The Red Cross Movement

Myths, practices and turning points

Neville Wylie, Melanie Oppenheimer, James Crossland

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526133533
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Relaciones internacionales

For over 150 years, the Red Cross has brought succour to the world's needy, from sick and wounded soldiers on the battlefield, to political detainees, to those suffering the effects of natural disasters. The world's oldest and most preeminent humanitarian movement, the relevance and status of the Red Cross Movement today is as high as it has ever been.Reimagining and re-evaluating the Red Cross as a global institutional network, this volume charts the rise of the Red Cross and analyses the emergence of humanitarianism through a series of turning points, practices and myths. The contributors explore the three unique elements that make up the Red Cross Movement: the International Committee of the Red Cross, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent formerly known as the League of Red Cross Societies (both based in Geneva) and the 192 national societies. With chapters by leading scholars and researchers from Europe, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and America, the book offers a timely account of this unique, complex and contested organisation.

1

The Red Cross Movement: Continuities, changes and challenges

Neville Wylie, Melanie Oppenheimer and James Crossland

For over 150 years, the ‘Red Cross’ has brought succour to the world’s needy – from sick and wounded soldiers on the battlefield to political detainees, internally displaced people, and those suffering from the effects of natural disasters – as well as having played a major role in a range of global developments in public health, such as blood transfusion. The world’s pre-eminent humanitarian movement, its relevance and status today are as high as they have ever been in its long history. At the time of writing, headlines carry news of the efforts of the Indonesian Red Cross – Palang Merah Indonesia – to bring aid and assistance to those communities affected by the most recent natural disaster to hit the country, the Krakatoa eruption and tsunami that struck Sunda Strait on 22 December 2018. That these terrible events are not the only crises demanding the Red Cross’s attention is clear from the website of the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent (IFRC), which gives prominence to the work carried out for the inhabitants of Sulawesi and Lombok, still rocked by aftershocks from the earthquake, tsunami and mudslides that struck in recent months; the ongoing operations in the typhoon-affected areas of the Philippines; and to those in Nigeria, where a quarter of a million people are at risk after floods inundated a half of the country. The Federation’s counterparts in the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) are busy in the world’s war and conflict zones: in Syria and Iraq; in the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo; in Chad, Yemen, Somalia, South Sudan and Myanmar; and in seventy-one other countries around the globe. The Red Cross, first used as an emblem to identify and protect civilian volunteers tending injured Prussian and Danish soldiers on the battlefield at Dybbøl on 24 April 1864, has become one of the world’s most recognisable symbols. The movement it spawned is older than most countries on the planet, and includes, at the last count, 192 national societies, comprising 165,822 local branches with 473,513 staff and over 11.5 million volunteers.¹

If the scale and longevity of the Red Cross distinguish it from other non-governmental organisations or humanitarian networks, so too does its approach to humanitarian affairs. Its stated mission is to ‘alleviate human suffering, protect life and health, and uphold human dignity, especially during armed conflicts and other emergencies’.² Grounding its actions on seven fundamental principles, the Red Cross has historically depicted its activities as a specific form of charity through humanitarianism, extending, as Jean Pictet, the author of the principles suggested, ‘its merciful action to the whole of humanity’.³ Furthermore, its interventions are governed by the principle of neutrality. This has led it to insist on obtaining agreement from all parties before deploying its delegates in the field, and operating without reference to the underlying injustices causing peoples’ suffering whenever and wherever it occurs. As Jean Pictet memorably put it, like the swimmer who advances in the water but who drowns if he swallows too much of it, the Red Cross seeks to reckon with politics without becoming a part of it. The approach is in marked contrast to the methods taken by many other humanitarian organisations, whose operations are often framed by the principles of non-partisanship or solidarity, and who not only alleviate suffering wherever it is found but also explicitly bear witness to the suffering and injustices uncovered. The Red Cross might, then, be the world’s most distinguishable humanitarian movement, but it represents a distinctive ‘brand’ of humanitarianism: a brand that both shapes the nature of its activity and operates as a powerful factor in motivating individuals, whether staff or volunteers, to engage in the movement as ‘Red Crossers’. Indeed, their activities are often described as ‘Red Crossing’.

