Comité International de la Croix Rouge - Comments

3) The Networking: coordination problems

-To understand how the ICRC works is to know the nature of its various relationships with, on the one hand, international and non-governmental organisations and, on the other hand, with the Red Cross movement. A detailed analysis follows, starting with the former. Thanks to its special status, the Geneva Committee maintains a number of statutory links with intergovernmental organisations. By virtue of Resolution 45/6 of 16 October 1990, the United Nations General Assembly agreed by consensus that the ICRC should be allowed to participate in its sessions as an “observer”. This privilege was later extended to the IFRC with Resolution 49/2 of 19 October 1994. On the recommendation of the Chilean ambassador, Juan Somavia, the UN Security Council has now consulted the Committee on a number of occasions, namely in the case of Rwanda in February 1997 and Sudan in October 1998. On a regional scale, the ICRC has also been an observer in the African Union since 4 May 1992 and the Organization of American states since 10 May 1996. In 1999, the Geneva Committee also formalized its relationship with the European Union and set up an office in Brussels after signing an initial agreement in 1993 with ECHO (European Commission Humanitarian Office). Other United Nations' agencies were not overlooked either. In 1982, the ICRC’s Central Tracing Agency managed to sign a one-way agreement with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees that gave it free access to the list of persons of concern to UNHCR. Similar partnerships were forged on a case-by-case basis with NGOs. A case in point is the agreement of 29 March 2000 that permitted the ICRC to use an American database that was drawn up by PHR (Physicians for Human Rights). This helped the Committee identify missing persons in the aftermath of the massacres in Srebrenica, Bosnia, in 1995.

-From an institutional point of view, the ICRC’s networking relies first and foremost on the Red Cross Movement as formed by national societies and their Federation, the IFRC. This complex situation means that a comprehensive study cannot be limited to the Geneva Committee's relationship with the Federation and the Red Cross societies. It also requires consideration of the IFRC's interactions with its members and must show how national societies themselves are interconnected, for instance through regional organisations like the Association for the French-speaking Red Crosses and Red Crescents in Africa, ACROFA (Association des Croix Rouges et Croissants Rouges francophones d’Afrique). For the ICRC, complications arise when it has to respond to contradictory call-outs. Being involved in a structure composed of national societies is somewhat ambiguous and recalls the position of the International Labour Organization with regards to trade unions. In fact, the IFRC is now charged with representing the various Red Crosses and Red Crescents all over the world, whereas the ICRC is supposed to guarantee their humanitarian values and endorses their existence by granting official recognition.

-Theoretically, the main body of the Movement should be the Standing Commission. Since 1928, its role has been to   liaise between the ICRC, the IFRC and national societies from one International Red Cross conference to the next . In practice, however, its role has been purely official. It has been chaired by Pierre Nolf (Belgium) from 1928, Iyesato Tokugawa (Japan) from 1934, Arthur Stanley (Great Britain) from 1938, Folke Bernadotte (Sweden) from 1946, André François-Poncet (France) from 1948, the countess of Limerick, Angela Olivia (Great Britain), from 1965, Geoffrey Newman-Morris (Australia) from 1973, Evelyn Shuckburgh (Great Britain) from 1977, Ahmed Abu-Goura (Jordan) from 1981, Botho de Sayn-Wittgenstein-Hohenstein (Germany) from 1993 and the princess of Orange-Nassau, Margriet van Vollenhoven (Netherlands)  from 1995. It was only in 1961 in Prague that the Standing Commission was able to organise its first meeting outside the framework of an international conference. Plans to grant it powers to supervise the ICRC and the IFRC never unfolded because the Committee and the Federation have always been poles apart: the first endeavouring to preserve political independence and the second attempting to retain directorship of the national societies. When the 26th International Red Cross Conference was cancelled in 1991, the Standing Commission returned briefly to its position at the forefront and established a discussion forum that is now known as the Council of Delegates.

