FRANCAISComité International de la Croix Rouge - Comments
10) Institutional learning
-With its extensive experience in armed conflicts, the ICRC’s aptitude for analysis is far better than the vast majority of NGOs. A number of its leaders have pursued high level academic careers and have been involved in the creation of some of the key research centres that currently exist in Switzerland. One example is William Rappard, an ICRC member from 1917 to 1921, who founded the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva in 1927. Jacques Freymond, a history professor and vice-president of the Committee between 1965 and 1971, then took over the reins and helped launch research centres specialised on Africa, Asia and Europe. With the IFRC and the Swiss Red Cross, the ICRC also established its own research department in Geneva in 1965, the Henry Dunant Institute, which offered training on international humanitarian law. Restructured in 1998, this institute became independent of the Committee to facilitate its involvement in political mediation and conflict-prevention. The following year, it re-formed as a foundation, “The Henry-Dunant Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue”, and started to build partnerships with international organisations, governments, the private sector and associations representing victims.
-Thanks to these analytical capabilities and its past experiences, the ICRC enjoys excellent credibility. To date, no factual errors have been found in its annual reports, unlike Amnesty International, which published incorrect information on Kuwait in 1990. Moreover, the institution has developed much more coherent and detailed strategies than NGOs like Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders) , which tend to react on a case by case basis. Further to an extensive evaluation carried out in 1996 on the impact of humanitarian organisations during the African Great Lakes crisis, the ICRC ended up becoming more involved in collective discussions on the quality of operations. Since then, it has participated in a forum set up in London in 1997, ALNAP (Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Action). From 1999, it also introduced compulsory performance reviews.
-The ICRC has occasionally opened itself up to the critical scrutiny of external evaluations, such as Donald Tansley's investigation in 1975 or the Avenirstudies of 1982-1984 and 1996-2002. Results varied. Donald Tansley was the former Vice-President of CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency) and the first person to be entrusted with a complete evaluation of national societies, the League of Red Cross and the Geneva Committee. Carried out between February 1973 and June 1975, his investigation underlined several important trends, including the movement’s isolation, its coordination problems, its complacency with regard to the authorities, the financial weight of its administrative structures, the collusion of national societies with their respective governments, the LRC's heavy and stagnant bureaucracy, the self-satisfaction and elitism of the ICRC, its excessive deference to local powers, and, finally, its failure to review its humanitarian programmes. In addition to the Geneva Committee, the League of Red Cross also funded occasional evaluations of its operations. In June 1986, for instance, Robert Chambers, a specialist from the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, was given the task of reviewing programmes targeting victims of the drought in the Sahel. Even if the League saved lives and was as efficient as other humanitarian agencies in the field, h is report identified several problems: amateurism, improvisation, empiricism, lack of planning, and untrained expatriates. He also highlighted a more general trend, that is, the poor institutional learning of an organisation with sixty years of experience. Afterwards, the ICRC requested a complete assessment of its activities as part of the Avenir study. Research was carried out in 2002 by Jean-Pierre Wolf, a consultant from Zurich, and Wolf-Dieter Eberwein, Hugo Slim and Boris Maver from the Universities of Berlin, Oxford and Geneva respectively. They underlined the need to encourage dialogue, build on international humanitarian law , diversify the sources of funding, improve recruitment, reinforce the follow-up of assessments and improve means to measure efficiency and access to victims. Today, the ICRC regularly requests independent reviews of its programmes, about a half dozen every year. Funders commission their own investigations. The British DfID (Department for International Development), for example, evaluated the Geneva Committee for the period 1999-2002 under the supervision of a London-based consultant, Peter Wiles.
