FRANCAISComité International de la Croix Rouge - History
1910-1919
-From 1910, Mexico: The Mexican Red Cross is established by presidential decree in February 1910. At the time, the ICRC does not operate in the country despite various revolutionary movements spearheaded by figures such as Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. Focused on Europe throughout World War One, it does not intervene either when the US Army occupy Veracruz in April 1914 and sends a punitive expedition in March 1916. The Committee’s restrictive mandate means that it is only able to correspond with the Mexican Red Cross during the peasant and catholic uprisings between 1926 and 1929. Only 50 years later does the ICRC intervene directly in Mexico, after the first offensive by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN or Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional) in Chiapas in January 1994. Working with the Mexican Red Cross and its president, Doctor Fernando Uribe Calderón, the ICRC visits prisoners held by government forces in Cerro Hueco Prison in Tuxtla Gutiérrez. Meanwhile, the EZLN, led by Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente (better known as Commandant Marcos), declares it is prepared to accept the principles of humanitarian law. It requests the ICRC to set up neutral zones near the Selva Lacandona, in San Miguel and Guadelupe Tepeyac, to exchange prisoners. In addition, the Committee escorts armed guerrillas in and out of these zones. In February 1994, it organises the release of the rebels’ only hostage: Absalón Castellanos Domínguez, a landowner and retired general who had also been the governor of Chiapas. Nevertheless, the ICRC refuses the EZLN’s request to supervise local elections, and limits its role to escorting civil servants in charge of the organisation of the vote in rebel zones. As the death toll of the conflict is low, the Committee to pull out of the region in 1995, after giving food aid to 20,000 inhabitants and 5,000 internal refugees who were unable to plant crops following the army’s occupation of their areas. On 26 May 1998, the ICRC then signs an agreement with the government to return to Chiapas and transport EZLN delegates to peace negotiations held in San Cristobál de las Casas in November. Indeed, the ICRC enjoys the continued support and trust of all factions, even if visits to high security prison units are suspended between 1997 and 2000.
-1911-1912, Libya: Italy, which invades Tripolitania in September 1911, attacks Ottoman troops with planes, one of the first examples of aeroplanes being used for military purposes. As a result, the Ottoman Red Crescent protests against the bombing of its hospitals in November 1911 and May 1912, although Rome denies any violation of humanitarian law. In February 1912 in the Turco-Arab zone, two doctors from the German Red Cross are then killed during fighting in Garian, south of Tripoli. Meanwhile, Italian troops, who now control the Libyan coastline, refuse the Ottoman Red Crescent access to the country by sea, despite support from the “British Red Crescent”, an organisation which is not recognised by the ICRC and which was set up by London’s Muslim community. In January 1912, one of the Ottoman Red Crescent’s medical missions, transported on the French ship Manouba, is intercepted and captured by the Italian Navy, thus creating a diplomatic incident with Paris. Generally speaking, however, the ICRC seems to be more favourably inclined towards the Italians. When the Ottoman Red Crescent requests assistance in repatriating Turks caught up in an uprising in Yemen, for instance, the ICRC refers the organisation to Rome.