-Historically, the relationship between the ICRC and the Red Cross movement was limited to contact with national societies, as the IFRC and its predecessor, the LRC, only date back to 1919. In 1887, the 4th International Red Cross Conference held in Germany concluded that the Geneva Committee would have the power to recognise national societies. Theoretically, the IFRC can admit a new member without the approval of the ICRC, but this has never happened. Consequently, the ICRC is the last port of call when it comes to recognising a national organisation, with or without the Federation's consent. The other societies within the IFRC cannot intervene at this stage and must wait for their general meeting to vote and ratify the admission of new members. A Red Cross organisation could thus be recognised by the ICRC without becoming a member of the Federation. The IFRC does not have a right of veto in this matter and resents not having the statutory ability to freely select its members.

-In other words, the Geneva Committee has the power to block access to the movement and, as such, has a key role with regard to states and national societies. Its stance is inherently political since it is able to select and acknowledge those entities that wish to join the movement. For instance, the ICRC approves the governmental delegations participating in the International Red Cross Conferences, even if states are not members of the United Nations. Examples include the Vatican and Switzerland, which signed the Geneva Conventions but only joined the UN in 2002 . Decisions to invite Palestinian or Taiwanese delegations provoked fierce debate as mentioned above in the chronological section on the history of the Committee. Similarly, many issues have arisen during the recognition of national societies, which have sometimes paralleled the recognition of a government or an independent state. The question became so sensitive that the ICRC no longer took the risk of indicating the total number of national societies in its annual reports!

-Given these issues, it is important to understand how the accreditation process developed over time and the ways the Committee implemented it. The rules stated that no national society could be recognized in a state that was not independent and had not signed the Geneva Conventions. But as early as 1876, the ICRC allowed Red Crosses to be set up in Montenegro and Serbia while these two territories were still formally part of the Ottoman Empire. The European bias was quite clear in this regard. The Icelandic Red Cross was recognised in 1925 even though the island only officially became independent of Denmark in 1944, nearly twenty years later. Likewise, the Norwegian national society was recognised in 1867, almost forty years before the country seceded from Sweden in 1905. European dominions and settlements around the world were also given preferential treatment, especially the British ones. The Canadian, South African and Australian national societies, respectively established in 1885, 1896 and 1914, were recognised by the ICRC in 1927 and 1928, whilst Red Cross chapters from other colonies had to wait until independence was granted before they could become full members of the movement. Consequently, the number of national societies rose rapidly when independence caused local branches to cut ties with their mother-state societies. One example is Cambodia. On 9 November 1953, the country became independent and, on 18 February 1955, Dr You Chhin founded a Red Cross. This organisation broke away from its French counterpart and was recognised by the Cambodian government on 16 June 1958, and later by the ICRC on 7 October 1960. In Hong Kong, on the other hand, the Red Cross society set up in July 1950 was considered as a branch of the parent organisation in London. It was an exceptional case because in July 1997, when the British enclave was returned to mainland China, the organisation was absorbed into the Chinese national society instead of becoming independent. Nonetheless, in the vast majority of cases, there tended to be a splitting off. After the partition of the Indian sub-continent, in particular, not only did the Indian Red Cross separate from its British counterpart, it also grew into three different entities in Burma, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, each taking its own direction. Following border conflicts with India, the Pakistani Red Cross, recognised by the ICRC in July 1948, chose for instance to adopt the Red Crescent emblem to reflect its army’s health services, whose logo was also the crescent. Generally speaking, if a national organisation already existed, accreditation seemed to follow automatically after independence. Because Great Britain ratified the Geneva Conventions on behalf of India in 1931, for example, Burma automatically inherited accreditation when it shook off New Delhi's mantle in 1937, then London's mantle in 1948. But the situation soon grew more complicated. The Swiss Federal Council, trustee of the Geneva Conventions, began to request a declaration of continuity from newly independent states to ensure that their predecessors' commitments were being upheld. Moreover, a United Nations Convention signed in Vienna on 23 August 1978 required that all previous treaties be revalidated. Renewal no longer happened by default and applications now had to be made from scratch. After 1980, the ICRC could no longer consider that the Geneva Conventions were still valid in countries that had not repudiated them after gaining independence. From then on, it had to request formal declarations that they were being applied, even on a temporary basis. This was often a determining factor in the recognition of a Red Cross or Red Crescent organisation, like in the case of Belize in March 1984.