-Nevertheless, it must be asked whether such exercises are mere formalities. Do they actually contribute to discussion or allow the organisation to build on experience? The Committee's use of reviews is very recent and the reports are seldom published. Morris Davis had already observed this about the Biafra War, when the ICRC refused to release an audit produced by the London firm Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co. The Committee, confirmed Donald Tansley, was reluctant to have its activities extensively analysed, and opposed “intellectual ” debates to operational pragmatism. For reasons of accessibility, for example, the ICRC argued that it alone was capable of judging the impact of visits to prisoners. To preserve its independence, it also refused to be assessed under the pretext of shielding itself from governmental interference. Other organisations within the Red Cross M ovement we re no better. The League abandoned and lost its archives when it evacuated Paris in September 1939. Afterwards, it neglected institutional learning and had no means to pay for evaluations because it was plagued by structural deficits. Only at the end of World War Two did the LRC start to fund performance reviews in order to improve logistics and the coordination of national societies. Even so, point out Daphne Reid and Patrick Gilbo, the League initially refused to let experts examine its operations for the victims of the drought in the Sahel. To begin with, the assessment done in April 1985 only assessed the Swiss Red Cross, which was criticised for its dysfunctional administration, the lack of nutritional policy and distribution problems that meant supplies failed to reach the children most at risk of starvation. The following year, an audit by the firm Price Waterhouse criticised the League for not carrying out feasibility studies before launching relief operations.
-Even when evaluations were carried out, their most negative conclusions were seldom published. It was therefore difficult for the institution to learn from failures and capitalise on its experience . Eric Martin, the president of the Committee, labelled Donald Tansley’s report a “merciless inquisition”. Yet it was the only assessment to be almost fully published. Otherwise, the ICRC has not released any of the reviews carried out during the 2000s, whether its own, British evaluations by DfID (Department for International Development), or the Avenir study, whose conclusions were briefly addressed in the institution's activity reports. From this point of view, the Committee lags behind the IFRC, which is one of the only humanitarian organisations to post its performance reviews online. Generally speaking, the Red Cross M ovement still needs to improve in this domain. According to Roger Riddell, for instance, the IFRC recently refused to communicate a critical report of its aid to survivors of the Asian Tsunami in December 2004. In November 1987, Mario Enrique Villarroel Lander, the president of the Federation, had even vetoed publication and dismissed his general secretary, Hans Høeg h for releasing Robert Chambers’ report on relief operations for the victims of the Sahel drought without his consent.
-Ultimately, it makes sense to ask questions about the manner in which the ICRC analysed its mistakes. It did not officially recognise its failings with regard to the Jews during World War Two until half a century later. However, the then president Cornelio Sommaruga did not apologise when he delivered a speech in Krakow during the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on 26 January 1995 . The Committee also sought to shirk its responsibility for the failures of the ITS (International Tracking Service) to identify survivors of the holocaust, as shown in Christine Rütten’s documentary movie entitled “The Red Cross under the 3rd Reich”, broadcast on the Franco-German channel Arte on 26 September 2007. Generally speaking, the rare evaluations covering the whole movement do not seem to have been used to improve performance. In a study published in 1988, two representatives of the Hungarian and Finnish Red Crosses, Rezso Sztuchlik and Anja Toivola, remarked that Donald Tansley‘s report of 1975 had had little follow-up. While its recommendations were discussed by the ICRC, only the 23 national societies investigated by the evaluators commented on the document. Most others failed to even read the report, let alone respond to questionnaires sent out afterwards to analyse their views of Donald Tansley's conclusions. The LRC itself simply ignored the evaluators’ proposals, and refused to establish a working group to study them at the 23rd International Conference of the Red Cross in Bucharest in 1977. Instead, in preparation for the 24th I nternational Conference in Manila in 1981, it drew up a rather vague strategic plan, which failed to include a budget forecast. This lack of direction was seen again in the code of conduct adopted in 1993 and ratified at the 26th International Conference of the Red Cross in 1995. According to Alain Mourey, an ICRC nutritionist, these guidelines are too abstract and it is unclear how the movement should actually implement them. Humanitarian organisations are unfamiliar with their terms , while governments do not apply them, as they were not instrumental in their adoption. Drafted under the aegis of Oxfam in 1998, the technical version of this code of conduct, Sphere, simply recommends minimal standards for food or medical services. But it is certainly not sufficient to deal with the crucial issues facing the ICRC.