-1912-1917, United States: Held in Washington in 1912, the Ninth International Conference of the Red Cross authorises the ICRC and national societies to extend their mandate to prisoners of war, in addition to the war-wounded. The event also consecrates the power of the American Red Cross (ARC), whose international operations expand rapidly under the patronage of the president of the USA. Usually, the organisation sends food aid and funds relief initiatives abroad under the supervision of American embassies or consulates, for instance in Sicily after the Messina earthquake of 28 December 1908. As explained by Foster Rhea Dulles, it becomes “so closely associated with the Government that it [tends] to become a semi-official instrument of foreign policy”. After the collapse of General Porfirio Díaz’ regime in Mexico in May 1911, it announces it will not remain neutral because civil wars are not covered in the Geneva Conventions. It therefore sends teams to support the US military occupation of Vera Cruz in April 1914, earning the hostility of Mexican inhabitants, who refuse its aid and force the ARC to give up food distribution programmes in October 1915. Despite this negative experience, the American Red Cross continues to work as a health division for the US Army during World War One in Europe. In 1914, it undergoes administrative reform to divide its activities between civilian and military sections, bringing together the three departments formerly charged with War Relief, National Relief and International Relief. Until 1917, when Washington puts an end to American neutrality and enters the war, the ARC assists both camps: the Germans and the Austrians on one side, as well as the French, the British, the Russians and the Serbians on the other. In Russia, for example, the US are the official protector of German and Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war. For the ARC, the problem is that Moscow issues permits to access prisoners on a reciprocal basis, while Washington has little influence over Spain, which is charged with protecting Russian prisoners of war in Germany and Austria-Hungary. In addition, the Tsarist regime has little confidence in American democracy. In February 1916, it expels all ARC expatriates because Doctor William Warfield denounces the Russian treatment of German prisoners of war who are left without medical assistance during a typhoid epidemic in Stretensk, Western Siberia in December 1915. By way of comparison, the YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Alliance) and the Swedish and Danish Red Crosses are much more efficient. Led by dynamic and experienced diplomats, the Swedish Red Cross, in particular, has a much better understanding of the country. It even manages to deliver money orders from the government in Berlin to German prisoners of war. Unlike the ARC, its employees speak Russian and have connections with the Tsarist nobility, especially through women. Indeed, aristocratic marriages often transcend national borders: Maria Fedorovna, for example, is the mother of the Tsar and the patron of the Russian Red Cross, but also the aunt of the Swedish Red Cross’ president (Prince Carl) and the sister of the Danish Red Cross’ president (Prince Valdemar, King Christian X’s brother). The ARC, on the other hand, is primarily seen as an extension of the American government. When the United States join the war in 1917, the ARC ceases all operations in favour of the Germans, with the exception of the war-wounded and prisoners of war in Allied hands. Significantly, all references to neutrality are deleted from the headers of official ARC documents.
-1913, Yugoslavia: After the first Balkan War of October-December 1912, which opposes the Ottoman Empire on one side, and Montenegro, Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece on the other, the second Balkan War is waged between June and August 1913, when Bulgaria attacks Serbia, Greece and Romania. In response, the ICRC launches in Belgrade an agency to identify and locate the wounded, sick soldiers and prisoners of war. Under the leadership of Doctor Carle de Marval (1872-1939), a delegate sent by the Geneva Committee, and Christian Vögeli (1871-1922), the Swiss consul in Belgrade, it gathers information on some 88,000 of a total of 250,000 sick or wounded captured soldiers, mostly Turkish. Before being closed in November 1913, however, the agency is a source of suspicion for some of the parties to the conflict. Indeed, it is located in a belligerent country, instead of operating from a neutral zone like its predecessor in Bâle, Switzerland, during the Franco-Prussian war in 1870. Consequently, Bulgaria does not hand over the details of Turkish prisoners until the end of the fighting. As for the Russian, German, British, French, Swiss, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Belgian and Norwegian Red Crosses, they manage their own medical operations near the frontlines.
