For they shall have their own ring of hell to live in.
That thar link shoots you to a windy Financial Times piece from Saturday's edition on the International Red Cross and the difficult decisions they're facing due to modern warfare. You see, the ICRC's mandate, traditionally, has been to send out monitors to POW camps and prisons to ensure that nation-states are living up to their obligations under the Geneva Conventions. To gain access to these camps, they promise that they will not publicize their findings, but will rather work on the inside to make sure things are done to help the prisoners with their living conditions. This has been the case since WWI. It's a quid pro quo arrangement. But, lately, it seems as if some people within the ICRC have been having issues with this quid pro quo. They want the quid, but now they're having second thoughts about giving the quo. And you want to know what events have brought about this remarkable potential change in mission?
Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.
Yes, that's right. This is the organization who did not think twice about what the SS was doing in Theriesenstadt. They bought the SS's story about that town, hook, line and sinker. But wait, it gets worse. From the article:
{...}But on the Nazi extermination and concentration camps, their courage and imagination failed. At a meeting held in Geneva on October 14 1942, the 25 people who presided over the organisation voted not to go public with the knowledge they had about Auschwitz and the systematic murder of civilians, Jews, gypsies, political dissidents and intellectuals, on the grounds that Hitler might retaliate by denying them access to the allied prisoners in German hands. It was not actually in their mandate to protect civilians - a revision of the Geneva Conventions to include protection for civilians had only reached draft stage by the outbreak of war - so that, technically, they were not at fault. But at the end of the war, when this decision to stay silent became known, it provoked widespread criticism including talk of anti-Semitism, and even threatened the future of the organisation.{...}
So, here you have an organization that has, for the most part, stuck to its original mission: to observe and work for better conditions for prisoners of war from the inside. Except for a few rare instances over the past sixty years, they have not publicized their findings. But the one time they should have diverged from their mission and publicized that millions of people were being systematically exterminated, they didn't do it. They were worried about the potential of Hitler retaliating and denying them access to POW's. They kept quiet, instead. Because protecting civilians wasn't a part of their mandate. And the mass murders continued. The smoke kept pumping out of the smokestacks at Auschwitz, in part, because of their silence.
It beggars belief that Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo should be the straws that are reportedly breaking the ICRC's back nowadays, when they had the opportunity to play a major part in stopping a genocide and they didn't do it. But, I'll fully admit, that could just be me and my skewed sense of right and wrong.
Posted by Kathy at June 19, 2005 12:37 PM