-There was an interesting twist in territories that de facto acted as independent states, such as Kurdistan and Somaliland after 1991. A Manchukuo Red Cross was, for instance, set up by the Japanese occupying forces in Manchuria in 1932; similarly, the Turks organised a Red Crescent in the “Republic” of Northern Cyprus after 1974. To prove their international legitimacy and adherence to the ideals of Henry Dunant, secessionist movements also launched “national” societies. This was the case for a short-lived Yellow Cross that sprang up in 1950 during an uprising on Celebes Island (now known as Sulawesi). When and where necessary, the ICRC sometimes dealt with relief organisations set up by guerrillas, even if it could not officially recognise them. Thus it worked with the Palestinian Red Crescent during Black September in Jordan in 1970, and later in Lebanon during the civil war from 1975 onwards. But in Iraq in 1974 it did not heed the Kurdish  petition to have their ”Red Cross” organisation recognized.

-Operational relations between the ICRC and the IFRC, the third great pillar of the International Red Cross Movement, are no less complicated. Tension between the two institutions dates right back to the creation of the League of Red Cross Societies in May 1919. This state of affairs was to continue after the latter was renamed the League of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in October 1983 and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in November 1991. The relationship has been characterised by competitiveness, conflicts over areas of expertise and, during the early 1990s, occasional personal issues between the ICRC and IFRC presidents Cornelio Sommaruga and Mario Enrique Villarroel Lander. In his report, Donald Tansley described the two entities as thriving on “an atmosphere of mutual suspicion”. Various agreements signed on 27 October 1928, 8 December 1951, 25 April 1969, 20 October 1989 and 26 November 1997 tried to encourage harmony and allocate designated tasks to each organisation. The ICRC primarily deals with aid and humanitarian law during wartime, whilst the IFRC takes care of natural disasters, sustainable development, poverty and coordinating national societies in peacetime. However, in practice, there is a lot of overlap. In fact, the two entities have never succeeded in clarifying their duties in matters of natural disasters during armed conflict and the legal protection of prisoners in peacetime. After the end of World War One, the ICRC refused to limit its activities . It argued that it had been helping victims of natural disasters prior to the creation of the League of Red Cross in 1919. It emphasised that traditionally its peacetime roles were in the three following areas: communication between national societies, organising conferences for the movement and publishing the international Bulletin. Furthermore, recalls Bridget Towers, the ICRC had been running public health campaigns since 1869. After the First World War, it continued to work in this field by supporting the initiatives of Save the Children and sending aid to the victims of a typhus epidemic in Poland in 1920, for example.

