FRANCAISComité International de la Croix Rouge - History
1920-1929
-1920-1923, Turkey: The American and French Red Crosses provide relief to Turkish citizens thrown out of Thrace by Greek troops, as well as Russian refugees fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution. In Constantinople in November 1920, for instance, the Americans organise facilities to accommodate some of the 110,000 refugees and soldiers under General Pyotr Nikolayevich Wrangel, pushed out of Crimea by the Soviets. In January 1922, the ICRC then begins to visit Turkish and Greek prisoners of war on both sides. In line with an agreement between Athens and Istanbul signed on 30 January 1923, the Committee is able to supervise the exchange and repatriation of many military and civilian detainees. Presided from 1921 by General Alexander Soutzo, the Greek Red Cross only takes care of its own nationals and works like a government agency, as it is heavily subsidised by Athens and has very few members.
-March-April 1921, Switzerland: France and Belgium refuse to attend the Tenth International Conference of the Red Cross unless Germany offers a public apology for its violations of the 1864 Geneva Convention during World War One. Still waiting for official recognition, Soviet Russia decides not to come to Geneva either, so as to boycott representatives from the former Tsarist Red Cross, who are first admitted in an advisory capacity, and eventually awarded voting rights. Meanwhile, the ICRC also has to handle competition from the League of Red Cross Societies (LRCS), which is considered to be an Anglo-Saxon conspiracy. It finally creates a joint commission presided by Gustave Ador. According to John Hutchinson, such an arrangement allows the Geneva Committee to give the impression that it is ready to cooperate and that the movement is coming together. Meanwhile, the objective is to delay discussions regarding the sharing of roles between the two institutions. Despite numerous disagreements, the Tenth International Conference of the Red Cross plans to extend the ICRC’s mandate to domestic conflicts. But Resolution 14 gives national societies the responsibility of providing relief to the war wounded and prisoners of war. This means the Committee cannot circumvent the Red Crosses that are controlled by totalitarian states, as in Germany, the USSR, and Italy.
-From 1922, Ireland: When conflict breaks out in June 1922, the ICRC hesitates to intervene because there is no local Red Cross in place. While London authorises the creation of an independent state in Southern Ireland (Eire) but keeps six counties in the Northeast (Ulster), the British Red Cross Society (BRCS) refuses to send volunteers to Dublin, where a civil war is raging. Up to 12,000 are said to have been taken prisoners by the Irish Free State, mainly Republicans loyal to Eamon de Valera and opposed to breaking up the island. After some persuasion, the ICRC nevertheless obtains permission from local authorities to visit one prison in April 1923. In a 7 May press release, it comes to the rather hasty conclusion that detention conditions are satisfactory. Paradoxically, the government’s version of the ICRC report is more complete and acute, stating that the Committee’s delegate, Rodolphe Haccius, was not able to question detainees nor hear their complaints. It turns out that Geneva had shortened his summary: an “editing” which raises protests from exiled Irish Republicans. The question of publishing ICRC reports comes up again in the Northeast, where the Catholic minority finally rebels against the dominating Protestants, loyal supporters of the British Crown. After the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 is suspended and a state of exception is declared on 10 August 1971, London authorises the Geneva Committee to visit political detainees in Ulster, especially in Armagh County, Crumlin Road in Belfast, and Long Kesh near Lisburn. Contrary to normal governmental practice, Great Britain chooses to publish the ICRC delegates’ full reports. Geneva agrees, even though London refuses to give insurgents prisoner of war status. The problem is that detainees go on hunger strikes to be recognized as political prisoners. In fact, Great Britain considers that deploying its troops to Ulster is part of a domestic police operation and not an armed conflict. Its soldiers accused of abuse are therefore judged in civil courts and not in military tribunals. As a result, the ICRC has to end its prison visits in 1975 and has a very difficult time gaining access to the terrorists of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). It is not until 1981 that the organisation is once again authorised to inspect prisons in Belfast, Armagh and Magilligan, and in later years, Maghaberry and Maze. Its visits become more regular, and take place in April 1983, August 1986, August 1988, May 1989, June 1990, February 1992, April 1994 and November 1995.
