Silence, Exile, Cunning: The Red Cross Posted by Heather Hurlburt

Last week, Suzanne posted on the Red Cross warning of mistreatment of the Koran and elicted a number of questions from our readers about why the Red Cross wouldn't give details.

As several folks suggested, the International Committee of the Red Cross does indeed have a policy of giving out little or no information about the situations it observes.  This is longstanding, and the rationale behind it is that, by maintaining discretion, they will be more likely to ensure continuing access and thus to help remedy bad situations. 

Readers with long memories will recall that the ICRC knew quite a bit about Abu Ghraib, and had been complaining to the US military about it, long before the photos hit the papers.  Indeed, Red Cross complaints were reported back to Washington, where fights broke out in the Administration about how seriously they should be taken.

The ICRC complains that its neutrality is called into question, and its safety compromised as a result, when militaries not only do humanitarian work, as in Afghanistan, but identify themselves with humanitarianism in their interventions.  I don't recall the ICRC making this complaint about Kosovo, or Somalia for that matter.  So the problem is less with the military doing relief work than with tactics that tend to blur the line between military and civilian relief workers on the one hand, and opponents who aren't interested in allowing civilians to be fed and prisoners to be visited on the other hand.

This is an area where progressives ought to be able to sit down and, regardless of how we felt about the war when it was started, have some real discussions about how Iraq and the larger "war on terror," the way the US is conducting it, must change our assumptions about how the world works and how we can work in it.

Field NGOs trying to be genuinely non-partisan, of course, don't have the luxury of wringing their hands.  Instead, they have two unpalatable choices:  leave or diminish their activities in war zones, as the ICRC did after an attack on its Baghdad headquarters in 2003; or become more partisan and seek protection from one side, as many NGOS have felt they had no choice but to do in Afghanistan.

One immediate consequence that is worth drawing is that declaring that the consequences of an "either you're with us or against us" policy include real harm to the innocent civilians whom we would like to be with us, if we can't find ways to have our policy respect (and even see the advantages of) the neutrality of the organizations that want to help them. 

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