-It is unsurprising then that the ICRC has often trod on the toes of the IFRC, and vice versa. Indeed, it stands to reason that the Committee helps victims of natural disasters in war-torn regions where it is already operational. It is harder to see the logic behind its peacetime programmes. Yet the ICRC has often acted in areas that are far from being conflict zones. This is the case for flood victims: it sent aid to the Netherlands in February 1953; Iraq in March 1954; Eastern Bengal in the current Bangladesh in June 1954; Austria in July 1954; Assam and Western Bengal in India in August 1954; India and Pakistan in August 1955; Bangladesh in November 1970; Haiti in May 1972; the island of Socotra in Yemen in November 1972; the Asunción region of Paraguay in May 1979; the Atlantic coast of Honduras in October 1988; the Ethiopian Ogaden in January 1998; Southern Russia in June 2002, and so on. Likewise, the ICRC helped drought-stricken areas such as the coastal plain of Tihama in North Yemen in August 1970, the forests of Irian Jaya in Indonesia in March 1998 and the Pokot districts of Turkana Province in Kenya in July 1999. Its intervention is understandable when it comes to Eritrea and Ethiopia at the tail end of the war between these two countries, from April to June 2003. Nor is it surprising to find the Committee helping the victims of landslides in politically unstable regions, such as the Garm and Karategin Valley districts of Tajikistan in May 1998, or areas affected by earthquakes, like Rostak, Northern Afghanistan, in February 1998, or Pakistani Kashmir, in October 2005. On the other hand, it is hard to grasp why the ICRC has been involved in natural disasters affecting countries where there are no military operations, unless the organisation intervenes in all cases of criminal or accidental violence, which would mean covering the whole planet! For example, when earthquakes struck Iran in June 1981, it seemed appropriate that Geneva send aid to Golbaf, as the country was at war with Iraq. But this was not the case for Bam in December 2003. It is also doubtful why the ICRC set up relief programmes for the victims of a volcanic eruption at Mont Pinatubo i n the Philippines in June 1991. Nor were there wars when the ICRC aided earthquake survivors on the Ionian Islands and in Thessaly in Greece in August 1953, then in April 1954, in Orléansville in Algeria in September 1954, in Skopje in Macedonia in July 1963, in Managua in Nicaragua in December 1972 and in North Yemen in December 1983.

-Similarly, the Geneva Committee's peacetime preoccupations have at times focused on public health and agricultural development programmes which are technically the domain of national societies and the IFRC. Following a survey of the sanitary conditions of Amazonian Indians in Brazil in August 1970, the ICRC participated in vaccination campaigns in Honduras in April 1972, then tackled malaria in the Tây Ninh province of Vietnam in March 1976. Over the years, its activities have become more and more diverse. In Kabul in 1996, the Geneva Committee developed professional training for young handicapped people. This programme led it to establish a specific unit to deal with the reconstruction of war-torn countries and help victims to rebuild their livelihoods. Thus it tried to improve the health of cattle in Ethiopia and in Mali by conducting veterinary vaccination programmes in 1997. In 1999, it also built wells to provide clean water during a cholera epidemic on Pemba and Ugunja islands in Zanzibar. Eventually, the ICRC claimed a special role combining rehabilitation and development in post-conflict reconstruction. Although it admitted in its 1998 annual report that poverty as such was not in its domain, it nonetheless went on to state that it fell to the Committee to “ensure, where possible, that development agencies took charge of a vulnerable population once the crisis was over”.

-The IFRC has also been guilty of treading on the ICRC's toes. In 1982, it was invited to visit political prisoners in Poland, an activity usually reserved for the Committee. Moreover, the Federation has often intervened in war-torn countries without the Committee's approval. There have been instances where the two institutions worked harmoniously together, namely during the communist uprising in Greece in 1947, the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the independence of Algeria in 1962, the Black September revolt in Jordan in 1970 and the collapse of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in 2001. On the other hand, paths divided during the wars of Korea in 1950, Biafra in 1968, Bangladesh in 1971, Vietnam prior to 1972, Ethiopia in 1984 and the Gulf in 1991. On more than one occasion, coordination was futile with both the ICRC and the IFRC simply getting in each other's way. At the outset of the Korean War in November 1950, for example, the League of Red Cross launched an appeal to national societies without first informing the Committee. After hostilities ended in July 1953,  the latter eventually had to entrust the Red Crosses in the field with the task of repatriating prisoners of war because it had been rejected by the communists. The League also pre-empted the ICRC's position in “Marxist” Ethiopia in June 1988, when the Committee refused to work under the political control of the junta and was expelled after putting its operations on hold and handing over its supplies. Without informing the ICRC, the LRC then took the reins by funding the Ethiopian Red Cross in line with conditions that the Geneva Committee had specifically rejected to avoid supporting military interests and infringing on the movement's neutrality. During the first Gulf Crisis in March 1991, once again, the Federation unilaterally broke an agreement that had been signed with the ICRC two months earlier. It elected itself responsible for collecting funds so that it could carry out its programmes autonomously until national societies dissuaded it from pursuing this course of action.