-1923-1985, Chile: Passed in April 1923, a law gives the Chilean Red Cross official status, well after its counterparts in Peru (1879), Argentina and Bolivia (1880), El Salvador (1885), Venezuela (1895), Uruguay (1897) Brazil (1908), Mexico (1910), Columbia (1915) and Paraguay (1919). Launched in Punta Arenas by an Italian immigrant, Vittorio Cuccuini Nannelli, in December 1903, the organisation was initially a self-defence group, the Association of lifesavers and guardians of property (Cuerpo de Salvavidas y Guardias de Propiedad). Renamed as Cuerpo de Asistencia Social, it was approached by the ICRC in 1909, and it opened branches in Tocopilla and Valparaíso in 1910 before being recognised by the government in 1912. Divided into several regional chapters, however, it was unable to set up a national structure and faced competition from a women’s Red Cross set up in Santiago by María Luisa Torres in October 1914. On 14 June 1920, the Minister of War finally passed a decree to unite the Cruz Roja Chilena under a central committee established in the capital city and presided by Vice-Admiral Jorge Montt. After its legalisation in April 1923, the organisation has many occasions to intervene during the various conflicts and coup d’états that tear the country apart. The Chilean Red Cross, for instance, is called on to provide relief to victims of the repression by General Augusto Pinochet after the military putsch that ousted Socialist President Salvador Allende in September 1973. The ICRC is active too. Unlike many other dictators, General Augusto Pinochet decides to treat political detainees as prisoners of war. From December 1973, the ICRC is therefore given permission to assist opponents held behind bars. Although the organisation is subject to the whims of the government, which suspends prisons visits for a time in June 1974, it also attempts to find the desaparecidos abducted by the death squads, and it gives out travel passes to nationals of other Latin American countries who, caught up in the events, are suspected of subversive activities and want to leave Chile. After an amnesty is declared in April 1978, which covers both opponents and members of the military junta, the ICRC closes its delegation in Santiago in October and only leaves open a branch of the Central Tracing Agency to help find persons who have disappeared during the conflict. However, in December 1981, it resumes its visits to extend its assistance to prisoners arrested for breaking laws on state security and arms control. When a state of siege is declared from November 1984 to June 1985, it reopens an office in Santiago, not only to take care of political detainees, but also to push the authorities to sign the additional protocols of June 1977.
-From 1924, Albania: As they regularly collaborate with the Fridjtof Nansen International Office for Refugees, the ICRC and the LRCS are given responsibility by the League of Nations for distributing relief in one of the poorest countries in Europe. Independent since 1912, Albania became a republic in 1916 but its social assistance programmes cannot depend solely upon its own national Red Cross society. Created on 4 October 1921 and recognised by Geneva in 1923, the latter is to disappear anyway, when the country is invaded by Fascists troops and annexed to Italy on 7 April 1939. After World War Two, Albania is taken over by Stalinist communists and completely cut off from the rest of the world under Enver Hoxha’s leadership. As a result, the Albanian Red Cross is no longer able to communicate with Geneva and is prevented from carrying out activities between 1967 and 1989. The ICRC can eventually return to Tirana when the regime introduces a multi-party political system that leads to violence. Some of its delegates, for instance, are attacked at Schkodër in April 1991 during riots to contest the results of the first legislative elections in 45 years. In September 1998, the Geneva Committee comes back to assist refugees fleeing the Serbian repression in Kosovo. It is supported by the Albanian Red Cross, which has been providing relief to 460,000 Kosovans since June 1998 in the border districts of Tropoja, Kukës, Has, Shkodër, and Korçë.
-17 June 1925, Switzerland: In Geneva, the ICRC submits a protocol banning the use of chemical and bacterial weapons. It is the first time that the institution broaches the question of regulating arms whose collateral damages render the Geneva Conventions inapplicable. By adopting an apolitical stance against war in general, as opposed to a particular war, the ICRC confirms the advances made by the pacifist movement in favour of disarmament. Likewise, the Red Crosses enter a phase of demilitarisation, in line with the 1928 Kellog-Briand Pact that condemns war. To spare civilian populations, the German Red Cross even asks for a complete ban on military aviation and bombing.