-One of the major challenges in providing humanitarian aid is to help victims without also helping their tormentors. As an uncompromising opponent of military blockades and embargoes, the Committee is familiar with the problem because it has often supplied war economies. Thus the head of the ICRC in Afghanistan, Jacques de Maio, explained to the French Parliament on 19 May 2010 that the combatants treated by the Red Cross quickly went back to fight, unless they died on the front. Interestingly enough, Nicholas Berry, who criticised the ICRC’s “pacifism”, and John Hutchinson, who wrote a book on its “militarization” , both concluded that the institution helped prolong conflicts by supplying the fighters and/or preventing decisive and rapid victories. Initially, the Geneva Committee even requested the repatriation of prisoners of war before the end of the hostilities, which would have reinforced army ranks! The ICRC has often seen its aid misappropriated by combatants. During the Lebanese war, for instance, one of its vehicles was stolen and probably used in a terrorist attack on the South in 1985. In Somalia in 1991, in Rwanda in 1994, in Liberia in 1996 and in the Sudan in 1998, ICRC deliveries arrived directly into the hands of fighters . Philippe Gaillard, the head of the Committee's delegation in Kigali during the genocide, explained how the institution gave the militias fuel to remove the corpses of their victims . The ICRC even offered petrol to help an apparatchik escape. Moreover, it had to refrain from denouncing the massacres as a crime against humanity to be able to continue its activities. In refugee camps like Ngara in Tanzania, the Committee found itself supplying the militias who were training to return to Rwanda to finish off the genocide. According to Philippe Gaillard as quoted by Carol Bergman, the ICRC was only trying to help families and argued that children should not be punished for their parents' crimes. Unsurprisingly, other organisations of the Red Cross Movement had similar problems. In Iraq, a special envoy of the Italian society, Maurizio Scelli, stepped in to pay the ransom for two humanitarian staff, Simona Torretta and Simona Pari, who had been kidnapped in September 2004 while working for a small NGO, “A Bridge for Baghdad”. In August 2005, it was reveal ed that, in exchange, the Red Cross had secretly given medical assistance to four terrorists hunted by the American military: a decision approved by Silvio Berlusconi's government.
-In theory, the ICRC is better equipped than most NGOs to prevent the misappropriation of aid by dictatorial or guerrilla rackets. Thanks to the agreements it has signed with numerous countries, its delegations are exempt from customs duties on the imports of humanitarian supplies; the only taxes applicable must not exceed those applied to public services. Besides, the ICRC has now enough expatriates throughout the world to ensure that its aid reaches victims. According to François Bugnion, the institution monitors food supplies to prisoner of war camps by establishing delivery receipts, drafting distribution reports and sending delegates to cross-check operations. However, matters get complicated when aid is intended for civilian populations in open spaces where it is harder to trace inputs. Despite its attempts to organize impartial distributions, Hans-Peter Gasser, a former delegate, admits quite frankly that the institution is not able to guarantee that relief goods wouldn’t be diverted by hungry soldiers. In any case, the procedures recommended by François Bugnion only allow the ICRC to monitor supplies during delivery. The institution has no control over the use of its aid afterwards. Moreover, it does not always have personnel on the ground to verify what is going on. During World War Two, its supplies to concentration camps were diverted by the Nazis. Likewise, explains Olive Checkland, very little aid reached prisoners of war held by Tokyo: Geneva’s parcels were instead used to feed an isolated Japanese garrison in the jungle at Aperon for five months in 1944.