-1914-1918, Switzerland: World War One confirms the importance of the ICRC as the organisation extends its activities to the military captured during combat, instead of wounded soldiers only. The institution benefits from the leadership of Edouard Naville and Gustave Ador, president of the ICRC as well as Gustave Moynier’s nephew and successor. In 1914, they set up a Central Agency for Prisoners of War, today known as the Central Tracing Agency (CTA). Its main objectives are to locate prisoners, identify them, deliver mail and reunite families by issuing travel permits to soldiers without papers. The Geneva Committee, which obtains a legal status under Swiss law on 15 November 1915, also launches relief programmes. It mostly focuses on the Franco-German border, rather than the Austro-Italian border, leaving the Danish Red Cross to work in Eastern Europe. While the ICRC is able to visit prisoners of war held behind frontlines, it does not have access to concentration camps in army zones, where abuses of detainees are most frequent. Nor does the Committee have access to civilians who have been deported, conscripted or taken hostage in regions under German occupation. At best, it can visit a hundred “show” camps where Berlin treats prisoners of war decently to lull the ICRC into a false sense of security. Consequently, the Committee is unable to investigate detention conditions for most imprisoned soldiers. Officially, prisoners of war are put in camps but, unofficially, two thirds are sent to work in Arbeits-Kommando: factories, mines, or farms. The Romanians are particularly badly treated. The ICRC denounces these abuses, as well as the bombing of a British hospital ship transporting troops and weapons, although this goes against the Geneva and Hague conventions. Berlin subsequently accuses the organization of taking London’s side. In response, the Committee’s June 1917 International Bulletin underlines its responsibility to denounce violations of humanitarian conventions and avoid the “weakness” associated with adopting a silent “pseudo-neutrality”. In an internal document mentioned by Annette Becker, the organization goes so far as to forget its neutrality and approve the resistance of the inhabitants of occupied territories before they were deported to Germany. Despite censoring letters sent to prisoners of war in enemy hands, the ICRC’s communication policy is more open during this period than at any other time during its history. It chooses to publish and sell its inspection reports of camps in order to reassure families and prevent reprisals against prisoners. On 12 July 1916, it issues a press release condemning warring parties that retaliate against wounded prisoners of war, an action that violates the 1864 Convention. On 8 February and 6 December 1918, further communiqués criticise the use of lethal gases. Indeed, there are many violations of the international humanitarian law during the conflict. On both sides, hospital ships clearly marked with the Red Cross emblem are bombed. The culprit is often Germany, which wages a maritime war, fires on crews without warning, sinks civilian boats, destroys commercial cargos, attacks hospital ships and uses chemical weapons with no regard for local populations. As for the German Red Cross, it sometimes refuses to feed or provide medical care to British prisoners of war. Wounded enemy soldiers are operated on without anaesthetic; doctors from the British Red Cross are imprisoned. Admittedly, the Russian Red Cross is no better in its treatment of German prisoners of war who are forced to build a railway between Murmansk and the Arctic Ocean: over 25,000 workers die during construction. Nor are civilians spared by the Tsarist monarchy. Trapped in Russia at the beginning of the war, over 330,000 German and Austrian citizens are forced to carry out hard labour in mines, swamps and weapons factories. The conflict is as deadly for the humanitarian personnel. Out of 68,000 nurses and first aid staff employed by Red Cross national societies during the war, 108 die on the front and 165 succomb to illnesses caught from soldiers. Yet the ICRC, recipient of the 1917 Nobel Peace Prize, succeeds in organising exchanges of wounded prisoners through Switzerland from October 1915 onwards. Following direct and exclusive negotiations between Paris and Berlin, another agreement is signed in Berne on 26 April 1918 to exchange prisoners on the basis of rank and number. France is initially reluctant because it holds less prisoners than Germany. In any case, the agreement is too late to be effective. It is more indicative of the belligerents’ exhaustion at that point in the conflict, when each side thinks that the repatriation of prisoners and reunification of families will revive public support for the war. Berlin, for instance, wishes to get rif of prisoners that are no longer capable of working and cost too much to feed, especially given the blockade of the German economy. After the Armistice of 11 November 1918, the ICRC then attempts to assist in repatriating over 800,000 allied prisoners of war, most of them French or Belgian, with a few Italians and Americans. However, the fate of German prisoners of war remain unclear until the Treaty of Versailles is signed by the Weimar Republic on 28 June 1919.
