FRANCAISComité International de la Croix Rouge - Comments
7) Links to politics
-Despite its attempts to remain impartial, the Geneva Committee has close ties to Swiss authorities, as shown by its relations with the government and the political careers of some its members. In a small country, explains Hans-Peter Gasser, it is difficult to find experienced staff. As a result, the institution recruited in governmental circles. Gustave Ador, for instance, ran the ICRC between August 1910 and March 1928, in parallel with his political activities. After a period as a municipal councillor between June 1870 and May 1878, he was mayor of Coligny from June 1878 to November 1879, and again from June 1882 to March 1885. He was also nominated to the Grand Council of Geneva in November 1874 and November 1879 as a member of an independent group which joined forces with the Liberal-Conservatives to become the Democratic Party and oppose James Fazy’s Radicals. Gustave Ador then ran the City Police between November 1879 and November 1880, and the Department of Finance from March 1885 to November 1897. He supported strict budgetary policy and opposed the social insurance scheme put forward by his main rival, the Radical Georges Favon. He also fought Socialist plans for a welfare state and tax increases. As a Liberal, e was against strong public sector growth. When supervising charities as the head of the Conf ederation’s Department of the Interior between 1918 and 1919, he preferred to hand over social welfare to private organisations. It was again as a Liberal that he entered the Swiss government after representing the Geneva Canton and presiding its Council of State in 1889. At the Federal Council in Berne, he replaced in July 1917 Arthur Hoffmann, who was accused of compromising the country’s neutrality by brokering a peace agreement between Germany and Russia in the middle of World War One. Gustave Ador took charge of the Foreign Office and supported the American project to create the League of Nations. As president of the Swiss Confederation between January and December 1919, he even managed to fix the new organisation’s headquarters in Geneva. He also succeeded in having his country admitted as a member despite a traditional commitment to neutrality that prevented Berne from participating in peacekeeping operations.
-Gustave Ador’s successor, Max Huber, was also an expert in multiple mandates. Between April 1931 and November 1932, he presided both the Geneva Committee and the Nansen International Office, a governmental organisation set up by the League of Nations to control flows of refugees. In February 1933, George Werner, a jurist and the second in command at the ICRC, took over at the head of the Nansen International Office. During this period, explains Dzonvinar Kévonian, the Committee’s delegates often worked for the League of Nations, especially the refugee service at the International Labour Organisation. This “overlap” compromised the ICRC’s independence and would today be unacceptable, for no one would imagine Jakob Kellenberger to be both the head of the Geneva Committee and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
-Other ICRC presidents were also involved in governmental politics. Carl-Jacob Burckhardt, who took the reins of the Committee on 1 January 1945, was nominated Swiss ambassador to France on 20 February. His position was highly political, for his country worried about General Charles de Gaulle’s “seditious” connections to communist resistance fighters. True to its legalistic nature, Switzerland had waited until July 1944 before calling the former French ambassador, the writer Paul Morand, back from Berne to Vichy. It recognised the provisional government in Paris the following October. Meanwhile, General Charles de Gaulle delayed accrediting Carl-Jacob Burckhardt until four months after his nomination. To focus on his diplomatic career, the latter then gave up his position at the ICRC and was replaced by his predecessor, Max Huber, who took up the position of honorary president until January 1947. Paul Ruegger, another president of the Committee, was just as controversial. Nominated Swiss ambassador to Rome in 1936 before his dismissal by the fascists in 1942, he played a dubious role in turning away Austrian and German Jewish refugees expelled from Italy in December 1938. Following recommendations from the Swiss Chief of Justice Heinrich Rothmund, Paul Ruegger suggested adding the annotation “NA” (Non-Aryan) to Italian passports to identify and redirect these asylum-seekers away from Switzerland.