-Such tensions seriously compromise the movement. Christophe Girod argues that “they undermine the credibility of the two institutions in the eyes of governmental donors, they ruin the coherence of political negotiations with authorities that might simply select the agency that offers its services with the least conditions, and they compromise the national societies that both fund and participate in relief operations already facing active competition from NGOs in their home countries.” The ICRC and the IFRC’s separate fundraising agendas have confused a lot of donors. Programmes have been duplicated, costs have increased and the movement was divided, incapable of speaking with one voice. Since the ICRC and the IFRC cannot be merged, it would probably be more effective to pool some common services in order to benefit from economies of scale in logistics, supplies, public relations and statistics, as recommended in Donald Tansley's report. But the rivalry between the two institutions is fuelled by personal disputes, the inability of the Federation to coordinate the national societies and the downright refusal of the Committee to give up any responsibility for fear of losing its independence and compromising its neutrality.

-The ICRC's “splendid isolation” and its reluctance to cooperate with others have been noted by many observers. Donald Tansley wrote that the Committee's often courteous, formal and aloof attitude towards other institutions has discouraged “open and honest debate on shared problems. The ICRC cooperates only when it needs information or help.” Otherwise, it rarely takes the initiative to facilitate coordination. Instead, it seeks to sidestep or overtake its rivals. For instance, during the Nigerian Civil War, spurred on by a desire to compete with religious NGOs, it took huge risks to bring food supplies to the secessionists. Similarly, it disapproved of intergovernmental organisations' attempts to assist prisoners because these institutions were too political and might compromise access to jails. Hans-Peter Gasser, a Committee member , describes how the ICRC frowned upon the European Council's forays into its territory, which the latter justified by saying it was working to ban the use of torture. Likewise in Rwanda, Simone Delorenzi reports that Geneva disapproved of prison visits carried out by the Centre of Human Rights at the University of Louvain, which resulted in lower standards being recommended. Obviously, similar initiatives by the IFRC were also criticised because the Federation’s close relationships with national bodies meant it lacked sufficient neutrality to inspire confidence. This had clear consequences. I n his study of the period between 1958 and 1970, Jacques Moreillon show ed that the League and national societies were less frequently called upon to help prisoners of conscience: they were approached in up to 25% of cases, compared with 40% for the ICRC.

-The Geneva Committee has repeatedly been criticised for thwarting coordination attempts and refusing to make its operational objectives known to other organisations. Since the first Gulf Crisis in 1991, funders have attacked its lack of strategic vision, its reactive stance, its ambition to be omnipresent and its tendency to duplicate programmes at much greater expense than its “rivals”. Basing her comments on a questionnaire published in 2003, Michèle Mercier states that more than half of the ICRC's operations could have been carried out by other organisations in nearly 50% of situations. The picture is not always so bleak. The Committee has actually cooperated with intergovernmental agencies like the UNHCR (United Nations High Commission for Refugees) in Bangladesh in 1971 and UNICEF (United Nations Children's Fund) in Cambodia in 1979. During the second Gulf war in 2003, it agreed to share in real time the information it was privy to concerning the state of sanitation in Iraq. At a meeting in Seville in November 1997, the IF RC accepted the ICRC’s leadership of relief operations during wartime. It also defined more precisely when a conflict situation began and ended so that each organisation would know when to intervene. A turning point came in 2003, when a former Norwegian Red Cross General Secretary, Jan Egeland, was appointed to head the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).  His personal contacts smoothed relations with the Geneva Committee . Likewise, the fact that some ICRC members were involved in setting up NGOs probably helped in negotiations with other bodies. In 1959, for example, Jacques Freymond launched Swisscontact, a foundation specialized in development and funded by the Cooperation Department of the Swiss Federal  Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Following in his footsteps, others worked for not-for-profit organisations after leaving the Committee, including Jacques Moreillon, who became secretary general of the World Organization of the Scout Movement from 1988 to 2004, and Louise Doswald-Beck, who headed the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) from 2000 to 2003. However, these connections are not always positive, as in the case of Jean-Pierre Hocke, a former Operations Division Director at the ICRC. His reputation for pragmatism earned him the prestigious title of United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in 1986. But he led the institution to financial breakdown by hiring staff with ties to the developing countries' representatives who had supported his nomination. Worse still, explains Gil Loescher, he yielded to the pressure of member states’ immigration services and violated his mandate by pushing asylum seekers under his protection to be repatriated, whether they liked it or not.