-From 1915, Belgium: Led by Antoine Depage (1862-1925) between 1914 and 1924, the CRB (Croix-Rouge belge) tries to remain active under German occupation, but is soon shut down for supposedly failing to fight prostitution. The real reason for its closure has more to do with the escape route set up by one of its nurses, Edith Cavell. A British, she helped 170 Allied soldiers to hide in hospitals until they were able to cross frontlines. In April 1915, the ICRC protests against the CRB’s closure, and manages to have the organisation reinstated. Nevertheless, it cannot prevent Edith Cavell’s execution, which takes place in October, a day after her death penalty is sentenced. Meanwhile, another faction of the CRB continues to work in Ypres, the only area to remain under the control of the exiled Belgian government, which is based in Sainte Adresse in the suburbs of Le Havre in France. Doctor Antoine Depage thus succeeds in setting up a 2000-bed hospital in a requisitioned hotel in the city of De Panne. From April 1917 onwards, however, it is mainly the ARC (American Red Cross) that takes care of the 90,000 civilians still present in this limited geographical space. It also assists Belgian refugees in France, Holland, Switzerland and Great Britain. Between September 1917 and October 1918, the Belgian chapter of the ARC is led by Colonel Ernest Bicknell and, according to John van Schaick, it devotes 27% of its US$4.3 million budget to military affairs between June 1917 and the end of its operations in Belgium in April 1919. As for the CRB, it is reunited after the war under the leadership of its secretary general, René Sand (1877-1953), a specialist of social health. After Antoine Depage, who is nominated a senator for the liberal party in 1920, its new president from 1925 to 1945 is Pierre Nolf (1873-1953), a professor of Medicine at Liège University, Minister of Science and founder of the National Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS or Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique). With support from the authorities, the CRB turns its focus to public health, especially nurse training, in line with a decree passed on 3 September 1921. The organisation also develops a countrywide network: in 1959, it has 480 local chapters and 280,000 members, compared to 28 chapters and 5,000 members in 1920. Some of its most important interventions include saving the victims of floods in Grembergen in 1930, the East Flanders in 1936, Hainaut in 1947, and Liège and Namur in 1961. It also recues the survivors of mining disasters in Bouverie in 1937 and Marcinelle in 1956.
-1916-1948, Sweden: While Berne adopts a passive neutrality that limits the Swiss Red Cross’ activities abroad, Stockholm’s active neutrality enables the SRK (Svenska Röda Korset) to carry out international operations during both World Wars. Following an initial meeting in 1915, Sweden organises a Germano-Russian conference which aims at reducing reprisals against prisoners of war held by warring parties. The meeting gets off to a rocky start because the German Red Cross initially refuses to apologise for sinking a Russian hospital ship, the Portugal, on 30 March 1916 in the Black Sea. According to Berlin, the target was legitimate, for its emblem was not clearly visible. Nevertheless, the conference is finally held as planned, in April 1916, and some progress are made. For instance, the SRK manages to convince the Tsar to stop forcing German detainees to work on the Mourmansk-Arctic Ocean train line, an extremely dangerous construction site, although it is unable to obtain similar concessions for Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war. In addition, the Russian and German national societies remain in contact throughout World War One, unlike during World War Two. The Russian Red Cross is given permission to visit prisoners of war in Germany and Austria-Hungary. Likewise, the German and Austro-Hungarian Red Crosses are allowed to care for their compatriot prisoners of war. One of their nurses, Erika von Passow, will thus disappear during the Bolshevik Revolution, while trying to flee Russia for Germany via Turkestan and Persia. Others will also experience such hardship. After finishing her official mission for the German Red Cross, for instance, Countess Nora Kinsky, from Bohemia, will remain in Russia to care for her younger brother and she will have to escape the civil war in mufti. As for Elsa Brändström, the daughter of the Swedish ambassador to Petrograd, she will catch typhus and be held for several months by the Czechoslovak Legion’s White Army on suspicion of spying. In this regard, World War One is quite formative for the Swedish Red Cross. Set up in 1865 and presided by Prince Carl (1861-1951) between 1906 and 1945, the SRK becomes one of the most active national societies in providing international relief. With members increasing from 4,500 to 500,000 between the two World Wars, it distributes food aid in Austria, Hungary, Poland and Russia after 1918. From 1939 onwards, it assists foreign nationals trapped in Sweden after Norway, Denmark and the Baltic Countries are invaded, and it sends relief to civilians in German or Soviet occupied regions in Finland, France, Norway, Poland, Belgium and Greece. Named vice-president of the SRK in September 1943 and president in November 1945, Count Folke Bernadotte (1895-1948) manages to travel to Germany in April 1945 to meet the head of the SS (Schutzstaffel), Heinrich Himmler, who frees some Scandinavian nationals and French women from Nazi concentration camps in order to open talks to negotiate the Third Reich’s surrender to Allied Forces. After the fall of Berlin in May 1945, the SRK then assists in repatriating American, British and German prisoners of war held in Sweden, some of whom had been exchanged during the conflict. It also delivers food aid for 121,000 children in Germany between January 1946 and June 1948, despite the reluctance of the Allies and the general public to help an “enemy country”. Launched in the British zone of occupation and quickly spread to all of Berlin, the programme includes the Soviet zone. While continuing operations in Austria and Greece, however, the SRK is soon forced to stop its activities in Hungary, Poland and Romania, when the communists take power.