-1926, Poland: After Józef Pilsudski’s coup d’état in May 1926, the ICRC organises prisoner exchanges in August with Lithuania, where Polish troops tried to annex Wilno (Vilnius). The Committee’s representative obtains permission to interview detainees without witnesses, a rule that will later hold the weight of doctrine for Geneva. In July 1924, the ICRC had also been invited by the Polish authorities to visit penitentiary centres. But the organisation had asked its delegate to inspect only 19 out of a total of 56 prisons, covering only half of the political detainees. Indeed, the ICRC feared controversy after Edouard Heriot, Léon Blum, Romain Rolland, and Paul Painlevé denounced “the white terror in Poland” in an article published on 2 May 1924 by L’Ere Nouvelle, a Parisian Journal. In fact, the local context is highly politicised because the regime in power in Warsaw acts as a barrier against Russian Communist forces. During a typhoid epidemic in 1920, note for instance Daphne Reid and Patrick Gilbo, the leader of the League of the Red Cross Societies’ Polish mission, American Colonel Hugh Cumming, openly declared he was going to set up a health unit to fight both the “Reds” and the disease. Humanitarians were to contribute to this by helping the country strengthen its independence. Officially established on 27 April 1919, the national Red Cross society thus played an important role in reinforcing the new state’s sovereignty, once shared between Russia and Germany. The organisation was lauched by Prime Minister Ignacy Paderewski while in exile in 1914, first to Switzerland, then to the United States. Initially known as the “Central Committee of Relief for the Victims of War in Poland”, its presidents were all linked to the independence project, with Ignacy Paderewski’s wife in 1919, Helena Paderewska, then General Jósef Haller in 1920, who was to follow the government of Wladislaw Sikorski in exile to London during World War Two.
-From 1927, China: The ICRC barely intervenes in the fighting that breaks out in August 1927 between General Chiang Kai-Shek’s nationalists and Mao Zedong’s communists. Sent to China during the flooding of the Yellow River in Henan Province in August 1925, the organisation’s delegate, Henri Cuenod, is more involved in accommodating 86,000 European refugees who fled Soviet Russia and were either evacuated to Latin America or settled in local “colonies” that will move onto Hong Kong or Macao after World War Two. In September 1931, the Geneva Committee faces another challenge: the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in northern China. As Tokyo continues its military campaign towards the south, the Chinese Red Cross is overwhelmed and seven of its hospitals are destroyed by occupation forces during fighting in July 1937. The ICRC is not allowed to intervene on the Japanese side either because Tokyo refuses any relief and does not respect humanitarian law. Its troops do not distinguish civilians from combatants, massacre the Nanjing population in 1937, drop fire bombs on Canton in 1938, and make virtually no attempt to spare relief workers. On 23 August 1937, for example, Japanese soldiers execute 43 Chinese volunteers wearing Red Cross armbands in Lotien, then bomb the Chen-Yu Hospital six days later. In December 1937, the new ICRC delegate to Shanghai, Doctor Louis Calame, organises facilities for internal refugees in a demilitarised zone set up in Nantuo with help from missionaries like Father Jacquinot de Besange. At the request of President Franklin Roosevelt, the American Red Cross (ARC) also intervenes on the Chinese side. However, volunteers in the US are reluctant to raise funds for a political show which allows Washington to discreetly disapprove of Japan without resorting to economic sanctions or a military intervention. The Japanese takeover of China puts an end to relief operations anyway. After the fall of Nanjing and Canton, the Chinese Red Cross has to move to Hong Kong before going into exile in Haiphong, Vietnam, throughout World War Two, up to the retreat of Japanese forces in 1945. As for the ICRC, it lacks funding and can only keep an honorary delegate in Shanghai until September 1950, where he is unable to create a demilitarised zone when the Communists seize the city in May 1949. During the civil war, Geneva looses contact with the Chinese Red Cross, which splits into two. One group goes with the nationalists to the Island of Formosa, now Taiwan, while the other stays on the continent and is put under complete communist control. In the People’s Republic of China, the Mao Zedong regime takes time to liberate the last Japanese prisoners of war before ratifying the four Geneva Conventions on 28 December 1956. Recognised by the ICRC in October 1950 and presided during almost two decades by Minister of Health Li Te-Chuan, the Chinese Red Cross does not carry out any