Commentators and those within the organisation frequently use the term ‘Movement’ to describe the Red Cross, and we adopt it in this volume. In truth, though, as a descriptor, the word’s value and appeal lies principally in its vagueness, its lack of precision. The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement is governed by its own set of statutes, and consists of three discrete elements. The first element is the ICRC itself, the origins of which lie in the meeting of a five-man committee in Geneva in 1863, whose members were concerned with how best to protect medical staff and the wounded from attack on battlefields. This concern led to the drafting of the First Geneva Convention in 1864, an act that both satisfied its members’ desire to secure an international agreement to protect the sick and wounded, and started a process of mission creep that led to the ICRC becoming the ‘architect’ and ‘guardian’ of international humanitarian law (IHL) in the decades that followed.⁴ Today, the ICRC’s remit for protecting victims of war is vast, and far exceeds the legal mandate set out in international treaties. Through both IHL development, and humanitarian acts in myriad conflicts, the ICRC has developed into a protector of soldiers, medics, civilian victims of conflict, prisoners of war and political prisoners. Of the 756,158 detained persons visited by ICRC delegates in 2013 only 2,818 were formally protected under the Third (prisoners of war) and Fourth (civilian) Geneva Conventions of 1949.⁵ As it has expanded into these new fields of humanitarian assistance, however, the ICRC has also had to avoid encroaching on State interests, by maintaining its political neutrality and operational impartiality, and insisting that its actions are acceptable to authorities on all sides of conflicts.⁶ This delicate balancing act between politics and humanitarian action in war has never been easy, and some episodes – the Holocaust and Biafran War are good examples – left the institution badly scarred. Managing its relations with the federal authorities in Berne has likewise frequently tested the institution.⁷ The problem has, however, been compounded in recent years by the need to accommodate human-rights laws into its war-focused practices. This has led to the ICRC attempting to clarify ‘customary practice’ in the application of IHL, and updating Pictet’s 1964 commentaries on the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, in the hope, one suspects, of encouraging conformity.⁸

The second element of the Red Cross Movement is the IFRC Societies. Created in the wake of the First World War by the national societies of the United States, Britain, France, Italy and Japan, the League of Red Cross Societies was officially formed in May 1919. Despite having a fundamentally different vision from that of the all Swiss ICRC – that of mobilising the combined strength of the national societies, and wedded to a concept of humanity that extended beyond zones of armed conflict and into everyday struggles of the peacetime world – its birth created uneasy and at times unwelcome competition for the ICRC.⁹ Responding to the misery and destruction wrought by the ‘war to end all wars’, and buoyed by the spectacular growth of national Red Cross societies as a result of the war, the vision of its founder, American banker turned philanthropist Henry Pomeroy Davison, was to create a ‘real International Red Cross’. This would be a humanitarian version of the League of Nations that could bring together the ‘Red Cross organisations of the world’, to continue their work in peacetime.¹⁰ The focus would be on social, medical, educational and peacetime relief initiatives, with the League of Red Cross Societies playing a facilitating and coordinating role, creating an exemplary global humanitarian community. Using the network of Red Cross national societies, medical research and science would combine to extend Red Cross work into peacetime, to prevent disease and create public-health programmes around the world. Despite its controversial birth and the initial curtailment of its original lofty ideals through illness, death and lack of funds in the early years, the League survived and, in time, thrived. Its role during the interwar years was to foster and promote transnational initiatives within the Red Cross network, to standardise, coordinate and promote health care, nursing, the Junior Red Cross, and disaster relief. The Second World War and the process of decolonisation that followed in its wake led to a huge increase in the number of new national societies. Changing its name, from the League of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in October 1983, and again to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in November 1991, this body also has some oversight of basic governance structures in national societies.¹¹