-The ICRC’s inability to follow up on the military and political misappropriation of its supplies is particularly obvious for programmes in the Communist bloc during the Cold War. In Berlin, for example, agreements signed in December 1945 lasted de facto until May 1950 and gave the institution permission to deliver aid to the four sectors of the city, the only area still open to the Committee in Eastern Europe at this time. Supplies were divided on a pro rata basis, with 36% dedicated to the Soviet zone, 30% to the American zone, 20% to the British zone and 14% to the French zone. The organisation, which was attributed numerous warehouses along the front lines, was initially in a good position to send delegates to check the distributions entrusted to a people’s mutual aid committee (Volkssolidarität) under the supervision of the communists. However, the Cold War and the Iron C urtain quickly curbed the ICRC's freedom of action. From June 1948 to May 1949, the Berlin Blockade by the Red Army forced the Committee to organise rail convoys from Switzerland that passed through Austria, Czechoslovakia and East Germany to reach the city. The Soviets also wanted all relief operations to be controlled by the External Trade Minister after the establishment of a German Democratic Republic in October 1949. For them, foreign aid had to meet two objectives: assist the working class and help achieve the economic goals of their two-year plan . Consequently, the Communists opposed personal donations and parcels, for they failed to take collective needs into account and tended to favour more well to do families. In the end, the ICRC lost control of its programmes. Delegates’ trips to the Soviet zone fell from 11 in 1947 to 2 in 1949, according to Catherine Rey-Schyrr. During the Hungarian crisis of 1956 too, the Committee found it difficult to maintain an appropriate humanitarian space. To supervise its distributions, it could theoretically visit feeding centres and get receipts proving that parcels were reaching the victims. In the same vein, it sold some of the relief to hospitals and farmers in order to fund and control a special bank account of the Hungarian Red Cross, which couldn’t use it without the approval of Geneva. According to Isabelle Vonèche Cardia, only "a small part" of the parcels ended up on the black market. "The ICRC could effectively control its programmes” in Hungary. But its relief was heavily taxed by the Soviets, and the local humanitarian personnel was imprisoned and prevented from helping the rebels. For political prisoners too, add Françoise Perret and François Bugnion, the ICRC could not control its distributions.
-Decolonisation was another key period for difficulties in distributing supplies, as there was always a risk that liberation movements would divert aid and supply their combatants first. During t he Vietnam War, for instance, the ICRC was never given information on the programmes it was funding through the Hanoi Red Cross. What it did know was that its parcels were distributed by the communist guerrillas of the Viet Minh in the North from 1946, then the NLF ( National Liberation Front) in the South from 1964. In its 1966 annual report, the Committee admitted it never received any “confirmation of delivery of its aid […] nor information about how it was being deployed”. During the period 1965-1972, this was all the more surprising because, contrary to popular belief, the ICRC sent more money and medicine to the Red Cross in the North than in the South, according to Keith Suter. In neighbouring Laos, the Committee adopted a similar strategy. From June 1961, it tried to work with the communist insurgents of the Pathet Lao. But except for the case of four Americans (including journalist Grant Wolfkill) in Xieng Khouang in November 1961, it was not allowed to visit prisoners in the hands of the guerrilla and could only assist those on the government’s side. Moreover, it could not prevent the Pathet Lao from brainwashing its captives and forcing them to work in camps. In other words, it had no access to rebel zones, while insecurity also restrained its work, as an ICRC doctor on his way to Saigon, Jacob Sturzenegger, died in a plane crash on 12 March 1975 near the village of Thanh-An in the Pleiku region. Likewise in Africa from 1973 onwards , the institution resolved to hand over medicine and ambulances to guerrillas controlling territories it could not enter, such as the PAIGC (Partido Africano para a Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde), the MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola), the FNLA (Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola), the FRELIMO (Frente de Libertação de Mozambique), the ZAPU (Zimbabwe African People's Union), the ZANU (Zimbabwe African National Union), the SWAPO (South-West Africa People's Organisation), the PAC (Pan-Africanist Congress) and the ANC (African National Congress).
