FRANCAISComité International de la Croix Rouge - Comments
2) The way it works
-From a legal perspective, the ICRC has a unique and hybrid status, being neither association nor intergovernmental organisation. Unlike the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, it is not run as a state body. At the diplomatic conference held in 1975 to extend the Geneva Conventions, for example, the institution showed its reluctance to act by default for states whose authorities, for whatever reason, failed to carry out their duty protecting prisoners of war and assumed that the ICRC would step in automatically. Being the guardian of the Geneva Conventions, the Committee is not strictly speaking an NGO either. With the permission of states, it acts in the public domain, negotiating international treaties and maintaining statutory relations with the United Nations. It has legal immunity, and can be awarded tax exemptions or issue passports . It therefore has a range of powers that an NGO would not usually have. It has also had its own radio frequency since 1948 and a studio to broadcast its programmes since 1965. For a long time, its delegates were provided diplomatic passports by the government of Switzerland. Since then, they are guaranteed some immunity from arrest and imprisonment thanks to specific agreements that are negotiated in various countries (the first of this kind was signed with Cameroon on 23 March 1972). Abroad, the legal status of an ICRC delegation is now similar to that of an embassy. Thus in Bogota in December 1999, some 200 Colombian displaced people (desplazados) invaded the organisation’s offices to be guaranteed some diplomatic immunity and be registered in town instead of being expelled back to war-torn areas: the police could not evict the squatters, who remained there for at least three years, and the Red Cross employees had to find another place to work!
-The ICRC’s name is misleading because the Committee is only international in its interests, not in its make up. Its members are co-opted and exclusively Swiss, which supposedly guarantees the institution's neutrality and integrity when faced with political disputes arising from state representation. It helps to protect the organisation from the tensions that tear the United Nations apart, for example. As a matter of fact, the caution of the Geneva establishment has made possible the development of humanitarian standards that are gradually gaining widespread acceptance. In fact, the small structure of the ICRC allows it to react quickly in comparison to other multinational institutions, faced with weighty bureaucracy and decision-making relying on consensus. Since the revision of its statutes in 1973, the members of the Committee proper number between 15 and 23 depending on the year, compared with 5 in 1863, 6 in 1867, 7 in 1871, 8 in 1876, 9 in 1884, 10 in 1888, 16 in 1918 and 20 in 1945. Appointments to the ICRC are made in the utmost secrecy and call to mind the procedures of the conclave to elect the Pope in the Vatican.
-Mono-national recruitment by co-optation means that Geneva protestant aristocracy is very well represented in the institution. Historically, the ICRC started as a family affair and was nicknamed the “Neighbourhood Committee”. Gustave Ador, for instance, joined the institution in December 1870 and succeeded his uncle Gustave Moynier as President from August 1910. His uncle by marriage, Daniel Colladon, was also connected to Henry Dunant. As for Leopold Boissier, who came to head the ICRC in September 1955, he was the son of Edmond Boissier, a former vice-president of the organisation. Yet another of his relations, Pierre Boissier, was a representative, then a member of the Committee and a Director of the Henry Dunant Institute. Indeed, he was earmarked for President before he died prematurely in an accident during a military training exercise in April 1974. Marcel Naville, ICRC President from January 1969, was another example: his grandfather was the head of the Central Tracing Agency during the First World War.