-1917-1918, United States: Led by Henry Davison and set up in May to raise funds from business circles, a “War Council” takes over running the ARC (American Red Cross) when the United States declare war against Germany in April 1917. As the first US soldiers leave for Europe, it collects a record $100 million dollars. And the number of active members goes up from 3,000 in 1905 to 220,000 in 1915, 286,000 in 1916, 18.6 million in 1917 and 28 million in 1918: a figure that does not take into account the 50 million American donors who give money to the ARC during two collection drives that raise $115 million in 1917 and $181 million in 1918. As the organisation moves into new headquarters built in Washington on land donated by the government in 1915, its operating budget grows from $488,590 in 1916 to $2 million in 1918. In August 1917, it has 2,279 regional chapters, compared to only 267 six months beforehand. The ARC’s headquarters therefore have to manage 8 million women volunteers and 9,000 employees, compared to 167 in early 1917 and less than 100 in 1914. The organisation receives considerable government support, and its ties to the White House are visible in several ways. Doctor Stockton Axson, its national secretary from 1917 to 1919, is brother-in-law to Woodrow Wilson, elected president in 1913 and the first incumbent to directly sponsor the ARC. As explained by Henry Davison in his book, the objective is not only to help civilians, but first and foremost the US Army. At the frontline, the ARC cares for the wounded and even comes to supplant military health services, especially at Château Thierry in France, a country where it has up to 6,000 employees in January 1919. Placed under US command and removed from French control since April 1917, volunteers also supply and entertain soldiers. Racial segregation is considered normal, with specific departments for the Blacks. But the ARC is accused by the American press of serving the tobacco industry’s interests, and criticised for selling meals and cigarettes to the soldiers. Moreover, it takes longer for the organisation to move into neighbouring Italy, despite the fact that this country had fought alongside the Allies since May 1915. Indeed, US troops are few on the Italian peninsula, compared to France. Consequently, the ARC attributes fewer resources to military activities in the country: only 10% of its budget from November 1917 until its withdrawal in June 1919. However, it assists the families of Italian soldiers, who receive around 25% of the organisation’s civilian aid. As in France, the ARC entertains and cares for wounded soldiers. Not without risks: one of its employees, Edward McKay, is killed by an Austrian mortar attack on 16 June 1918, while another volunteer, famous author Ernest Hemingway, will describe in Farewell to Arms the Caporetto defeat that he witnessed in October 1917. For civilians who were forced to leave their homes after conflict in the region of Venetia, the ARC sets up two hospitals, one in Rimini on the Atlantic Coast, the other at Canicattini Bagni in Sicily. Supervised by American consuls in Italy and led by US officers, the organisation directly serves the interests of Washington. According to Charles Bakewell, for instance, it relays Allied propaganda to counter the “defeatists” who accuse the United States of gaining from the war, and attempting to make it last longer. On the eastern front too, the ARC plays a diplomatic and financial role in Russia, where it opens an office in Petrograd in August 1917, then in Moscow after the Bolshevik Revolution in March 1918. As explained by Antony Sutton, it looks for business opportunities under the cover of humanitarian operations. Completely funded by William Boyce Thompson, the director of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, its Petrograd mission is not accountable to the ARC’s head office in Washington. It is almost entirely made up of military personnel who compare themselves to a “Haitian Army” because they include officers, but no soldiers. Their political activities are immediately obvious to the seven American doctors who are sent to Petrograd and who quickly resign. A Professor of Medicine at the University of Chicago, the head doctor, Frank Billings, is consequently replaced by “diplomats”: first Raymond Robins, then Allen Wardwell. Their aim is to fund the partisans of Alexander Fedorovitch Kerenski and to convince Washington to do business with the Bolsheviks by recognising their revolutionary government so that it could be given loans. In Moscow in November 1917, for instance, Raymond Robins attempts to convince Vladimir Illitch Oulianov (“Lenin”) and Leon Trotsky to continue war against Germany in exchange for a promise that US aid would resume. The ARC is thus used as a foreign policy instrument. As part of the US Army and subject to military control, it spreads the government’s political propaganda. Criticisms against the organisation are considered attacks on national security and threatened with prison sentences. Hence Louis Nagler, an assistant to the Wisconsin secretary of state, is condemned in July 1918 to 30 months prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, for discouraging his fellow citizens to donate money to the ARC or the YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Alliance). Opposed to the US Army’s intervention in Europe, he was of German descent and openly supported the pacifist senator Robert La Follette. He falls foul of the anti-spying law: even though the ARC and YMCA are not officially covered by “secret” legislation, the judge argues that their volunteers are an integral part of US troops, confirming the two organisations’ militarisation. After 1918, the ARC will continue to work with the Army anyway, caring for veterans and training nurses.
