>
International Committee of the Red Cross
>
History

Comité International de la Croix Rouge - History




1870-1879


-From 1870, France: the Société de secours aux blessés militaires des armées de terre et de mer (SSBM) is not prepared to cope with the Franco-Prussian war, which begins in July 1870. This is partly due to its leadership. Run by aristocrats and headed by Count Emmanuel de Flavigny from 1870 to 1873, it refuses to let professional medical personnel practice in the field and dismisses a renowned war surgeon, Auguste Nélaton, replacing him with a doctor close to the nobility, Jean-Charles Chenu. Thus Léon Le Fort, a surgeon, criticises the society’s incompetency in an article published in the Revue des deux mondes in 1871. He gives further details in his book: in charge of setting up mobile clinics for the organisation in July 1870, he was stripped of his position in August and surrendered after the siege of Metz in October. In his own words, “the medical corps was unable to manage the ambulance service from the outset of the conflict. A kind of voluntary corps, run by civilians lacking basic experience in warfare, scuppered all efforts by doctors.” At the front, nurses and stretcher-bearers were recruited amongst the unemployed, drunkards, thieves, idlers, unqualified Lady Bountifuls and deserters trying to escape the call-up by wearing medical uniforms. Red Cross armbands were generously distributed, to the point that peasants used them to access the battlefields and steal valuables from corpses without being shot. Others ingeniously put Red Cross banners on the roofs of their houses to avoid having to lodge soldiers: in line with Article 5 of the Geneva Convention of 1864, civilians’ dwellings could not be requisitioned if they were being used to treat the wounded. Away from the front line, some citizens also wore a Red Cross to pretend they had been awarded the French Legion of Honour, a red medal. In the same vein, city councils, philanthropic capitalists, freemasons, Protestants organisations and Jewish groups abused the Red Cross logo to win over the public. General Charles Bourbaki even dressed up as a nurse to escape the town of Metz, surrounded by the enemy. On the contrary, soldiers evacuating the wounded refused to wear the Red Cross armband, arguing they would look like cowards trying to protect themselves from enemy fire. As a matter of fact, knowledge of the 1864 Geneva Convention is quite poor. On one side, the Germans bomb and kill two nurses in a hospital at Sedan on 1st September 1870. On the other, French Francs-tireurs finish off a wounded Bavarian surgeon at Orléans on 10th of November 1870; a day after, regular troops briefly take over the city, deport German nurses to Pau and compel American relief workers to evacuate fatally injured prisoners of war. Captured in Dijon on 27 December 1870, surgeons from the Prussian Red Cross are then imprisoned. And wounded French soldiers, treated in Switzerland, are reintegrate into the Army despite provisions to the contrary in the Geneva Convention. As for the Germans, they deliberately bomb hospitals while they lay siege of Paris. After their victory in January 1871, the French Société de secours aux blessés militaires, which lost four volunteers during the war, does not perform better. Far from remaining neutral, it supports the government of the Versaillais over the rebels of the Paris Commune, the Fédérés. Consequently, the latter dissolve the society, confiscate its material, and briefly arrest Jean-Charles Chenu in April 1871. The Fédérés, who only ratify the Geneva Convention on 13 May 1871, also kill a Red Cross doctor who is the first victim of this civil war. As a result, the Versaillais make no prisoners because they consider that his death justifies the systematic killing of combatants who subsequently fall into their hands. Another doctor is killed and six nurses wounded by the rebels. Meanwhile, ambulances trapped in Paris are used to hide priests persecuted by the Commune, as well as weapons for royalist forces. When the Fédérés begin to use the Red Cross logo, members of the Société de secours aux blessés militaires give up all pretence of neutrality and return to civilian life, abandoning their armbands. For the Versaillais, explains the founder of the British Red Cross John Furley, even the International Committee of the Red Cross is suspect because its name reminds the Socialist International! The Société de secours aux blessés militaires remains biased after the fall of the Commune on 27th May 1871. In January 1872, it funds a memorial service at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris for the victims of the Franco-Prussian War, but not for those killed by the Versaillais. Likewise, the Society sets up at Invalides Palace a Red Cross museum dedicated only to those who died in battle against the Germans. Indeed, the Société de secours aux blessés militaires is very conservative, and its members are mainly Orleanist aristocrats. Between 1873 and 1886, it is presided by King Louis-Philippe’s second son, Louis d’Orléans (1814-1896), Duke of Nemours, who took part in the conquest of Algeria, and went into exile during the 1848 revolution before returning to France in 1871 and being expelled from the army with other monarchists in 1886. At the head of the Society, he is replaced by Marshal Edme Patrice Maurice Mac-Mahon (1808-1898), a reactionary legitimist who fought during the Crimean War, resigned when Charles X abdicated in 1830, governed Algeria in 1864-1870, organised the repression of the Commune in 1871, and was elected President of the French Republic from 1873 to 1879 thanks to support from a monarchist coalition at the National Assembly. The other presidents of the Société de secours aux blessés militaires are cut in the same mould. Between 1893 and 1897, it is King Louis-Philippe’s fourth son, Henri Eugène Philippe d’Orléans (1822-1897), Duke of Aumale: a Governor of the African French colonies in 1847, and a Deputy in 1871, he was sent into exile by the Republicans and removed from the French army in 1886, before returning from exile in 1889. From 1897 to 1904, leadership of the Society next passes to Léopold Davout (1829-1904), the Duke of Auerstaëdt and the nephew of a famous Marshal of Napoleon I. From 1904 to 1916, the organisation is then presided by Marquis Melchior de Vogüé (1829-1916), a former French ambassador to Istanbul and Vienna in the 1870s. The first commoner to take the reins of the French Red Cross is professor Louis Renault from 1916 to 1918, during World War One. In the meantime, the organisation has gradually lost all independence. Since its nationalisation both by the Fédérés and the Versaillais, explains Bertrand Taithe, it became an auxiliary of the governement, ready to mobilise civilians and relief workers to fight alongside the military in the modern totalitarian wars of the XXth Century.
 