-Poor coordination was always a central problem for the Red Cross Movement and reverberated within the IFRC and national societies. Antoine Bosshard explains that, over time, the ICRC increasingly encountered competition from a growing number of Red Crosses that focused on their own country first, leaving very little resources for international activities. In 1995, for example, only 50 of 14,000 employees of the CRF (Croix-Rouge Française) dealt with foreign affairs. But as the organisation’s operational and financial capabilities increased, so did its involvement in setting up programmes abroad: resources allocated to international missions were nearly 4% of a total budget of 907.3 million Euros in 2005, compared with less than 2% of approximately 526 million Euros in 1995. At the Belgian Red Cross, the overseas division actually became a separate association in 1997, and had a budget of 6.1 million Euros in 2006. Meanwhile, the ICRC struggled to impose its leadership when wartime operations were being planned. Without centralised management or guidance in the form of a working role model, the Red Cross Movement proved so uncoordinated and tangled that it began losing sight of its original aims: it even risked dissolution according to Donald Tansley’s report in 1975. The ICRC and the IFRC were so concerned with defending their own respective areas of responsibility that there were more differences than similarities between them. Moreover, it was only in 1946 that the League of Red Cross sketchily defined the fundamental roles and remits of national societies in a resolution voted by its Council of Governors in Oxford. Today, conflicts over areas of competence still exist despite a four-year action plan drawn up to deal with these divisions and adopted during the celebrations for the 50th Anniversary of the 1949 Geneva Conventions at the 27th International Conference of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement in Geneva from 31 October to 6 November 1999.

-Although the ICRC is supposed to coordinate national societies during wartime relief operations, it has been beleaguered by a host of misplaced initiatives. Red Cross and Red Crescent organisations often follow their own strategies with no reference to Geneva. There is little effort to coordinate. Due to divisions based on ideology, religion and nationality, some national societies even support opposing camps. This happened in Vietnam where the Soviet Red Cross took the side of Hanoi while the American and Philippine Red Crosses backed Saigon. Another case in point occurred during the Biafra war when the French Red Cross openly supported the secessionists and preferred to send supplies directly to the rebels from Gabon, rather than sharing an airlift organised by the ICRC in Nigeria. Similarly, in 1971, the Soviet Red Cross neglected to inform Geneva of its decision to rush medical teams to Bangladesh during the secession of East Pakistan. The situation has not improved since. The Gulf crises have their own take on this trend. To begin with, Red Cross societies avoided consulting Geneva when they attempted to rescue their nationals held hostage under the regime of Saddam Hussein after September 1990. Acting with Baghdad's approval and despite opposition from the United Nations Committee responsible for imposing sanctions on Iraq, the Indian Red Cross took the initiative to charter a ship without an ICRC escort and was delayed at sea before being allowed to unload its supplies in the port of Um-el-Qasr. Similarly, when Saddam Hussein's troops pulled out of Kuwait, the American Red Cross omitted to coordinate with the Geneva Committee when sending doctors and undertaking reconstruction programmes. Meanwhile, Maghreb Red Crescent medical teams attempted to leave the region as early as possible to avoid being forced to only treat victims from the government’s side during the repression of the Shiite uprising in Southern Iraq in March 1991. In the Kurdish North of the country, Red Cross societies from developed countries intervened without prior agreement from Saddam Hussein. Under immense pressure from both the general public and the media, they worked closely with Western troops involved in Operation Provide Comfort. At the same time, the ICRC hoped to disassociate itself from this military intervention, in order to remain neutral and continue working in the South with Baghdad government . Problems of this kind reappeared during the second Gulf Crisis when American and allied troops disembarked in Iraq from 2003 onwards. In fact, the Italian Red Cross worked under the protection of its country's military contingent and categorically refused to coordinate its programmes with the ICRC…