-From 1945 onwards, the ICRC did stop electing active members of government. However, it continued recruiting former ambassadors or high-ranking civil servants. Successively nominated in 1976, 1987 and 1999, all its presidents had held official positions. The first, Alexandre Hay, had been the Director General of the Swiss national bank; the second, Cornelio Sommaruga, was charged with international economic relations between 1984 and 1986; and the third, Jakob Kellenberger, had been State Secretary to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Committee also welcomed former presidents of the Swiss Confederation, like Ernest Nobs from 1952 and Max Petitpierre from 1961: the former was head of state in 1949 and 1950; the latter in 1955 and 1960. Other ICRC members have gone on to careers in the public sector after leaving positions in the organisation. The Committee’s envoy to Biafra, Albert Bachmann, beca me the head of the Swiss secret service in 1974. However, he was forced to resign in 1981 after a parliamentary enquiry into the vagaries of his department.
-Historically, the multiple mandates of some ICRC members have caused obvious conflicts of interest. Gustave Ador, Giuseppe Motta and Philippe Etter, for example, were all simultaneously Committee members and Federal councillors. As for William Rappard, he entered the ICRC in 1917, just when the Swiss government made him a special envoy to the United States; he also had an official role at the League of Nations between 1920 and 1934. But double mandates were not an issue for the Committee. If William Rappard was forced to resign in 1921, it was because of a disagreement with Gustave Ador over his “betrayal ” in favour of the rival League of Red Cross, where he had accepted the position of Secretary General in 1919-1920. Gustave Ador himself had to temporarily withdraw from the ICRC while heading the Swiss Confederation between June 1917 and February 1920, when he was replaced by Edouard Naville as acting president. However, his government involvement inevitably had an impact on the Committee . Sometimes in a positive way: Gustave Ador , for instance, facilitated agreements between Great Britain and the Ottoman Empire, on the one hand, and France and Germany, on the other, for the repatriation of prisoners of war and civil detainees. Conferences to negotiate these agreements were held in Berne, the first being signed on 29 December 1917 and the second on 26 April 1918. On the negative side, the political activities of Gustave Ador, as Geneva’s representative at the Federal Council, and Edouard Odier, as Berne’s ambassador to Petrograd, meant both wanted to safeguard Swiss neutrality. They therefore abstained from signing an ICRC communiqué on 18 February 1918 denouncing the use of toxic gases by Germany and the Allies . Clearly, government priorities outweighed those of the Committee. Consequently, Gustave Ador, as head of state, ordered the Bolsheviks to close their diplomatic mission in Berne after they were accused of supporting a general strike. In response, the ICRC delegate to Saint Petersburg was expelled in June 1919. In Russia, the Committee found itself playing a consular role, as diplomatic relations between the two countries were broken off and the Swiss legation’s offices were pillaged in October 1919. The ICRC became an unofficial embassy and quickly moved away from its traditional mission focusing on prisoners-of-war. Its Moscow delegate Voldemar Wehrlin, in particular, was charged with the repatriation of around 7,000 Swiss nationals living in Russia at the time. To do so, he had to update administrative documents, give legal advice, and issue, extend or cancel Swiss passports. Given the situation, the ICRC followed orders from Berne and refused to assist Swiss communists who had entered Russia “at their own risk”. Likewise, it complied with instructions issued by the Federal political department to reduce costs and slow down repatriations during the economic crisis of the 1920s. It even collected and recorded declarations from residents of Swiss origin who renounced their nationality because they had no more ties to the homeland. Only after dekulakisation and the purges initiated by Stalin in the 1930s did the ICRC once again take up its humanitarian activities in favour of all Swiss citizens, regardless of political leanings. This allowed the Committee to negotiate the release and repatriation of those held by the Soviets, rather than their deportation to the gulag.
-The ICRC’s ties to Swiss authorities were confirmed during the interwar period: the authorities even saved the institution from bankruptcy after the 1930s financial crisis. In a country that shunned diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, it came as no surprise that the Committee had little sympathy for Bolshevik revolutionaries. In 1924, Théodore Aubert, a lawyer who was formerly an ICRC delegate, set up the anti-communist EIA (Entente International Anticommuniste). The organisation enjoyed the support of the president of the Finnish Red Cross, Marshal Gustaf Mannerheim, as well as four active Committee members: Lucien Cramer, Guillaume Favre, Georges Wagnière and Rodolphe de Haller. After the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, it received funding from Italy, and subsequently advocated an alliance with the fascists to counter the “red peril”. Théodore Aubert was also a member of Georges Oltramare’s Union Nationale, a group close to Benito Mussolini’s supporters. Lucien Cramer, who published a brochure attacking renewed diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, was responsible for the organisation’s political agenda, as was Georges Wagnière, the Swiss ambassador to Italy between 1918 and 1936. The Union Nationale was discreetly supported by Georges-Elie Audeoud, Edmond Boissier, Guillaume Favre and Jacques Berthélémy Micheli, all members of the ICRC and the Parti National Démocratique ( which considered merging with Georges Oltramare’s group in 1938 and which belonged to the right-wing coalition in power in the Geneva canton at the time).