-1918-1950, Russia: After the Bolshevik Revolution and the fall of the monarchy in October 1917, Edouard Odier, vice president of the ICRC and the Swiss ambassador to Petrograd, sends delegate Edouard Frick to Russia in May 1918. For the first time in its history, the organisation is allowed for a while to visit political prisoners as well as prisoners of war. Eugene Nussbaum, who replaces Edouard Frick in October 1918, is not so lucky. Arrested on 2 June 1919, he is forced to leave the country during the plundering of Petrograd. Meanwhile, Gustave Ador, ICRC president and Swiss head of state, expels the Bolshevik mission to Berne, which had been occupying the Tsar’s former embassy. Relations with Moscow further deteriorate when the ICRC repatriates Russian prisoners of war to Odessa and Southern regions held by the Allies and the White Army, instead of the North, which is controlled by the “Reds” and where transport lines are disrupted. As a matter of fact, openly anti-communist members of the Geneva Committee are concerned about reinforcing Bolshevik ranks at a time when over one million soldiers are returning to their home country. But on 19 April 1920, Berlin and Moscow sign an agreement to free Russian prisoners of war in Germany and organise their repatriation through transit camps in the Baltic countries. Facilitated by the League of Nations High Commissioner for Russian refugees, Fridjtof Nansen, and the Swedish, Norwegian and Danish Red Crosses, the first Russo-German exchange of prisoners takes place in Narva on 12 May 1920. As for the ICRC, it manages to convince the White Army to free Hungarian and Austrian prisoners of war in December 1919. However, relations with the anti-communist forces are not always good. In July 1918 in Khabarovsk, a Swedish ICRC delegate and his Norwegian secretary are captured and hung by Cossacks. On the other side, the new Soviet Red Cross president Zenoby Petrovich Soloviev, who takes over from Yakov Mikhaylovich Sverdlov in July 1919, prevents Eugene Nussbaum’s successor in Moscow since October 1921, Voldemar Wehrlin, from visiting gulags, under the pretext that only ordinary prisoners are held there. The ICRC can still assist some foreign detainees, but it has to stop working with the Mensheviks and Socio-democrats of the “Political Red Cross”, an organisation set up by Ekaterina Pavlovna Peshkova, Maxim Gorky’s first wife, to help Polish prisoners. Following an agreement signed by Fridjtof Nansen and the Communist authorities on 27 August 1921, the Geneva Committee then focuses on providing relief to famine victims in Russia and Ukraine, even if this reinforces the Bolshevik war economy at a critical point in the conflict against the Whites. While food aid is stolen or given to members of the Party, the ICRC finds it difficult to supply provisions fairly. To distribute donations by Jewish charity organisations, for example, risks provoking anti-Semitic feelings. Consequently, an ICRC delegate to Ukraine, Georges Dessonaz, chooses to give them to Catholic children. The Geneva Committee is not alone anyway. Herbert Hoover, the leader of the ARA (American Relief Administration) and a future American president, distributes surpluses of the US Army, still in stock since World War One. Moreover, some national societies intervene on an ad hoc basis, like the CFR (Croix-Rouge française) in July 1922. Others are present on a larger scale. After being forced out of Moscow by the Bolsheviks in October 1918, the ARC (American Red Cross), for instance, helped to evacuate Czech soldiers via the Transiberian Railway. It then supplied the Army of Admiral Alexander Koltchak until the “Whites” were defeated by the “Reds” in Omsk in November 1919, and the American troops had to evacuate from the port of Vladivostok in April 1920. Later on, it is involved in relief operations for famine victims. In Ukraine in September 1922 and April 1923, the ICRC’s delegate seizes this opportunity to visit forced labour camps in Dopr and Kharkov, althought they have very few political prisoners. Humanitarian