-Even when the Committee recruited outside these family connections, its members came from a very specific group of the Swiss population. This is apparent in the successive presidencies of Guillaume-Henri Dufour (1863), Gustave Moynier (1864-1910), Gustave Ador (1910-1928), Max Huber (1928-1945), Carl-Jacob Burckhardt (1945-1947), Paul Ruegger (1948-1955), Leopold Boissier (1955-1964), Samuel Gonard (1964-1969), Marcel Naville (1969-1973), Eric Martin (1973-1976), Alexandre Hay (1976-1987), Cornelio Sommaruga (1987-1999) and Jakob Kellenberger (since 2000). Only in 1923, after a good half-century of existence, was a non-Genevan Catholic member elected: Giuseppe Motta, from Italian-speaking Switzerland. Max Huber, elected in 1928, was in fact the first head of the ICRC not to come from Geneva. He was from Zurich and had been President of the International Court of Justice in The Hague from 1925 to 1927. In 1948, Paul Ruegger became the first Catholic to be named president of a Committee that, at the time of writing (2009), have only ever had one Jew and no Black members. In the 1960s and 1970s, the institution tried to be more representative of the Swiss Confederation’s various cantons and started to choose presidents from external candidates rather than “in-house applicants” like Jacques Moreillon or Roger Gallopin. The idea was to select very important persons, even if they had no experience in humanitarian law and operations. So the Committee continued to recruit from the bourgeoisie. Between 1863 and 1970 there were 98 members, of which 37 were lawyers, 19 doctors and 6 bankers. The average age was sixty and staff turnover was very slow. The institution's presidents included members of the armed forces (Guillaume-Henri Dufour, Samuel Gonard), elected politicians (Gustave Ador), lawyers (Gustave Moynier, Max Huber, Paul Ruegger, Leopold Boissier, Samuel Gonard), a businessman (Max Huber), a doctor (Eric Martin), diplomats (Carl-Jacob Burckhardt, Paul Ruegger, Cornelio Sommaruga, Jakob Kellenberger) and bankers (Marcel Naville, Alexandre Hay, Cornelio Sommaruga). According to the historian Caroline Moorehead, such elitism explained an excessive deference to governmental authorities, an underlying anti-communist leaning and a paternalistic and conservative, even puritan attitude. The Committee avoided taking on representatives from trade unions or the working class until the very end of World War Two. When the ICRC was hauled up by the USSR over its silence regarding Nazi crimes against humanity, it brought in two socialists, Adolf Luchinger in 1946 and Ernest Gloor in 1945. The latter was a Member of Parliament from 1925 to 1935 and went on to be the institution's Vice-President on numerous occasions in 1947-1952, 1954-1956 and 1961-1962. Close on the heels of these new recruits were a former Secretary General of the International Federation of Metal Workers (Adolphe Graedel, from 1965), a Secretary for the Swiss Trade Union (Waldemar Jucker, from 1967), and a Vice-President of the Swiss Federation of Metallurgy and Watchmakers (André Ghelfi, from 1985).
-The Committee proper is also characterised by very low turnover of its members, if exception is made for expatriates, local employees and administrative staff. The first presidents of the institution had record-breaking terms of service: Gustave Moynier served for 46 years consecutively, Max Huber for 16 and Gustave Ador for 15. Only Marcel Naville was not offered a second mandate, as a result of the difficulties faced by the ICRC during the Nigerian Civil War in 1968. Little progress in this field was made during the 1960s. In the words of Jacques Freymond, “those who made up [the Committee] were [in fact] more inclined to analyse the world from a Swiss point of view, like the 19th century aristocracy. They felt they were citizens of the world even though they were, very unfairly, accused of only being citizens of their own world.” A great number of them never ventured beyond their country's borders and often stalled projects initiated by delegates abroad. However, when “competing” NGOs started emerging in the 1980s, they had to reconsider their position. The organisation's facelift had to be driven through an administrative reform. It meant that from 1973 onwards the mandates for ICRC members were limited to four years and could only be extended once by a single vote with a two-thirds majority. Since then, the members who made up the core of the institution were no longer permitted to remain in service beyond the age of 72. The uppermost limit was 75 years on condition that three quarters of the “Assembly”, i.e. the collective body of the Committee, were in agreement. Today, the retirement age has dropped to 70.
