOs from NATO countries were evacuated.
The ICRC remained and was able to provide humanitarian assistance
to the hundreds of thousands of Serb civilians forcibly cleared
from the Krajinas by Croat and Muslim forces.
In August 1998, Tomahawk missiles slammed into an Afghan facility
the U.S. government said was a terrorist training camp. In the streets
of the Afghan capital, Kabul, crowds tried to take over the American
embassy; shots were fired at foreigners and two aid workers were
killed. The UN evacuated all its personnel from Afghanistan to nearby
Pakistan. So did all the NGOs. Only the ICRC remained. Thirty of
its delegates stayed on, feeding the war widows of Kabul, keeping
the military hospitals open, fitting prosthetic limbs on child amputees,
and trying to keep their lines of communication open to all of the
factions in Afghanistan’s brutal civil war.
The ICRC sometimes pays the price for its staying on. On December
17, 1996, in an ICRC hospital near Grozny, Chechnya, masked assailants
scaled the wall of the compound and using pistols fitted with silencers
executed six Red Cross personnel in their sleep. But the ICRC still
refuses to post armed guards inside hospitals or as escorts for
their convoys.
(See Red Cross/Red Crescent
emblem; training in international
humanitarian law.)
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