Neutrality -- a help or a hindrance?

By Denise Plattner

GENEVA (JP): In the past year the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has been clouded by tragic deaths among its staff, humanitarian catastrophes in Zaire, Afghanistan and Chechnya and an increasingly hostile environment. It is in this setting that the institution finds itself at a point of critical self-analysis -- how should it respond to the growing number of situations where the rule is that there are no rules?

The media is also undergoing a painful introspective process. The "CNN Syndrome" of immediate news has opened an uncomfortable debate which strikes at the heart of traditional ethics. One BBC journalist has dubbed the challenge now facing the media "The Tyranny of Real Time", while veteran war correspondent Martin Bell has urged the BBC to finally abandon its principle of neutrality in favor of "journalism of attachment".

The battle for and against neutrality and the virtue of the neutral stance is on. For decades the ICRC, and the whole Red Cross movement, was considered the embodiment of neutrality in action. This is an issue on which the institution still stands firm.

To laypeople and journalists in particular, the concept of neutrality is often misinterpreted when applied to the ICRC's working methods. It has been employed as a weapon with which to attack the institution -- the accusation being that the ICRC uses neutrality as a protective shield to avoid speaking out on the atrocities it witnesses during the conflict. As the custodian of the Geneva Conventions, which serve as a "manual" for waging a "humane war", the ICRC is often asked how it can justify its failure to take a stand against the mechanism of evil.

This perception reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of the neutrality exercised by the ICRC as its core principle.

The institution believes in the philosophy that humanitarian action should not be partial or politically motivated. It also feels the experience it has acquired in wars over more than 130 years demonstrates that not becoming involved in political controversies or "taking sides" gives it a greater chance of reaching the people who need help -- be they civilians, displaced persons, war-wounded or prisoners.

To abandon that approach and decide on who are the "good guys" and "the bad guys" in a war would, the ICRC firmly believes, prevent it from achieving the primary goal of its work -- to come to the aid of all victims of conflict.

In hindsight, the objections appear to be based on two premises: neutrality imposes silence and, from the viewpoint of justice, silence is reprehensible.

As the ICRC has stated many times, silence has never been adopted as a principle by the institution. The question has always been considered from the angle of efficiency in fulfilling the objectives set by the principle of humanity, which is to reach and help victims of war.

Evidence of this is the fact the ICRC does not shy away from denouncing atrocities that violate humanitarian law; its public statements are governed by certain conditions, notably the requirement that any such denunciation be in the interest of the persons or populations affected or under threat.

A prime example occurred during the conflict in Yugoslavia. In 1992, after months of negotiation, ICRC staff had still not received the basic security guarantees they needed to accomplish their task. This left thousands of innocent civilians bereft of humanitarian aid.

On July 29, ICRC President Cornelio Sommaruga made an urgent plea at an international meeting convened by UNHCR, in which he said: "Behind this nightmarish situation, nourished by revenge and hate, there is a deliberate plan based on the exclusion of other groups. For a man of the Red Cross like myself, this is quite abhorrent... I am referring, of course, to the terrible ravages of 'ethnic cleansing'.

"Such methods, which we thought had been consigned to museums showing the horrors of World War II, have become almost common practice in the war-torn territory of what was Yugoslavia."

One month later, at the London Conference, the ICRC openly voiced its problems in gaining access to the now notorious detention camps of Manjaja and Trnopolje, where thousands of Bosnian Moslems were being held in appalling conditions, and were ill- treated and systematically executed by Bosnian Serbs.

Does making such statements mean taking sides? If so, then only on behalf of the victims whom it is the ICRC's primary aim to reach and continue to reach in the future. Speaking out is considered a last resort measure when all other steps -- primarily direct negotiations with the parties -- have failed, and when the interests of the victims are best served by doing so. In denouncing breaches of humanitarian law, the ICRC condemns not the perpetrators but the acts themselves, and it also stands ready to speak out if the "other side" commits similar violations.

The ICRC has not denied the antithesis between justice and neutrality. Jean Picket, a distinguished ICRC lawyer during World War II, wrote: "While justice gives to each according to his rights, charity apportions its gifts on the basis of the suffering endured in each case... it refuses to weigh the merits and faults of the individual".

In describing the ICRC as an impartial body as a neutral institution, nations in the world have endowed it with neutral state status. States certainly do have an interest in ensuring that a body dealing with countries at war respect the duties of neutrality and observe the principle of complete impartiality from the outset of its own free will and at all times. In this way, the ICRC has won the confidence of countries and has been assigned under international rules tasks that were initially based on less solid legal grounds. Gaining the trust of every party in a conflict is an obvious imperative for gaining access to victims on all sides.

The writer is the legal adviser in the ICRC's Legal Division.