-Of course, the ICRC always argued that its compromises were in the best interests of the victims. However, highly debatable concessions have been made for the sake of gaining access to prisoners. To silence Arab rumours that its delegates to Palestine in 1948 were Jewish, for instance, the Committee confirmed in writing that its personnel did not have Israeli ancestry, and even momentarily considered proving the Aryan descent of its expatriates by putting “Christian” on their identity papers. Later on, it requested that Palestinian prisoners repeat their accusations of ill-treatment in front of Israeli officers before officially forwarding their complaints: a procedure which exposed plaintiffs to the risk of retaliation from their jailers, as underlined in the National Guild of Lawyer's report of 1978, quoted by David Weissbrodt and James McCarthy. For diplomatic and political reasons, t he ICRC also disregarded its own protocol for prison visits. In East Germany in the mid-1960s, note David Weissbrodt and James McCarthy, it agreed to help prisoners of conscience without having permission to meet them alone. In doing so, it hoped to set a precedent for future activities in Communist countries . Globally, around 10% of ICRC interviews with prisoners took place in the presence of jailers in 1970.
-It is understandable that to gain access to victims, the Committee was sometimes forced to choose the lesser evil and take certain risks. For example , the institution preferred to create stateless person categories rather that forcefully repatriate prisoners of war who did not want to return to their countries, as for some Russians after 1945, North Koreans after 1953 and Iraqis after 1991. The ICRC also recognised that its visits to prisons could give legitimacy to the detaining powers, like the Greek military junta in the late 1960s. The risk was even higher in regimes that only authorised Geneva to assist “official” prisoners after their trial, as this shifted the focus away from “suspects” tortured in police stations, military barracks and secret detention centres, where abuses were most frequent. In worst case scenarios, explains David Forsythe, ICRC inspections sometimes encouraged the authorities to hide or eliminate mistreated inmates . After the junta in Chile gave the ICRC permission to access political prisoners, for instance, the military in Argentina preferred to kill opponents to avoid being held responsible for bad imprisonment conditions. In another case, royalist leaders who were pressed by the Geneva Committee to exchange prisoners with the republicans in North Yemen in 1964 were eventually assassinated by “hawks” in their own camp.
-Some “collateral damage” is inevitable if we want humanitarian activities to continue. However, the ICRC’s liabilities are more serious when it contributes directly to supporting warring parties . Its role in providing fuel to the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide, even for humanitarian purposes, was shocking. Imagine the scandal that would have ensued had the institution helped fuel the Nazi gas chambers to stop Jewish suffering! The question must be asked whether these compromises actually save lives. In its 1994 annual report, the ICRC acknowledged that its “protection work [had] a very limited impact” in Rwanda. Meanwhile, it attempted to make up for the inability of failed or weak states to maintain their prisons in working order. In the mid-1990s, the ICRC decided to “take over, partially or completely and in a lasting manner, from detaining authorities”. Its concern was to ensure the survival of prison populations at risk of dying from hunger, sickness or physical exhaustion. The organisation therefore undertook to renovate existing structures or to build new ones in Rwanda, Burundi, Congo-Kinshasa, Liberia, Madagascar, Yemen and Haiti. In Nsinda, Rwanda, it funded the construction of seven “temporary” prisons to improve detention conditions for genocide suspects waiting for trial. It also supplied food to the prisoners until January 2004, when the government finally began to take over and look after the 89,000 people accused of participating in the massacres of April- July 1994. The ICRC then supported plans to reform the Rwandan prison system.