-Monique Pavillon claims that the ICRC was also sexist for many years in a country where women were allowed to vote only in 1971. The Committee admitted its first woman member, Marguerite Cramer (a lawyer) in 1918, and its first woman delegate, Jeanne Egger, in 1962. In the early 1990s, only 15% of the organisation's staff were female and the retirement pensions they drew were considerably less than their male counterparts. Only in 2002 was Doris Pfister given a leading position as a woman. Clearly, the ICRC's conservatism was more marked than in many other national societies within the Red Cross Movement. Even in Afghanistan, a country not known for respecting women's rights, a woman leads the Red Crescent organisation: Fatima Gailani, its president since 2004 and the daughter of the famous Islamic National Front leader Pir Sayed Ahmed Gailani, who fought against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s. In Cambodia, the Red Cross has always been headed by women. The first Presidents were princesses, namely Norodom Rasmi Sobhana from 1955 to 1967 and Norodom Monineath Sihanouk from 1967 until the coup d'état that overthrew the monarchy in 1970. They were then succeeded by figures like Chuop Samlot from 1970 to 1973, Phlech Phiroun in 1974 and from 1979 to 1992, Norodom Marie Ranariddh from 1994 to 1998 and Bun Rany Hun Sen from 1998 to 2006. Another case is the Rumanian Red Cross: its chairwoman, Mihaela Geoana, is the wife of the Senate’s President, Mircea Geoana, a social democrat candidate of the former communist party, who lost the presidential elections of 2010. Historically, women have often been a driving force behind the establishment of relief organisations for the wounded in armies in the field. Such female torch-bearers included Aurelia Ramos de Segarra in Uruguay, Thanpuying Plien Pasakornravongs in Thailand, Empress Augusta Viktoria of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany, Queen Sofia Wilhelmina Mariana Henrietta of Nassau in Sweden and Clara Barton in the United States. One example is i n El Salvador, where the Geneva Conventions were ratified in December 1874 . Here, Sara Guerra played an important role in supporting the Cruz Roja Salvadoreña set up in March 1885 by Doctor Augusto Bouineau. She pressed her husband, Rafael Zaldívar, a trained doctor and the country’s president at the time, to immediately recognise the organisation. A few days later, a one-month long war against Guatemala broke out. In October 1898, El Salvador left the Central American Union, and the organisation became inactive. At this point, the Women’s Red Cross Association took over. Created in 1906, it made considerable advances in the field of public health and eventually merged with the Red Cross in 1963. Meanwhile, the Cruz Roja Salvadoreña adopted new statutes in July 1918 and was recognised by the ICRC in April 1925. Despite these exceptions, men often dominated decision-making structure in national societies. Although they have always been fairly forward-thinking in gender equality issues, even Scandinavian countries were far from pioneering when it came to the Red Cross. It took a whole century for women to become the presidents of the national societies in Sweden and Norway, respectively with Christiana Magnuson from 1993 to 2002 and Astrid Nøklebye Heiberg from 1993 to 1998 (a psychiatrist by training, the latter also became the first woman to head the IFRC in 1997). The United States followed the same pattern after scandals that led to the departure of Clara Barton in 1904 and compelled Mabel Thorp Boardman to lie low and yield her position up to the men. It was only in 1991 that another female candidate, Elizabeth Dole, was elected President of the American Red Cross. In Japan, again, only 67,768 of 1,620,530 Red Cross members were women in 1913. With support from the nobility, Japanese women had to set up their own organisation in June 1887, the Ladies’ Volunteer Nursing Association (Tokushi Kango Fujinkai), just before the JCRS (Japan Red Cross Society) decided to train single women nurses in April 1890. Women then played a key role in pushing the JCRS to move away from war relief in favour of public health initiatives. As a result, the society was instrumental in opening a general hospital in Tokyo on 17 June 1892, and a maternity in the suburb of Shibuya on 9 May 1922: the latter, an exception for a country where most births took place at home, also sheltered victims of the famous earthquake of 1 September 1923. Despite their growing influence, however, women were unable to stop the militarization of the Red Cross. In 1907, JRCS nurses who died on the Manchurian front in 1905 were the first females to be buried at Yasukuni Shrine, a cemetery for war heroes. A1966 movie of Yasuzo Masumira, Red Angel, also shows JRCS nurses who take part to the fighting and kill Chinese soldiers during World War Two…