humanitarian activity and is mainly a political body whose purpose is to challenge the legitimacy of Chiang Kai-Shek’s government in Taiwan. Indeed, the exiled nationalists claim continuity of their authority over the continent, but their national Red Cross society is downgraded. The situation sets off a diplomatic row because the authorities in power in Taipei have signed the Geneva Conventions on 12 August 1949, before Beijing. The ICRC therefore invites two governments but only one national society to the International Conferences of the Red Cross. As a result, the Taiwanese delegate withdraws in protest at the admission of a representative from mainland China in 1952, and Beijing boycotts the meetings after 1957. Despite ICRC President Paul Ruegger’s official visit in March 1951, the Communist Red Cross refuses to circumvent Pyongyang and to relay the Committee to assist wounded and ill combatants, prisoners of war and civilian victims of the fighting in North Korea. Because Beijing disputes whether the Geneva Conventions apply in occupied territories, the ICRC is also refused permission to intervene in Tibet, invaded by the Chinese Red Army in 1950. The organisation has to settle for providing relief to refugees in mountain camps in Nepal, where supplies are distributed from 1959 onwards with a DC-3 lent by the Order of Malta. Likewise, during border fighting in October 1962, Geneva is allowed to conduct visits on the Indian side but not the Chinese. On its own initiative, Beijing finally releases and repatriates its prisoners in June 1963, arguing that Chinese representatives should have access to their nationals without going through the Red Cross, as the two countries have not cut off diplomatic relations. In another example, the ICRC is only authorised to be present at the repatriation of Vietnamese prisoners of war captured during a border conflict with Hanoi in May and June 1979. The situation improves after Mao Zedong’s death. Dialogue is especially productive in the British territory of Hong Kong, where the local Red Cross handles Chinese refugees from 1962 and later Vietnamese boat people from 1975. In October 1987, the ICRC sets up a delegation there with two main objectives: to promote humanitarian law throughout the continent and to facilitate the identification of family members separated by the withdrawal of nationalist forces to Taiwan in 1949. If Geneva has no access to political prisoners or victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1989, it gets permission to visit Vietnamese prisoners of war captured during the February 1979 border conflict and the March 1988 confrontations around the Spratly Islands. With the Cold War coming to an end, increasing Red Cross cooperation in the region contributes to easing diplomatic relations. The Hong Kong Red Cross society is officially invited to Beijing in 1980 and, in 1991, provides relief to flood victims on the mainland. The Red Crosses of the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan re-establish direct contact in December 1990. As China attempts to better its image in the hope of hosting the 2000 Olympic Games in Beijing, negotiations continue over giving the ICRC permission to visit prisons. The Geneva Committee eventually opens a regional delegation in Beijing in July 2005 and tries to cooperate with the Chinese Red Cross to assist North Korean refugees in Yunnan province.
-1928, The Netherlands: More conciliatory than his predecessor Gustave Ador, the new president of the ICRC, Max Huber, negotiates an agreement with the LRCS in order to cancel projects to merge the two organisations discussed at the Eleventh and Twelfth International Conferences of the Red Cross held in Geneva in 1923 and 1926. During the Thirteenth International Conference, held in The Hague in 1928, the movement adopts statutes for national societies, the Geneva Committee, and the League. The debates offer an opportunity for all these organisations to coordinate and share tasks. The ICRC is given responsibility for relief operations during wartime; the LRCS, during peacetime. Given the lack of dialogue that followed the end of World War One, a permanent commission is created to maintain ties between two international conferences of the Red Cross. Its main aim is to solve questions and disagreements that might come up between the ICRC and the LRCS or national societies. However, the international conferences retain the real decision-making power, serving as a sort of supreme court. Having no real influence over projects discussed in 1926, the commission poses no threat to the LRCS’s leadership role nor the political independence of the ICRC, which holds on to its role of moral guardian to the Geneva Conventions. As a result, the Red Crosses from northern Europe (Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden) protest and pull out of the League until 1930.