activities are once again restricted when the famine ends. As the Committee withdraws to Moscow and never actually denounces concentration camps, the Soviet Red Cross ceases in April 1923 to forward its food packages to gulag prisoners. The Committee’s role becomes purely ceremonial: the organisation carries out administrative duties and assists Swiss nationals in Russia. Because of the Communist regime’s xenophobia and paranoia, it cannot even communicate with the Soviet Red Cross, which is set up in 1924 as the Alliance of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. The ICRC eventually closes its Moscow mission on 23 June 1938. Meanwhile, the Soviet Red Cross, also suffers from the purges of Josef Stalin. Its leader, Abel Sofronovitch Enoukidzé, a professional revolutionary and a member of the communist party’s central committee, is executed on 16 December 1937 and replaced by subordinates, first Pauline Sazonova, then Pierre Glebov, who put a stop to the organisation’s international relations despite joining the League of Red Cross Societies in 1934, when Moscow still sought to build ties with Western democracies and create p eople’s fronts against the Nazis. Just before World War Two, the Soviet Red Cross is merely a structure built to relay the Party and the government according to an official brochure quoted by Jiri Toman. It has the same characteristics as Communist syndicates, youth unions (komsomol), cooperatives (kolkhoz) and professional associations, and is expected to work with these groups. Above all, it is considered a “mass organisation”, to use the terminology of the statutes adopted at its fifth Congress on 16 May 1963: it has over 4 million members at its first Congress in Moscow in October 1932, and 7.9 million members in July 1941, when the population is mobilised against the German attack. Its main aim is to recruit volunteers and spread government propaganda, with 86 ambulance aircrafts put at its disposal in 1935 to cover rural areas. All other activities are handed over to the authorities, including medical, sanitation and financial services, which are placed under the control of the Ministry of Health on 3 December 1938. According to statutes drafted on 22 February 1941, shortly before the German invasion, the organisation’s role is clearly to mobilise and organise civil defence in a military context. Much of its personnel is swallowed up by military operations: the Army annexes 30% of its nurses in 1943 and 40% in 1942. Between September 1941 and March 1945, Soviet soldiers also receive supplies sent by the American and British Red Crosses through the ports of Murmansk and Vladivostok, as relief cannot come overland because of the German occupation of Europe. After the collapse of the Third Reich, the Army and the Communist Party continue to supervise humanitarian issues. The Red Cross is unable to prevent massive violations of the Geneva Conventions. Out of the 1.5 million Soviet prisoners of war repatriated between May 1945 and February 1946, over one third are accused of “betraying the Party” and placed in the Army’s disciplinary battalions, assigned to reconstruction sites or deported to gulags. In line with agreements signed in Yalta in February 1945 and Moscow the following June, Great Britain, the United States and France undertake to repatriate to the USSR all those with Soviet nationality before September 1939, regardless of the wishes or fears of the returnees. The ICRC is thus powerless to stop the Allies sending a total of 4.2 million Soviet nationals back to their country by force. Already criticised for its weak position on Adolf Hitler’s atrocities, it refrains from denouncing Josef Stalin’s violations of humanitarian law and tries no to be associated with anticommunist propaganda, which links the Nazi extermination program and the Soviet concentration camps. In Paris in November 1949, the ICRC refuses to sign David Rousset’s call for an international investigation into gulags, and its delegation avoids to raise the matter during an official visit to Moscow in November 1950.