-1871-1872, Switzerland: while France and Prussia sign an armistice on 28 January 1871, the Swiss Red Cross resettles some of the 80,000 soldiers of General Charles Bourbaki’s army, which had retreated to Swiss. During the conflict, the Geneva Committee had also set up an International Agency for Information and Assistance to the Wounded in the border town of Basel. Working under a new logo, the green cross, it had recorded prisoners held by both sides, and it facilitates subsequent repatriation programmes by the French and German Red Crosses. However, the war experience is not all positive for the Geneva Committee, two years before its tenth anniversary in 1873. During the conflict, there was so little respect for the humanitarian law that Gustave Moynier publishes in January 1872 a memorandum on the need to establish an “international judicial institution capable of preventing and punishing violations of the Geneva Convention.” Such a proposal will eventually give rise to the International Criminal Court in 1998. In the meantime, the Committee has to be more realistic, and give up some of the utopian dreams it had initially harboured regarding, for instance, the repatriation of wounded or able-bodied soldiers before the end of the fighting, even if this helps enemy armies to re-form during conflict. Drafted during a diplomatic conference in Geneva in 1868, additional articles to the 1864 Geneva Convention theoretically arrange the liberation of wounded prisoners-of-war. But they forbid them to take up arms again. And they allow detaining authorities to keep prisoners for military purposes, especially if they have strategic information, so that the former are not tempted to kill the latter. In a book published in 1876, a German, Carl Lueder, then request that the 1864 Convention also cover civilian as well as military hospitals, but to no avail: the ICRC’s mandate remains restricted to the war wounded.
 
-1872-1876, Spain: The Second Carlist War, which lasts until 1876, is the first internal conflict where the Geneva Committee intervenes, albeit through the intermediary of national Red Crosses. Between 1873 and 1875, the French Society, for instance, takes charge of Spanish refugees who flee to Southern France. The ICRC funds some of these operations, despite opposition from Madrid. Indeed, the Spanish authorities would have preferred to deal with war victims both inside and outside their country. In Spain, the Geneva Committee leaves things up to the Cruz Roja and decides not to send any representative, unlike during the 1875 conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Established on 6 July 1864 by the head of the army’s medical division, Nicasio Landa y Alvarez de Carvallo, the Spanish Red Cross is very close to the monarchy. Under the patronage of Queen Isabel, it is presided by an important prior in the Order of St. John, Infante Sebastian Gabriel de Bourbon y Braganza, and it continues the tradition of a “Holy Cross Society” that was set up on 2 May 1808, during the uprising against the French invaders and Napoleon Bonaparte’s troops in Madrid. Initially called the “Spanish Society for Relief to the War Wounded” pursuant to a law of 20 April 1870, it is exempted from regulations that were passed on 17 April 1821 and that assimilated to a rebel any person who rescued guerrillas. When the Second Carlist War breaks out in 1872, the Cruz Roja is presided by Count José Joaquin de Ripalda, the Marquis of Campos Salinas. At the end of the conflict, the organisation splits and knights of the Hospital of the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem set up a service of ambulances which is recognized by pope Leon XIII in 1880 and which mainly supports an hospital in Madrid, Our Lady of Atocha, until it disapers after the death of its founder, Senator Eduardo Palou y Flores. As for the Cruz Roja, it becomes completely inactive, to the point that the ICRC looks into whether it still actually exist in 1892.
 
