The Sad Decline of the ICRC

Photo Credit: Haim Zach/GPO

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets in Tel Aviv with International Committee of the Red Cross president Mirjana Spoljaric, Dec. 14, 2023.

When I served as Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs in the Reagan administration, there was one humanitarian organization that stood apart as the best: the International Committee of the Red Cross, or “ICRC.” Many so-called human rights groups and self-styled humanitarian organizations were engaged mostly in left-wing politics, and many remain so today. But not the ICRC—then, anyway.

Unlike the national Red Cross and Red Crescent societies in scores of countries, the ICRC was apolitical, effective, efficient, politically neutral, and staffed mostly by top-flight Swiss officials. Working with them was a pleasure.

Fast-forward to today and think for a moment about the ICRC’s role in assisting Israeli hostages held in Gaza. The ICRC says “Our mission is to protect the lives and dignity of those affected by armed conflict and to provide them with assistance, such as food and clean water, health care and shelter.” It also says it “helps people around the world affected by armed conflict and other violence, doing everything it can to protect their lives and dignity and to relieve their suffering, often alongside its Red Cross and Red Crescent partners.” The ICRC’s role in protecting prisoners is one of its essential tasks and always has been, including visiting them and providing the essentials of life.

But not Israeli hostages. First, their release was supposedly supervised by the ICRC—yet we all saw the awful scene where they were surrounded both by armed Hamas terrorists and braying mobs. But even more striking than that single moment, as Richard Pollack wrote,

Unlike their activity in other conflicts, not once did the ICRC ever meet with a single hostage during their captivity since being seized on October 7. The relief agency never provided them with comfort, deliver needed medicines, or assure their safety. Not once in these 471 days.

Well, many people might respond, blame Hamas for refusing access. But that does not take the ICRC off the hook, as Richard Goldberg of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies put it:

It was the moral and legal obligation of Red Cross leaders to spend every waking day trying to put maximum pressure on Hamas, to get proof of life and access to the hostages. And they failed in both their moral and legal duties fundamentally.

Did the ICRC put maximum pressure on Hamas? Did they raise hell? Did they demand that Qatar pressure Hamas to allow them to do their work, and demand that governments around the world speak out as well? Did they make this an international moral issue?

They did not. I think back to the head of the ICRC with whom I dealt back in the Reagan administration, Alexandre Hay. Hay was a lawyer and diplomat who had for ten years been vice president of the Swiss National Bank when he became ICRC president in 1976. The director general was Jacques Moreillon, who left in 1988 to become Secretary General of the World Organization of the Scout Movement.

Fast-forward again to today. The ICRC’s director-general is Pierre Krahenbuhl, who worked for the ICRC from 1991 to 2014 and then moved in 2014 to take over UNRWA as its Commissioner General. UNRWA, the UN Relief and Works Agency that handles Palestinian “refugees” exclusively and whose infiltration by Hamas has been revealed. Krahenbuhl was forced out in 2019. Why? According to AFP,

An internal ethics report has alleged mismanagement and abuses of authority at the highest levels of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees even as the organization faced an unprecedented crisis after US funding cuts. The allegations included in the confidential report by the agency’s ethics department are now being scrutinized by UN investigators. The agency — the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) — said it is cooperating fully with the investigation and that it cannot comment in detail because the probe is ongoing. AFP has obtained a copy of the report, which describes “credible and corroborated” allegations of serious ethical abuses, including involving UNRWA’s top official, Commissioner-General Pierre Krahenbuhl. It says the allegations include senior management engaging in “sexual misconduct, nepotism, retaliation, discrimination and other abuses of authority, for personal gain, to suppress legitimate dissent, and to otherwise achieve their personal objectives.”

Pollock adds that the problems included:

“creating a “toxic environment” within the organization, according to the official investigation. The special UN investigation of Krähenbühl reported they discovered that under his leadership at UNRWA he produced “a work culture characterized by low morale, fear of retaliation … distrust, secrecy, bullying, intimidation, and marginalisation … and management that is highly dysfunctional, with a significant breakdown of the regular accountability structure”. The devastating ten-page UN report said he and his top associates, “engaged in abuses of authority for personal gain, to suppress legitimate dissent and to otherwise achieve their personal objectives.”

Despite all this, in 2023 Krahenbuhl was selected to run ICRC. Last year the United States gave the ICRC a total of $622 million, which by my calculation is about a fourth of its budget.

This is a very sad story to those who dealt with the ICRC in better times, when its management and its work were exemplary. It should certainly lead the Trump administration and Congress to ask more questions about ICRC management—and about its abject failure to do anything at all for Israeli hostages.

{Reposted from Council on Foreign Affairs}