-The ICRC's executive structure deserves some explanation at this juncture. The role of Secretary General within the institution's internal hierarchy carries hardly any weight. Below the position of President of the Committee is the General Manager or Executive Director, depending on the titles handed down from year to year. Hierarchically speaking, this role could be compared to that of the Prime Minister in France. The first person to hold this position after the Second World War was Roger Gallopin, as the representative of the regional delegations from 1946 to 1969 and as President of the Executive Council from 1969 to 1976. His colleagues included Jean Pichet, who dealt with general matters, and Georges Dunand, who focused on field operations. Back then, the legal protection of victims of armed conflicts was the ICRC’s main occupation. Consequently, jurists dominated the institution. The role of Director of Operations was less important , as a representative of the regional delegations who became part of a Commission of External Affairs established in April 1950. The position was successively held by Jacques Chenevière, Raymond Courvoisier from 1969 to 1971, Jean-Pierre Maunoir in 1972, Jean-Pierre Hocke from 1973 to 1985, André Pasquier from 1986 to 1989, Jean de Courten from 1989 to 1998, Jean-Daniel Tauxe from 1998 to 2002 and Pierre Kraehenbuel since 2002. The title of Director-General was created after a reform in July 1973 to professionalize the organisation by separating its governing and operational structures. Set up in 1946 and 1949 respectively, the Bureau and the Council of the Presidency were also replaced by an Executive Council. As for the Director-General, he was responsible for supervising the various divisions: legal services, operations, human resources, finances and the Central Tracing Agency (CTA). Dividing the executive powers sometimes provoked conflicts between the President of the ICRC, Eric Martin, and his Director-General, Roger Gallopin, that proved hard to solve. But according to David Forsythe, Alexander Hay was in 1976 the last President of the Committee to actively have a hand in the organisation's management. Afterwards, it was down to the Director-General to deal with daily matters. This was the case for Jacques Moreillon with Yves Sandoz from 1976 to 1989, Guy Deluz from 1990 until his resignation in 1992 (due to a difference in opinion with the then President Cornelio Sommaruga), Peter Fuchs from 1992, Paul Grossrieder from 1998, Angelo Gnädinger from 2002 (when the position was reinforced) and Pierre Krähenbûl (also spelt Kraehenbuel), first as a deputy from 2004. By virtue of an administrative reform endorsed in May 1991, the Director-General became a full legal member of the Executive Council, a board which adopted the name of Assembly Council late in 1998 and which grouped the heads of the divisions of operations, doctrine, legal affairs and cooperation with the Red Cross Movement.
-These changes demonstrate the ICRC's commitment to becoming more professional. In today's system, paid positions are on the increase, but at the expense of volunteer posts. The organisation has come a long way from its humble beginnings. In the words of President Gustave Ador, quoted by Jean-Pierre Gaume, the ICRC started off without “ambitions to operate in the field”. It intended to act as a kind of conduit between different Red Cross or Red Crescent societies which were supposed to run independent humanitarian programmes despite their questionable impartiality and integrity. The institution worked with very few administrative staff and, prior to 1910, Committee meetings frequently took place in Gustave Moynier's apartment to save having to hire a meeting room. The day-to-day running of the office was managed by a small number of people. At the time, the Committee members had to dedicate only one working day every month to the organisation, compared with one month per year at present. The amateurism was particularly visible when it came to selecting delegates abroad. The recruits were mostly Swiss businessmen and expatriates who were hired in the field as and when required. Paradoxically, there were no significant overhauls despite the extension of activities during the two World Wars. The number of volunteers, including expatriates and administrative personnel in Geneva, made up between 15 and 50% of the ICRC workforce: there were 1,752 volunteers to 1,907 paid staff in 1945, 60 to 334 in 1948, 52 to 316 in 1950, 47 to 301 in 1952, 53 to 289 in 1953, 51 to 179 in 1954, 50 to 170 in 1956 and 43 to 187 in 1957. The proportion was even higher within the delegates’ ranks, and was worsened by the financial crisis that hit the Committee after World War Two : a record of 38 to 35 in 1949, 34 to 27 in 1950, 30 to 4 in 1954, 30 to 10 in 1955 and 26 to 3 in 1956.