-1873-1914: Great Britain: Initially launched by Colonel Robert Loyd-Lindsay, a hero of the Crimean War and a Member of Parliament (MP), the organisation that will give rise to the British Red Cross splits into two separate entities when its founder, John Furley, resigns in 1873. A member of the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, the latter opposes the former, an aristocrat who becomes Lord Wantage and who refuses to popularize and bureaucratize the charity’s activities under the banner of the War Office (that he joins he 1877). As a result, John Furley starts in 1877 another organisation, the Saint John Ambulance Brigade, to provide public health services during peacetime. And he keeps attending ICRC meetings, despite no longer having an institutional connection to Robert Loyd-Lindsay’s Red Cross, which is more and more isolated. The disagreements between the two men are also due to their different reactions to the army’s attempts to militarise an organisation that tried to remain independent and neutral by sending relief workers in civilian clothing to both sides during the 1870 Franco-Prussian War. In 1899, the authorities settle the question and set up a Central British Red Cross Committee, the CBRCC, to train volunteers during peacetime in preparation for war. Pursuant to a royal decree of July 1905, Robert Loyd-Lindsay’s organisation is merged to form the BRCS (British Red Cross Society). Each entity is supposed to maintain separate tasks in peacetime and wartime respectively. Headed by the Queen and sponsored by the King, the new organisation is successively led by a famous surgeon, Sir Frederick Treves (1853-1923), then from 1912, by a Liberal MP of Brighton, Edward Ridsdale (1864-1923), and from 1917, by a Tory representative of Ormskirk, Arthur Stanley. In 1908, a royal charter confirms the institutionalisation of the BRCS, which successfully hosted the Eighth International Conference of the Red Cross in London a year before. As president of the organisation since 1910, however, Nathan Meyer Rothschild is unable to take over the Saint John Ambulance Brigade, which competes for funding and opportunities to provide uniformed volunteers to the Ministry of War. When fighting breaks out against Germany in 1914, both entities are given equal status, a move that leads Edward Ridsdale to resign. But they are eventually forced to become one, largely due to pressure from The Times newspaper, which refuses to launch two separate fundraising campaigns. During the conflict, the BRCS is to hire many women, the FANYs (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry), who compensate for the lack of men and are grouped into so-called VAD (Voluntary Aid Detachments). Feminism and nationalism go altogether in this regard. Up to 80,000 women serve under the British Red Cross, especially ladies of the middle classes that are prevented to join the ranks and files of factory workers.
 
-From 1874, Belgium: Auguste Visschers, president of the Belgian Red Cross since 1868, dies in June 1874 and is replaced by General Bruno-Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Renard until his death in July 1879. Originally set up on 4 February 1864 by Doctor André Uytterhoeven, head surgeon at Anvers Hospital, the society had become the oldest in Europe after Germany was reunited in 1869 and equivalent organisations disappeared in Wurtemberg and Oldenburg. But the Belgian Red Cross is divided between its doctors on the one hand, and the army and the aristocracy on the other, not to mention tensions between Flemish and Walloons. Doctor Henri van Holsbeek (1829-1873), for instance, left the Brussels Red Cross chapter to set up his own in Anvers in 1873. However, his organisation is taken over by the aristocracy under the presidency, from 1885, of Louis-Eugène-Henri-Marie Lamoral, Prince of Ligne (1854-1918). Unable to develop operations, the Croix-Rouge belge (CRB) also wastes considerable time and money in bringing lawsuits against businesses that supposedly misappropriated its logo. Following other constitutional monarchies in Europe, the government then takes control of the society. The CRB is officially recognised by a law passed on 30 March 1891 and forbidden to provide relief or funds outside the country without the permission of the Ministry of War.
 