-The ICRC also appeared to be acting under influence during World War Two. As seen above in the chronologi cal section regarding Germany from 1933 onwards, the Swiss government was not without blame in failing to denounce the Holocaust. The Committee even waited for Berne’s approval before sending delegates to concentration camps in 1944. To keep a low profile, the government had already refused the ICRC permission to follow up on British requests to visit Jewish refugees held in Switzerland in 1942. In the same vein, it had attempted to modify a Committee report on abuses suffered by German nationals detained in the Dutch colony of Indonesia , so as to avoid Nazi reprisals when citizens from the Netherlands were being deported to Germany.
-The ICRC could expect certain services from the Federal government in return. This was evident in some win-win exchanges between the Committee and Swiss authorities. The two entities’ joint interests were obvious. Yves Collart quotes Marcel Pilaz-Golaz, the head of Swiss diplomacy, who explained in 1941: “In Berne’s opinion, what is good for the ICRC is good for Switzerland.” During World War Two, the government funded over half of the institution’s total budget. It also exempted the Committee from customs duties, provided staff with diplomatic passports, assisted in transport operations and excused ICRC staff from military duties. With the permission of Edouard de Haller, member of the ICRC from 1940-1941 and Swiss Federal councillor, the organisation obtained boats to transport supplies. Abroad , its delegates could use the diplomatic bag, even if they avoided taking up residence in Swiss embassies. In theory, Swiss diplomats were not called on to fulfil any of the Committee’s humanitarian tasks. In practice, however, the separation of duties was often a mere formality . During the Cold War, again, the institution moved closer to the Swiss government. Attacked by the Communist press , the ICRC was accused of being at Washington’s beck and call. In retaliation, Berne began proceedings against André Bonnard, the president of the local section of the World Peace Council, who, in June 1952, had given his French Communist colleague Frederic Joliot-Curie information on the commercial and industrial activities of members of the Geneva Committee. The ICRC, which had not sued the World Peace Council, was thus considered by the government as a national interest. In March 1954, the Federal Criminal Court eventually sentenced André Bonnard to a short but symbolic suspended sentence of 15 days in prison.
-This did not signal the end of the government’s protection. The Swiss authorities regularly sent envoys to negotiate the release of ICRC representatives like August Lindt during his brief detention by Nigerian authorities in 1969. In return, Berne requested the Committee to prepare diplomatic conferences. Within Switzerland, ICRC employees had limited room to manoeuvre and did not benefit from the diplomatic immunity usually awarded to international organisations based in Geneva. Conflicts of interest also occurred with other states until the institution amended its internal regulations. Only in 1986 were delegations invited to international conferences of the Red Cross finally barred from simultaneously representing a national society and a government. A further seven years were necessary before the Committee signed on 19 March 1993 an agreement with Switzerland so it would be recognised as an international organisation and awarded diplomatic immunity.