-Such a system had its advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, the volunteer delegates were well connected locally. Many of them were married to women who were native to the countries to which they were posted or in which they were already working. These connections eased political contacts to such an extent that they could often gain entry to detention centres that would normally be out of bounds to foreign visitors. On the other hand, as Catherine Rey-Schyrr points out, they were not capable of the same impartiality as expatriates and this lack of independence caused problems within the ICRC, namely in Greece in 1948 and in Spain in 1959. In Saigon during the Vietnam War, explain for instance Françoise Perret and François Bugnion, these “honorary delegates” were Swiss businessmen who were contracted by the government and who accepted to interview political prisoners in front of their wardens. As a result, the communists did not trust them at all. In general, these “honorary delegates” acted more like representatives. They did not possess the same operational capacity as their successors have today. It was the Six-Day War of 1967 which forced a change in mentality. As the political crisis deepened in the disputed Israeli-Palestinian territory, the organisation sought to recruit more long-term staff, instead of relying on a list of volunteers who were on standby or recruited on an ad hoc basis. Prior to 1970, candidates for delegates’ posts were trained on the job. After this date, they were invited to take part in theory lessons and courses where they could practise in simulated situations. These courses were held in Cartigny, a former presbytery on the outskirts of Geneva, then moved to Ecogia in the Versoix district in 2001. According to Isabelle Vichniac, formerly the Geneva correspondent for Le Monde newspaper, the organisation was particularly strict when it came to recruitment. Besides looking at candidates' qualifications, motivations and age group (between 25 and 40), the ICRC checked that they had a clean police record, a valid driving licence, no history of medical problems, no debts, no alimony to pay, no record of political activism or links with Amnesty International and no outward signs of homosexuality, sentimental attachments or exceptional family burdens. Names with Jewish undertones were overlooked because they could cause issues in the Arab world. Coloured people were also avoided as they did not conform to the traditional Swiss “look”.
-In its attempt to become more professional, the ICRC eventually had to remove two obstacles to its growth: its dependence on volunteers and its mono-national recruitment. The first difficulty was dealt with by increasing salaries in order to keep experienced staff. In the early 1970s, 60% of the permanent staff at headquarters held a degree or equivalent qualification. Working conditions were reasonable by Swiss standards. Executives earned just a little less than in the private sector. As for the lower staff ranks, they were not paid the “thirteenth month” bonus like in a company, nor did they benefit from the tax breaks enjoyed by intergovernmental organisations in Geneva. Expatriates, however, had similar packages to those of Swiss diplomats. Yet there was no apparent connection between remuneration and the ICRC's ability to retain its delegates. According to a study by David Forsythe published in 2005, statistics from 1974 showed that, w hile 75% of expatriates left their positions after three years , permanent administrative staff stayed in Geneva for an average of eight years . A rise in salaries was not sufficient to retain even the most determined expatriates in war zones, given the psychological strain they were placed under . Consequently, an a ssociation of f ormer d elegates established in 1983, the AAD (Association des anciens délégués), had to set up a pension fund in 1994, the Fondation Avenir, to help retired ICRC personnel in their social and professional reintegration. Following a complaint made by an employee who underwent an amputation after treading on a mine, the institution also had to make its insurance cover more comprehensive, as it used to exclude acts of war! Eventually, the disappearance of the volunteer force helped the ICRC to put an end to tensions with professional staff but not between the headquarters and the delegates in the field.