-1875-1876, Montenegro: thanks to the adoption of the Geneva Convention by the state of Montenegro on 29 November 1875, the ICRC can legally provide relief to some of the 40,000 refugees that flee the Balkan wars opposing Bosnia, Herzegovina and Bulgaria on the one hand, and the Ottoman Empire on the other. In January 1876, a delegate from the Committee sets up the Montenegrin Red Cross with support from its Russian counterpart. The organisation is soon followed by similar structures in Romania and Serbia. This is a timely move given the Austrian Red Cross’ reluctance to take charge of refugees instead of its own soldiers. However, only sovereign nations are supposed to ratify the Geneva Convention, and Montenegro and Serbia are not recognised by the Ottoman Empire. As a result, notes Gustave Rolin-Jaequemyns, Istanbul protests against the breach of its suzerainty. Indeed, the ICRC circumvented the international law to encourage new Red Crosses in regions fighting for independence, even if their final recognition depended on a subsequent ratification of the Geneva Convention by their government. Elsewhere, however, the Committee was more careful to respect national sovereignties and it avoided intervening directly in international conflicts. After criticising Louis Appia and Henry Dunant’s unilateral efforts in Germany in 1866 and France in 1870 respectively, the ICRC seldom sent delegates into the field, and mostly operated through national societies.
 
-1876-1896, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria: The ICRC supports the creation of a Serbian Red Cross in June 1876, although the country’s independence is not recognised until the Berlin Conference in March 1878. Presided by the Archbishop of Belgrade, the society has 1500 members and is immediately active during clashes with the Ottoman Empire. As soon as September 1876, for instance, one of its secretaries, Luka Popovitch, is killed by Turkish cavalry in Aleksinac (Alexinatz). To oversee the various Red Cross activities in the region, the ICRC establishes in June 1877 an international agency based in Trieste and led by Alexis Paris, the Swiss consul in the city from 1875 to 1889. In November 1885, the ICRC intervenes once again to help victims of a conflict between Serbia and Bulgaria. This time, the two local Red Crosses manage to cooperate effectively, probably because of their shared Orthodox faith. Just set up in July 1885, the Bulgarian Red Cross is thus presided by Vasil Drumev, Metropolitan Kliment of Turnovo. As for the Serbian Red Cross, its control passes to the military when the conflict comes to an end. From 1888 to 1896, it is presided by General Milojko Leschianin (1833-1896), Chief of Staff and War Minister in 1873 and 1880 respectively.
 
-1877-1878, Turkey: The Red Crescent replaces the Red Cross symbol in the Muslim world. In 1868, a fleeting Ottoman Society for Relief to the War Wounded had been set up by a Hungarian doctor, Karl Edward Hammerschmidt, who had fled the Habsburg monarchy during the 1848 revolution. But the organisation had collapsed after the death in 1874 of its founder, who had converted to Islam, taken the name Abdullah Bey and been promoted to the rank of colonel and medical chief of the Istanbul Imperial Guard after the Crimean War of 1853-1856. In 1877, the Society is then resurrected by Hadj Harif Bey, its president, and Marco Pasha, chief inspector of health services for the sultan’s armies in Constantinople. Refusing to adopt an emblem it identifies with the Crusades, it will officially take the name of Ottoman Red Crescent in April 1911. Meanwhile, the government only agrees in June 1877 not to shoot at people wearing the Red Cross emblem. And Turkish troops continue to violate the international humanitarian law. During a war against Russia and Serbia in 1877-1878, they execute wounded enemy soldiers, mutilate their bodies, and kill first-aid workers of the Red Cross. In Romania, for instance, they attack a hospital in Giurgiu (Giurgewo), and slaughter two “health officers” in Plevna in July 1877. Admittedly, no side is completely innocent. In Vidin (Widdin), Bulgaria, the Romanians, who have just set up a national Red Cross society, bomb a Turkish hospital suspected of hiding canons. In January and February 1878, Russians and Cossacks shoot at Ottoman medical facilities in Rustchuk (Russe) and Guildiz-Tabiassi (Telis), southwest of Pleven, Bulgaria, arguing the Red Crescent logo is neither recognised nor neutral. They also pillage a hospital in Kars, Armenia. As a jurist rather than an ICRC member, Gustave Moynier finally protests publicly against Ottoman abuses, going against the rule according to which abuses observed in the field must be communicated directly to the national societies concerned. After the Turkish defeat in January 1878, the ICRC eventually widens its mandate, and assists civilian refugees alongside the Ottoman Red Crescent: an innovation for an institution focused on the war-wounded.
 