-It must be noted that the IFRC has not fared much better. Considering that the Federation is composed of independent national societies, it applies the majority rule even though it actually runs more like a confederation than a federation. As such it wields few powers over its members when supervising relief operations and trying to guarantee their impartiality. At best, it opens communication channels by endlessly funding meetings which, according to Donald Tansley, have sometimes swallowed up almost half of its regular budget. By doing so, it involves a maximum number of national societies but fails to actually agree on any useful resolution. When the Governor's Council took place in Oslo in May 1954, the League did create an administrative office to coordinate member activities during peacetime. However, it was soon bogged down in redirecting calls for help and checking it was appropriate to send supplies from one Red Cross to another as requested . When an earthquake struck Agadir in Morocco in February 1960, for example, national societies did not bother to coordinate and even went as far as providing o verly warm clothing and cheese that melted in the sun. The reorganisation of the IFRC’s administrative structure in April 1983 confirmed this state of affairs. During this re-shuffle, the aid desk was divided into six regional offices, effectively limiting the coordinating role of the Federation to a mere power of verification a posteriori. Since then, no substantial progress has been made in this regard. During the Asian tsunami of December 2004, for example,  t he Indonesian Red Cross had to warn other national societies to stop sending out supplies without evaluating what was really required and without consulting the local authorities first. When the disaster was given global coverage in the media, 100 of the 184 IFRC member organisations appealed to public generosity to help the victims. The outcome was that a considerable number of national societies with no prior experience abroad launched their first operations in a developing country; a case in point was the Irish Red Cross. Eager to spend the funds they had collected too hastily, they set up their own programmes which duplicated efforts in regions where the IFRC had refused their assistance because needs were already being met. According to John Telford et al., for instance, ten of the biggest Red Crosses in the world pledged to reconstruct a total of 21,000 houses in Indonesia. In 2006, however, less than 500 had been completed . IFRC food deliveries to villages also undermined the powers of traditional chiefs and dissuaded farmers from returning to agricultural work. As for the medical response, it was completely out of proportion and inappropriate. In general, tsunamis do not lead to epidemics and therefore require little follow-up health care. Statistically speaking, they cause an average of one death for every four injured, against one in eight in the case of earthquakes. The emergency hospitals set up by the French Red Cross therefore remained underexploited.

-With no central governing body, the Movement is not really able to solve its coordination problems. Indeed, each national society is free to work with its equivalent in a war-torn country. In other words, coordination issues do not only concern the IFRC or the ICRC, but also Red Cross and Red Crescent organisations between themselves. Admittedly, within national societies there is little room for manoeuvre, because they are structurally limited by political, organisational and legal constraints that often hinder humanitarian action. This subject is discussed more at length in the fourth part of this analysis. During the cold war, strategic alliances were forged under the guise of coordination. These ties, however, responded to ideology first and humanitarian needs afterwards. Moreover, some national societies did not even attempt to cooperate. An extreme example is the German and Soviet Red Crosses, which did not communicate at all during the Second World War. During the era of decolonisation, tensions also arose between developing and developed countries. “Partnerships” with poor Red Cross societies in the third world were often tainted with distrust and fraught with accusations of imperialism. At a symposium on development in Montreux in 1975, a solution was forged by way of euphemisms describing  “contributors” and “beneficiaries” as “participants” and “operators”. But this was insufficient to solve the underlying problems. According to Ellwyn Stoddard, for instance, the Mexican government initially refused assistance from the American Red Cross after Hurricane Gladys destroyed  the coast north of Tampico in September 1955. On this occasion, foreign aid bruised national pride as the local authorities would have preferred to coordinate and check all rescue workers. Under pressure from the victims, the Mexican government eventually gave way and handed over its aid supervision capacity to the United States.