-1919-1922, France: The ARC (American Red Cross) plays an important role in helping to reconstruct the old continent, thanks to support from President Woodrow Wilson, US Army surpluses and a nest egg amounting to around $400 million in 1919. After an outbreak of Spanish influenza that causes more fatalities than World War One, the organisation focuses on fighting tuberculosis and widening the Red Cross mandate to include public health. But its desire for reform in peacetime is incompatible with the ICRC’s conservatism and fear of competition. At a conference in Cannes in April 1919, the American, British, French, Italian and Japanese Red Crosses decide to set up an organisation based on the League of Nations model and inaugurated in Paris on 5 May the following year. Led by Henry Davison, this League of Red Cross Societies (LRCS) is managed by a 15-member Board of Governors, a third of whom are nominated by the five founding societies. Seen as an Allied initiative, it does not invite defeated countries to join the project and it is frowned upon by the ICRC for going against the movement’s principles of universality and neutrality. By creating such a League, members are implicitly criticising the unilateral and non-democratic makeup of the Geneva Committee, where national societies have no representatives. The ICRC therefore tries to thwart the American initiative by launching a rival project with Rome, Athens and Sofia: the Union of Red Cross Societies. However, it soon has to accept the LRCS, whose members jump from 5 in 1919 to 35 in 1921 and 50 in 1924. Indeed, Red Crosses in newly independent countries and British dominions are eager to join the organisation to develop their international connections, as in Finland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India and South Africa. Moreover, the LRCS wins over Red Crosses in defeated countries: Austria, Bulgaria and Hungary in 1921, Germany in 1922 and Turkey in 1930. Nevertheless, the League does have some teething problems since the Republicans won the US elections and adopted an isolationist policy in 1921. First, the LRCS has no official ties to the League of Nations, which sets up its own world health organisation in 1921. Moreover, it faces budgetary problems as it does not receive the financial resources it hoped for from the Rockefeller Foundation and the ARA (American Relief Administration), which want to keep their humanitarian preserve, or the British Foreign Office, which, according to Bridget Towers, finds it “absurd” to globalise funding for public health. After Henry Davison’s death, the League also faces opposition from ARC isolationists who are unhappy about how little European members contribute to the organisation. The fact is that these national societies raise less funds during peacetime because the general public is usually more concerned by the war wounded. In addition, the British Red Cross wants to control its own international operations; the CRF (Croix-Rouge française) is fully occupied with reconstructing its country; and the Italian Red Cross is busy distributing relief to earthquake victims in the Mugello and Sienna regions in June and September 1919 respectively. Consequently, in August 1922, the LRCS adopts more modest ambitions. Away from the League of Nations and the ICRC, it moves to Paris, where real estate is cheaper than in Geneva. After Henry Davison dies of illness, its new president in 1922 is another American, Judge John Barton Payne, who is also a member of the ARC central committee and who is followed by compatriots Cary Grayson in 1935 and Norman Davis in 1938. The LRCS focuses on training health personnel. In 1934, it takes part in setting up the Florence Nightingale Foundation in London alongside the International Council of Nurses, which was founded in 1899. But the LRCS never manages to obtain the ICRC’s official status: in 1935, for instance, it is the Geneva Committee that the League of Nations requests to organise a secretariat for the International Relief Union, which was established to help the victims of natural disasters. Nor does the League succeeds in becoming the national societies’ only intermediary, especially after the 1929 Wall Street Crash, when the ARC is no longer able to contribute so generously to the organisation’s budget. As a result, the LRCS has to cut ten staff, reduce administrative costs and submit to supervision by a financial committee after Secretary General Tracey Kittredge resigns in 1930. Under the leadership of Ernest Bicknell and Ernest Swift (brought in to replace Gordon Berry who committed suicide before taking up his post), the organisation is also forced to move its headquarters from Avenue Velasquez in Paris’ 8th arrondissement to buildings provided by the French government in Rue Newton in the 6th arrondissement in December 1934.