-From 1878, Switzerland: The 1870 Franco-Prussian War, which severely affected the Red Cross movement, causes the ICRC to enter a recession phase. Except for the Balkan Wars at the turn of the century, when its budget reaches 11,871 Swiss Franks in 1912 and 8,771 in 1913, the financial resources of the organisation thus decline from CHF 8,280 in 1880 to 3,005 in 1881, 5,032 in 1898, 4,633 in 1901, 3,403 in 1903, 5,852 in 1905, 5,914 in 1906, 5,872 in 1907, 5,977 in 1908, 6,376 in 1909, 7,447 in 1910, 6,999 in 1911, and 6,903 in 1914. According to the minutes of ICRC meetings, its assets also decrease in the 1880s. They represented CHF 86,000 in 1879, 68,000 in 1880, 136,000 in 1881, 118,000 in 1884 and 80,000 in 1889, as against 105,000 in 1894, 129,000 in 1898, 173,000 in 1899, 179,000 in 1901, 177,000 in 1902, 179,000 in 1904, 180,000 in 1905, 179,000 in 1906, 171,000 in 1907, 172,000 in 1908, 174,000 in 1909, 176,000 in 1910, 177,000 in 1911, 159,000 in 1912, 159,000 in 1913 and 143,000 in 1914.
 
-From 1879, Peru: Allied to Bolivia against Chile during the War of the Pacific that breaks out in April 1879, the Peruvians set up a “Blue Cross” relief society. Presided by Monsignor Jose Antonio Roca, it cares for wounded evacuees in the coastal province of Lima and receives a bit of funding from the ICRC, which recognises it the following year. However, when Chilean troops occupy Lima in January 1881, Jose Antonio Roca is forced into exile. At this point, a bookseller, Emile Henriod, takes over the organisation, and manages to have it declared of public utility in 1883. Nevertheless, it remains inactive for a long time, and is only open to men: women are admitted for the first time in 1911, eight years before the society joins the League of the Red Cross in 1919. After a brief war against Ecuador in 1941, the organisation is mainly concerned by internal conflicts within Peru. The revolt instigated by the Shining Path, a Maoist group, also causes the ICRC to intervene from 1984 onwards, as a fierce army crackdown leads to the displacement of large numbers of civilians. Unable to initiate dialogue with the rebels, the Committee has no access to their prisoners and settles for working in government-controlled zones. But the relations with the authorities are tense too. Thus the ICRC is not given permission to visit prisoners held by the secret police, or to enter regions where a state of emergency has been declared and where it can only distribute aid to poor children in the town of Ayacucho. If these bans are lifted in January and April 1986 respectively, they are put in force again a year after. Despite sporadic visits to political prisoners in 1988 and the signing of a general agreement with the authorities in June 1989, a leak to the press then shakes the government’s confidence in the ICRC when a magazine from Lima publishes in February 1993 an interview of the detained leader of the Shining Path, Abimael Guzmán, who was arrested in September 1992. As a result, Geneva suspends its assistance to prisoners for a month because the interview has been recorded without its knowledge during one of its prison visits. The organisation finds it easier to intervene during a brief border conflict between Peru and Ecuador in January 1995. But it regularly comes up against difficulties when it tries to help civilians. On 25 February 1994, two employees die in a plane crash soon after taking off Tingo María. On 17 December 1996, the head of the ICRC delegation in Lima, Michel Minnig, is one of the 650 guests taken hostage by a Túpac Amaru commando at the Japanese Embassy. Thanks to its prison meetings with other rebels from the same organisation, the Geneva Committee can quickly offer its good offices in negotiations between the terrorists and the Peruvian president, Alberto Fujimori. Held captive in the Japanese Embassy, Michel Minnig acts as a mediator and is soon acclaimed as a national hero. In the meantime, the government puts pressure on hostage takers by threatening to discontinue Red Cross visits to political prisoners. The Japanese Embassy is finally freed during a dramatic clash with the Peruvian Army in April 1997. It takes the ICRC several months to obtain permission to recommence its assistance to detained militants of Túpac Amaru and the Shining Path. The situation subsequently improves, except for a brief period during which visits are stopped because of prison riots. Guerrillas loose ground, and Alberto Fujimori is forced to leave the country in April 2000 after accusations of corruption and election fraud. Such political changes mean the ICRC can now investigate those who disappeared during the conflict, and support a Truth Commission established in June 2001 to look into human rights violations during the two preceding decades.