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Journalist Nick Cater writes about disasters, development, crisis and conflict. His Words & Pictures consultancy has carried out assignments for commercial and non-profit clients, from the World Bank to the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation.It's a tough call but probably no one is having a worse war against terrorism than the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).As the last century waned, the ICRC held a massive review of its future -- the project was even called Avenir ("future" in French) -- as guardian of the Geneva Conventions on the laws and customs of war.This concluded that the new millennium's hot action was not uncommon combat between countries; instead, it would have to get down and dirty with the world's warlords, militias and narco-guerrillas.A new century brings an awful new clarity: attacked from without, beset from within, outflanked by events and facing new rivals, the ICRC finds its biggest problem is not bin Laden -- someone it seems not to have had on its list for a long talk about war's laws -- but a single superpower which cares little or nothing for rules that might constrain itself and its friends.After Cold War constraints gave way to a free-for-all in the early 1990s, aid agencies are not only caught -- sometimes literally -- in conflict crossfire, but also face manipulation to fit their biggest paymasters' political and military agendas.This was starkly shown in Kosovo when British Prime Minister Tony Blair launched his military and political assault on Serbia under the cloak of his misused term "humanitarian intervention".After the Balkan and Rwandan horrors, Afghanistan brought more bad news for the ICRC, especially when the normally well-informed agency had to evacuate all expatriates -- a scenario not envisaged -- with barely enough time to destroy sensitive documents.Luckily, the unprepared Afghan staff left behind performed with courage and dedication. Indeed, when one local staffer's mother asked if hiding ICRC vehicles at her home might make her a bombing target, the son urged her to polish the red crosses on the roof for protection. Unfortunately, a red cross did not deflect the U.S. bombs that hit an ICRC warehouse in Kabul.The ICRC then faced the ignominy of Camp X-Ray and the prisoners of war suddenly deprived of rights, denied PoW status and in danger -- should any future U.S. military tribunal's thin justice go against them -- of no appeal and sudden execution for, in some cases, being in the wrong place at the wrong time without a uniform. Some are even claiming to be aid workers.Yet in Afghanistan, U.S. and British soldiers wear Western civvies or local clothes to protect themselves, putting at risk aid workers who must compete for official recovery funds against military units engaged in low-level psychological operations such as rebuilding schools. There's a war going on, yet soldiers have so little to do that the British government's Department for International Development (DFID) encourages them to take funds away from NGOs and the Red Cross. U.S. army "humanitarian" officers have even asked American charities for funding.The ICRC's troubles don't end in Kabul. An Afghan coordination conference exposed bickering when six Islamic states' Red Crescent Societies failed to turn up and the American Red Cross snipes over the lack of recognition of Israel's equivalent of the Red Cross, the Magen David Adom, even while renewed violence has forced the ICRC to pull the plug on negotiations.Meanwhile, interlopers such as the Council of Europe's Committee on Torture and the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) invade once-exclusive ICRC territory of visiting political detainees and prisoners of war, and the ICRC quietly loses ground, while Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch gain legitimacy by loudly condemning torture, jailings and murder.Inspired by the insolent U.S. attitude towards the Geneva Conventions and the ICRC, Ariel Sharon's Israeli forces stop ambulances saving the dying, crush ICRC vehicles with tanks, threaten the agency's staff and use the old as human shields in attacks on civilians and terrorists alike. Rather more quietly, the ex-KGB man, whom the U.S. president calls Pootie-Poot Putin, has perfected today's nod-and-wink politics so his forces can rape, torture and slaughter Chechens with not a word from Boo-Boo Bush.With such examples, the ICRC must be wondering exactly how the Geneva Conventions will be flouted and defiled if, and when, the much-touted Iraq invasion gets under way as the U.S. works its way down the "Axis of Evil" to-do list.Secretive, straitjacketed and very Swiss, the ICRC is an absolutely necessary anachronism, a vital tool of states that tries to uphold the defining humanitarian principles of independence, neutrality and impartiality; a protector of human rights and the space for humanitarian action while helping combatants fight wars, providing they do so with chivalry or, at least, basic standards of behaviour.Principles? Chivalry? Standards? How very 10 September. As they parade their contempt, the last thing Bush and Blair -- to say nothing of Putin and Sharon -- want is humanitarians with principles.
An interrogation table in the abandoned Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval base July 27, 2008. Camp X-Ray was where terrorism suspects seized in Afghanistan and elsewhere were held for ...
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