-1929-1945, United States: Following the economic crisis of 1929, the American Red Cross (ARC) confirms its increasing isolationism and pulls out of Europe. After the dissolution of its War Council in February 1919, its membership had already drop from 20,386,000 in 1919 to 8,988,000 in 1920, 3,506,000 in 1922, and 3,012,000 in 1925. A former judge and Interior Secretary under Woodrow Wilson’s administration, its president John Barton Payne is no longer in a position to lead large-scale international operations since he succeded Livingston Farrand, who resigned in October 1921 to take up a post in Cornell University. In 1930, the ARC’s budget is only 3 million dollars, barely one-third of the sum available in 1920, which was partly lost in an important – but less successful than anticipated – fundraising campaign. As soon as February 1920, these financial difficulties were compounded by severe criticism from Illinois Republican Senator Lawrence Yates Sherman, who made claims of an excessive bureaucracy and overheads, which accounted for 40% of the organisation’s expenses. New York Republican House Representative Lester David Volk called for an investigation in 1921. The ARC’s national treasurer, John Skelton Williams, was unable to disprove the accusations. And before resigning, Frank Persons, former director of civilian relief operations during World War One, wrote a report recommending the organisation reduce its activities and focus on US public health programmes. Nor was the ARC immune to political controversy. When Mississippi suffered flooding in April 1927, the organisation is accused of providing food to white people only, while the Blacks are held in camps under the control of their employers, who want to send them back to work on plantations still under water. During various demonstrations around the country in 1928, the ARC is also criticised for refusing to distribute food to strikers on the pretext that it does not want to become involved in labour disputes. Consequently, unions ask their members to stop donating money to the Red Cross and to give instead to social organisations for workers. Likewise, the ARC is accused in 1932 of hindering a demonstration by World War One veterans who call for an increase in their pensions, because the Red Cross offers their wives and children free transportation home before they arrive in Washington. With unemployment increasing as a result of the Depression, the presidential debate soon pits Herbert Hoover’s Republicans, who favour a free economy and are opposed to government intervention, against Franklin Roosevelt’s Democrats, who support a welfare state and the New Deal to drive consumption. At the time, the ARC’s board wants to remain independent and collect funds only from private donors. In January 1932, it refuses an offer by Democratic Senators to provide $25 million in subsidies for aid to drought victims. However, it accepts to distribute wheat and cotton surpluses on behalf of the Republican government. After Franklin Roosevelt is elected president, the organisation is especially wary that social programmes put into place by Democrats would encroach upon its activities. Indeed, the ARC focuses on domestic issues and puts aside its international operations. In 1937, the failure of its fundraising drives for China and Spain confirms the isolationism of the American people, not to mention Catholic donors’ hostility towards relief for the “Reds” (Republicans) in Madrid. But when Great Britain and France declare war against Germany in September 1939, attitudes change. In the US, the ARC begins to prepare the civil defence by training more than 100,000 relief workers and nurses. Abroad, the organisation does not attempt to fight the blockade affecting areas under Nazi occupation. After the German Red Cross refuses its assistance, it only works with the Allies. In March 1941, the ARC sets up an Emergency Council that, like its predecessor in World War One, manages all overseas operations under the leadership of Thomas Lamont, a banker with close ties to John Pierpont Morgan’s financial institutions. The organisation’s militarisation is confirmed after Washington enters the war against Japan and Germany, following Tokyo’s attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941. The ARC, which has made peace and signed a cooperation agreement with American unions, follows the advance of US troops in Asia and Europe. Its volunteers are incorporated into the army and deployed to the front lines. Many die during combat, especially in the Battle of Guadalcanal in August 1942 and the July 1943 landing in Sicily. Others fall victims of Nazi bombings against establishments that are supposedly protected by the Red Cross emblem. In Sicily, a nurse from San Francisco is killed on 7 February 1944 during an airstrike on a health centre in Anzio, while three hospital ships are hit by German planes. According to Charles Hurd, the ARC looses a total of 86 volunteers, 52 of whom are women, between 1941 and 1945. Yet its medical activities are less widespread than in World War One because army health services are much better developed and refuse volunteers’ involvement, especially in the Pacific, where tensions are high. As a result, the Red Cross focuses more on relief to American soldiers and prisoners of war. For the troops, it opens entertainment clubs where alcohol and gambling are forbidden and where female dancers are checked by military police to avoid immorality. At the request of the Army, soldiers have to pay for their meals so they are not tempted to abuse their privileges. But when American troops land in Europe, the ARC, which applies racial segregation and refuses black blood donors, is soon accused by the British press of discrimination in favour of whites and officers. In January 1942, the organisation decides to create two blood banks, one for blacks and the other for whites. The liberation of occupied Europe highlights the ARC’s competition with the British Red Cross, which had hoped to be the first to operate in France and Italy.
