Francisco Rey Marcos is a researcher with the Institute for the Study of Conflict and Humanitarian Action (IECAH) in Madrid and works for the Spanish Red Cross. He says humanitarian agencies -- their independence already stretched -- are widely perceived by the Iraqi public as actors in the armed conflict, and not as impartial providers of aid and protection.
It was a more terrible day than usual in Baghdad: 12 dead in the vicious bombing of the headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross, among a total of at least 35 killed in several attacks that day.
It raised serious questions about the role of humanitarian agencies in this new kind of war, and about the challenges facing humanitarian action itself.
It was not the first time the ICRC had been deliberately targeted. The killing in Chechnya in 1996 of six delegates at its hospital near Grozny set a brutal precedent.
And the Baghdad incident was part of a general climate of insecurity in which even the United Nations had been hit.
But the attack on the ICRC in Baghdad was different, both qualitatively and quantitatively. And it is unclear just how humanitarian agencies should react.
Violence in any armed conflict may seem “indiscriminate”, merely the product of chaos, but in fact it is rarely so. On the contrary, there is always a rationale of some sort.
But what could any group hope to achieve by attacking an organisation as studiously neutral as the ICRC?
It looks as if the attackers intended to strike at exactly those organisations that had succeeded in maintaining a large measure of independence from coalition forces in Iraq, and avoided coming under their control.
We should remember that it was the ICRC which, in the first few days after the fall of Baghdad, “reminded” the city’s new occupiers of their obligation to observe the strictures of International Humanitarian Law (IHL). This was a time when sack, pillage and chaos reigned; and when those occupiers did little to stop it all.
The head of the U.N. mission in Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, also had his differences with the coalition way of doing things.
So one theory has to be that the attackers wanted to force the United Nations, ICRC and other NGOs to withdraw personnel, and highlight the fact that the United States and its immediate allies are effectively alone against an Iraqi “resistance” which they -- whoever they are -- lead.
This idea is reinforced by comments by the U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, who virtually begged NGOs to stay put in Iraq. The United States clearly needs them.
In Iraq, more than in the earlier wars in Kosovo and Afghanistan, it may be that humanitarian agencies -- their independence already stretched -- are being widely perceived as part of the framework created by the intervening forces, as actors in the armed conflict, and not as impartial providers of aid and protection.
And make no mistake, this has not come about by accident.
When British Prime Minister Tony Blair said during the Afghan conflict that “this war has three dimensions: the military, the political and the humanitarian one”, he reinforced the impression of a hidden agenda behind humanitarian action.
In the case of Iraq, coalition governments have also been financing the most sympathetic, least publicly sceptical NGOs while ignoring others less pliable, so it is easy to see how this perception of ordinary Iraqis took hold.
A case in point is the “humanitarian” money donated by Madrid to NGOs associated with the governing party -- NGOs with neither experience in humanitarian action nor any previous presence in Iraq.
The ICRC as well as the Iraqi Red Crescent and its partners in the International Federation (of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies) had many years experience of working in Iraq, deploying local professionals and volunteers, without problems of any kind.
The International Committee also broke with its tradition of maximum discretion and publicly denounced the treatment of prisoners at the U.S. base in Guantanamo, Cuba, calling on Washington to observe international norms.
NGOs are involved in conflict only to help and protect its victims. If they can’t do that properly, they should reconsider their entire operation -- perhaps replacing expatriate with local staff, as in Iraq.
But steering a course between capitulation to attack on one hand and manipulation by occupiers on the other is difficult.
In any case, when impartial and independent humanitarian organisations become targets and their legally sanctioned emblems bull's-eyes, genuine humanitarian work will have been hugely complicated.
These are difficult days for humanitarians.
Véase este artículo en castellano: Cuando la Cruz Roja es el blanco
This is a version of an article originally published on the webpage of Radio Nederland on October 30, 2003.
Any views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not of Reuters.
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