-In this respect, the Committee has not demonstrated that it is truly committed to doing no harm and to limiting the undesirable effects of aid . Its “Doctrine 15”, discussed above in the section on public relations , simply states what conditions are required before the organisation can denounce massive and repeated violations of humanitarian international law. It deals with the prospect of being expelled from a country, but makes no provisions for a withdrawal strategy should ICRC aid cause more harm than good. Practically speaking, the Committee could learn lessons from an objective analysis of the situations where its operations have had negative effects. The ICRC withdrew for these reasons from Ethiopia in 1988, Tajikistan in 1997 and Madagascar in 2006. In most cases, however, it chose to continue its programmes, at the risk of appearing complicit in abuses. This approach differs to that of NGOs like MSF (Médecins sans frontières), which decided in 1995 to withdraw from Rwandan refugee camps to avoid giving assistance to war criminals and “genocidal” militias. Otherwise, the ICRC’s strategy is not very different from other organisations of the Red Cross M ovement which are less concerned by the misappropriation of aid . A t the end of the Spanish Civil war in 1939, notes for instance Charles Hurd, the ARC (American Red Cross) was keen to satisfy its Catholic donors, who were hostile to the Republicans’ anticlerical opinions. So it started to supply t he N ationalists and its flour was used to reimburse loans contracted with Germany to buy weapons. Despite the pressure of the American public, which had given up to 70 million dollars to help the victims of the Nazis, it was President Franklin Roosevelt who, later on, prevented the ARC from providing assistance to France, Holland and Belgium after 1940, for fear that humanitarian aid would end up in the hands of the German occupation troops. The BRCS(British Red Cross Society) did not perform better. In Nazi Germany it did manage to obtain receipts proving that its parcels were reaching British prisoners of war: a ccording to Philip George Cambray, only 16% of food supplies were misappropriated or lost in 1942. In the Soviet Union, however, the BRCS was never authorised to monitor the delivery of humanitarian goods to civilians. In Japan , it was unable to obtain receipts to ensure supplies reached British prisoners of war. When Tokyo surrendered, the Allies found some donated food rotting in warehouses. Yet the Red Cross M ovement failed to learn its lesson. Unlike MSF, which withdrew from North Korea in 1998 because it was not given permission to freely access famine victims, the IFRC continued to work in the last Stalinist dictatorship on earth, thus participating in the communist selection of which groups deserved to be fed and live, or to die by starvation. The Federation argued that its activities helped keep the peace by preventing the collapse of the regime and encouraging the authorities to negotiate a stop to the country’s nuclear arms programme. Behind the humanitarian façade, the objectives were clearly political: to contain a possible influx of North Korean refugees towards Seoul, and to ease the diplomatic relationship between Tokyo and Pyongyang.
-Despite its analytical capabilities, the ICRC’s stubbornness to continue its most problematic programmes is surprising, as the organisation has always been able to re-launch activities in the rare countries it has withdrawn from. In Tajikistan, for instance, the Committee stopped its one-year-old food programme in detention centres where it had been denied access and where supplies were diverted in January 1997. Nonetheless, the institution managed to obtain a partial authorisation to officially visit prisons in June 2003. In other countries, it took much less time to restart activities. In Madagascar, the ICRC suspended, then completely ceased, its prison rehabilitation programme in May and November 2006 respectively, as it had had little success in improving detention conditions. But it soon recommenced its visits when the government decided to adopt a new penitential law in May 2007. Burma is another example. In July 1995, the ICRC closed its Rangoon office and sent its expatriates to Thailand, after the junta blocked access to political prisoners and Karen rebel zones. Four years later, however, it was given permission to return to the country, and sent teams to the provinces of Hpa-an, Kyaing Tong and Mawlamyine. When the regime’s “hawks” regained power in October 2004 and arrested Prime Minister Khin Nyunt (the former Chief of Military Intelligence), the Committee repeatedly protested against various abuses. After a new appeal to the international community in November 2005, the ICRC obtained the right to reopen its five regional offices in Hpa-an, Kyaing Tong, Mandalay, Mawlamyine and Taunggyi. Unable to continue its prison visits, the Committee eventually denounced the regime’s serious and systematic human rights violations in June 2007. Surprisingly, its press release did not lead to government retaliation and t he ICRC was not thrown out of the country. It therefore continued organising visits for prisoners' families and running orthopaedic programmes for those who had been disabled during the war. When the regime repressed Buddhist monks after demonstrations in August 2007, pressure from the international community certainly helped matters. The government was encouraged to adopt a more moderate course of action by its powerful Chinese ally, which was grateful to the ICRC for having obtained the release of some of its citizens kidnapped by rebels in Niger and in Ethiopian Ogaden. As for the junta’s position towards the Committee, it was perhaps a strategy to avoid major concessions to the international community, playing the humanitarian card rather than the political one and negotiating access to prisons instead of sharing power with the opposition.