-Meanwhile, the CRS (Croix-Rouge suisse) has even stronger ties to the Swiss government. During World War Two, for instance, the authorities requested it to organise relief operations and supervise around 20 Swiss NGOs. Berne also impose d certain conditions: to appease Berlin, the CRS was ordered to avoid focusing on Nazi victims. Consequently, donations from the American Red Cross were refused because they were earmarked for Jewish refugees in Switzerland. Instead, e fforts concentrated on children. Between 1942 and 1947, the CRS ran a programme that aim ed to provide relief to minors in Nazi-occupied Europe. It focused on neighbouring countries so that Jewish people would not need to cross the Swiss border to be assisted. The initiative came from Edouard de Haller, a future minister and member of the Geneva Committee. Withi n Switzerland, activities focused on illegal immigrants, and succeeded in placing 180,000 of them in temporary host families. In France, however, the programme had to apply the anti-Semitic laws of the Vichy regime. As a result, t he CRS fire d Rösli Naef (1911-1996), a nurse, and force d Anne-Marie Imhof-Piguet (1916-), a delegate, to resign after they attempted to smuggle the children of deported Jews across the Swiss border in December 1942. The women had previously assisted the children in La Hille in the Pyrenees before a police raid led to their internment in a camp in Vernet in August 1942. According to an internal memorandum dated 8 February 1943 and quoted by Gérard Delaloye, collaborators of the Swiss Red Cross we re requested to maintain “strict political, religious and ideological neutrality. The French government’s laws and decrees must be executed to the letter, whether or not they are in accordance with your own convictions. […] The French government has entrusted us with a relief mission for children. The mission will only succeed if we prove ourselves trustworthy and avoid compromising it with reckless actions. If, in the future, you feel the situation is such that you are unable to carry out your duties, we ask you to resign rather than continue working and thus jeopardise the reputation of Switzerland and the Red Cross.”
-The proximity between the CRS and its government is not only due to the exceptional circumstances created by World War Two. It also has structural origins. This is evident in the political career of several of the organisation’s presidents: Kurt Bollinger (1982-1988), a squadron leader in the Swiss Air Force between 1973 and 1980; Karl Kennel (1988-1996), a Conservative deputy for Lucerne between 1963 and 1971 and a Federal state councillor for the Christian Democrats between 1971 and 1987; Franz Muheim ( 1997- 2000), a Swiss ambassador to London between 1989 and 1994; René Rhinow ( since 2001), a law professor who chaired the Swiss Upper House (Council of States) in 1999. Institutionally speaking, the CRS plays an auxiliary role for public authorities and often has a representative on the ICRC board. From 1981 onwards, it was charged with running an office assisting in the deportation of illegal immigrants and asylum seekers. Cantonal CRS chapters we re involved in around 25% of all expulsions organised by Swiss authorities. According to the journalist Pierre Hazan, this had implications for the institution’s medical centres in registration offices for asylum seekers. Because it depended on government funding, the CRS refuse d to treat patients who we re suspected of pretending to be sick. In the same vein, it did not comment on the repressive nature of the Federal Office for Refugees (ODR) under the aegis of an ad hoc umbrella, OSAR (Office suisse d’aide aux réfugiés ), which groups governmental agencies and NGOs.
-The ICRC is no exception: other national societies have been accused of being too close to political powers. Funded by the Ministry of the Interior, the CRF (Croix-Rouge française), reports for example Anne de Loisy, deters journalists from investigating bad treatment and police violence in the airport centres where it assists detained asylum seekers. The CRI (Croce Rossa Italiana) is not better: in 2009, it accepted to identify, register, and control Gypsy illegal immigrants to be deported. Generally speaking, Red Crosses and Red Crescents are close to state structures because they are considered as public auxiliaries. Abroad, notes Ian McAllister, “aid follows the flag, i.e. national societies rather tamely follow the regional priorities of their own government”. The Dutch Red Cross, for instance, uses its own sources of funding for running programmes in the Netherlands, but is entirely dependent on the government for international activities. National societies can also play a role in initiating dialogue with the enemy. In July 1958, Washington, which had no direct diplomatic relations with East Berlin, used the ARC (American Red Cross) to negotiate the release of nine American soldiers caught during a storm and forced to land with their helicopter in the People’s Democratic Republic of Germany a month earlier. In addition to their activities in the fields of health, immigration or diplomacy, national societies help to maintain law and order at home. In the Arab world, Red Crescents are used by authoritarian regimes to counter the influence of Islamic NGOs by supervising charities. In exchange, they enjoy certain privileges. In Syria, they have an exclusive right to raise funds from members of the public. In Abu Dhabi and Jordan, they are given permission to collect donations in schools as all pupils are automatically considered as members of the Red Crescent.