The power of the Red Cross Movement, however, lies in the national societies themselves. This global network of 192 diverse and culturally specific societies – the most recent addition to which being Bhutan, which joined the movement in December 2019 – embodies Henri Dunant’s ambition of taking the organisation of relief out of the hands of the military, tapping the energy and dynamism of civilian volunteers on a global scale.¹² This adherence to Dunant’s vision is still very much in evidence, even if, over time, many national societies have loosened their original voluntary anchor and, for the sake of efficiency, professionalism and other external factors, adopted the status of quasi-State organisations. Others are completely controlled by their governments, defined as being ‘auxiliaries’ to the ‘public authorities in the humanitarian field’.¹³ The journey that brought the Movement to this position was a long and winding one. With few exceptions, the national societies of the late nineteenth century existed principally to supplement the work of over-stretched army medical departments, becoming crucial cogs in the war machines of many states.¹⁴ By the turn of the century, this nexus between wartime service and Red Cross work had been solidified, albeit with states party to the revision of the Geneva Convention of 1906 making sure to restrict the freedom of action of Red Cross workers and ensure that they were given no special status in IHL. Beyond the battlefields, however, the Movement was given more room to grow by governments that saw the value of Red Cross volunteers as responders to peacetime natural disasters and disease epidemics. This recognition of the national societies’ value in contributing to the peacetime health of states and their citizens was recognised in 1919, when the Covenant of the League of Nations called on member states to ‘encourage and promote the establishment and co-operation of duly authorised voluntary national Red Cross organisations having as purposes the improvement of health, the prevention of disease, and the mitigation of suffering’.¹⁵

Notwithstanding the heterogeneity of its membership, as part of a single movement, the constituent parts of the Red Cross all adhere, at least in theory, to the seven fundamental principles of the Red Cross Movement. The principles – humanity, impartiality, neutrality, independence, voluntary service, unity and universality – emerged out of the confusion and debacle of the Second World War, and were adopted in Vienna in 1965.¹⁶ It is important to note that the Movement went without this core set of principles for a long time. One of the principles most commonly associated with the Red Cross, neutrality, was absent from the founding discussions in 1863, and took time to gain traction.¹⁷ This was not for want of trying. In 1875 Gustav Moynier, the long-time President of the ICRC (1864–1910), suggested four principles to guide the Movement’s actions. In times of peace, the Red Cross Societies were to prepare for future emergencies, sharing good practice and technical knowledge across the network. They were to embrace a sense of mutuality, nurturing ties among the various national societies, and agreeing on having only one ‘national’ Red Cross Society in every state. Finally, the Movement was to hold to Dunant’s co-opted phrase of ‘tutti fratelli’ (‘all are brothers’), and dispense assistance on the basis of a soldier’s needs, not his nationality. Although these ideas remain relevant today – only one Red Cross Society is still permitted in the territory of each independent state¹⁸ – Moynier’s principles spoke to the specific concerns and pressures facing the young Movement, particularly after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1.¹⁹

The next attempt to clarify the Movement’s organising principles, following the carnage of the First World War and the emergence of the League of Red Cross Societies, was no less momentous. The revised statutes of 1921 stressed values that remain central to the Movement’s current operations, in insisting on its members’ impartiality, independence, universality and equality. It is no surprise that the Movement felt the need to reiterate its commitment to these values – and add three more – in 1965, following events in the Congo that underscored the extent to which Cold War divisions had permeated international politics and threatened the independence of international institutions. It was also a time when the Movement had just welcomed a raft of new national societies from the newly independent states in Asia and Africa, whose leaders had little experience in, or, necessarily, understanding of, the Red Cross Movement and its values.²⁰

Although the Movement has repeatedly reaffirmed its commitment to the 1965 fundamental principles (most recently in 2015) the fact that it has felt the need to do so, and has, periodically revised and updated its principles, suggests a plurality of opinion as to what the Red Cross should stand for, and how it should operate in the field. The root cause of these divisions may in part lie in the competing conceptions of humanitarianism, derived from the different geographical circumstances and historical and pol...