-In this respect, Red Cross organisations are different from the Geneva Committee because they still retain a large number of volunteers. National societies became particularly popular after the First World War when the Youth Red Cross was launched in the United States in 1917, in Australia in 1920, in France in 1922 and in Germany in 1925. Most of these “junior” sections then lost the favour of the public and were reabsorbed into national societies after the 1968 student uprisings in Western countries. Moreover, Red Cross organisations also wanted to run in a more professional manner, following the example of the ICRC. During the French Indochina War, for example, the CRF (Croix-Rouge française) developed the so-called IPSA (Infirmières Pilotes Secouristes de l’Air), a corps of air pilot, parachutist and rescue nurses. Trained to intervene in flight, many of these nurses later retrained and went on to become air hostesses in the private sector. As for the ARC (American Red Cross), it adopted a more professional approach when its “Chairman” from 1954 to 1973, Roland Harriman, decided in 1953 to create a separate salaried Director's position that came with the rather misleading title of “President”. The organisation then took its first steps towards modernisation under the guidance of people like Richard Schubert, who rationalized and computerised the accounts system from 1983. After that, John “Jack” McGuire, a specialist from the pharmaceutical industry, reorganised the ARC’s system of blood stocks from 2005. Generally speaking, the number of volunteers working in national societies seems to be steadily diminishing. In the United States, for example, there were 34 volunteers to one paid worker in 2006, compared with 171 volunteers per paid worker in 1966. However, it is difficult to compare one country's situation with another. In the West, the number of volunteers sometimes include names of those who have simply made donations. In Eastern Europe during the Communist era, such statistics were even less reliable: all citizens were compelled to become members of national Red Cross societies, which were considered as mass organisations, like trade unions but with a cheaper subscription and a slighter political commitment!
-In order to expand its activities across the world, the ICRC also had to give up exclusively employing Swiss citizens. Sticking to one nationality restricted the recruitment of qualified professionals and did not fit the requirements of an institution which was increasingly called into developing countries. As a result, the ICRC’s expatriate workforce grew older. In the 1970s, delegates in the field were, on average, around forty years of age, compared with thirty for the employees of the Division of Operations in Geneva. At the time, 99% of expatriates were Swiss, and the rest mostly French. These proportions were reflected at headquarters, where foreign national employees were not involved in decision-making and represented barely 10% of the organisation's permanent administrative staff. But in 1993, the ICRC implemented a change in policy and started recruiting non-Swiss delegates. Ten years later, the proportion of foreign nationals in the expatriate staff was 40%. This figure did not include some 9,000 local staff trained in the regional centres of Abidjan, Amman, Colombo, Bogota, Nairobi, Sarajevo and Tbilisi. By 2002, non-Swiss employees in Geneva and in the field represented nearly a third of the total workforce, a proportion which reached 50% in 2004. Nevertheless, only 4% of them were citizens from developing countries.
-In extending its activities, the total number of ICRC staff increased. It peaked at 3,700 during the Second World War and began to drop soon afterwards due to budgetary constraints. There were less than fifty employees working at headquarters in 1950 and less than thirty in the 1960s. In the 1970s, the ICRC started gathering steam again and reached post-war levels of activity, with as many staff in Geneva in 1979 as there were in 1949. Recruitments for positions abroad also exploded . After 1989, expatriates began to outnumber employees at headquarters and reached 1,000 in 1993. In the 1990s, the ICRC’s total workforce was around 1,600, of which less than 50% were based in Geneva. In addition, the organisation employed 6,000 casual local staff and could count on 200 volunteers provided by national societies. Today, it has ten thousand personnel around the world, of whom over two thousand are directly recruited through the Geneva office. Technically, the ICRC can also rely on the workforce of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. According to Didier Cherpitel, a former Secretary General for the IFRC, national societies had around 300,000 paid staff, 97 million members and carried out the equivalent of 1.8 million full-time jobs using about 20 million volunteers in 2003.