-Obviously, the docility of national societies depends on the circumstances and the regime in place. The British Red Cross, writes John Hutchinson, was receptive to government requests in the 1920s and turned down an Italian invitation to form an International Relief Union for victims of natural disasters, fearing a fascist initiative. According to Jonathan Benthall, ties were reinforced during the Gulf Crisis of 1991, when the organisation launched an important fundraising campaign to support Kurds at the request of Jeffrey Archer, a former Conservative deputy. However, Geoffrey Best considers the British Red Cross is less close to the authorities than its American counterpart, especially given its lack of influence over the government’s humanitarian policies. This is visible in London’s delay in approving the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the additional protocols of 1977, respectively ratified in 1957 and 1998. The United Kingdom feared that the development of international humanitarian law would prevent it from using nuclear weapons, compromise its relationship with the United States, cause conflict amongst NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) members, and create difficulties for its troops based in Ireland, South Yemen and Malaysia, where England was accused of mistreating local populations and refusing to allow detainees prisoner-of-war status. Actually, the British authorities only took part in drafting the Geneva Conventions of 1949 to avoid being alienated by other states and to preserve the ICRC’s neutrality, threatened by Soviet and Swedish reform projects.
-In this regard, Red Cross societies in Western democracies are also dependent on election results. The CRF (Croix-Rouge française) is one such example. During the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, the organisation had its headquarters at the Elysian Palace, where the French president now lives, but tried to remain independent from the military. According to Grégoire Wyrouboff, this was not necessarily a good choice, as the German Red Cross was much more efficient in medical terms thanks to its integration with the Army at the beginning of the conflict. Headed by aristocrats, the future CRF was antagonised by anticlerical executives of the Third Republic. Nationalised during the two world wars, it was also at the mercy of the governments of the Fourth and Fifth Republics. After the Socialists took power in May 1981, President François Mitterrand named a supporter, Georgina Dufoix, to the head of the Red Cross in April 1989. This political manoeuvring was strongly criticised by the press. Georgina Dufoix was nevertheless obliged to resign when the CRF became involved in a scandal involving the evacuation of a Palestinian terrorist, Georges Habache, from Tunis, for treatment in a Paris hospital in January 1992 . When the Conservatives returned to power, President Jacques Chirac put Marc Gentilini, a professor of medicine and a member of his party (the Rassemblement pour la République ), at the head of the organisation in May 1997. A deputy for both the Mayor of Bris -sous-Forges and the Member of Parliament Pierre-André Wiltzer, who was to become Minister of Development Cooperation, Marc Gentilini had close links to Africa . In 1988, he launched an NGO to fight AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome), OPALS ( Organisation panafricaine de lutte contre le sida) . Supported by Edith Bongo, the wife of the Gabonese president, and funded by a branch of the oil company Total in Libreville, this organisation was part of the CRF between 1998 and 2006. After completing two mandates, Marc Gentilini was eventually replaced in December 2004 by Jean-François Mattéi, another Conservative politician who was Minister of Health under Jean-Pierre Raffarin’s government between May 2002 and March 2004.
-In this respect, Red Cross societies have been used as both political springboards and retirement opportunities. In France, once again, the organisation helped to “recycle” ministers that had fallen out of favour: Georgina Dufoix after the contaminated blood scandal in 1988, and Jean-François Mattéi after the heat wave deaths of summer 2003. As for Nigeria, its Red Cross co-opted as president Rochas Okorocha, who had just lost the presidential primaries of the ruling People’s Democratic Party in 2007, and who joined the opposition to contest regional elections in Imo State in 2011. In Norway, the Red Cross was also used as an honourable retirement option for former members of government. Its presidents from 1993 and 1998 onwards were respectively Astrid Nøklebye Heiberg, a Conservative deputy and Minister for Administration in 1986, and Thorvald Stoltenberg, a Labour Minister of Defence in 1979- 1981 and Foreign Affairs in 1987-1989 and 1990-1993. Thorvald Stoltenberg went on to be nominated the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in 1990, and a Special Representative to the former Yugoslavia in 1993. Alternately, the NRK (Norges Røde Kors) has served as a political springboard for its directors, especially its secretary-generals in 2001-2003 and 2003-2005, both Labour: Jan Egeland, who began his career as a diplomat between 1990 and 1997, was promoted head of the Office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs at the United Nations from 2003 to 2006; Jonas Gahr Støre, who was an adviser under the government of Jens Stoltenberg from 2000 to 2001, was Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2005 to 2009.
