The Red Cross Needs to Get Real

The Red Cross Needs to Get Real
It's time to rethink the Geneva Conventions.
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Wednesday, January 23, 2002 12:01 a.m. EST

The real shame of Guantanamo Bay has nothing to do with U.S. treatment of captured Taliban and al Qaeda fighters now held there. It has everything to do with the International Committee of the Red Cross rushing to the scene, waving the Geneva Conventions as if riding to the rescue of those lovable old POWs on "Hogan's Heroes"--demanding that modern disciples of terrorism be handled simply as good old conventional prisoners of war.

The real issue is not the size of the chain-link cells for the detainees, the color of their jumpsuits or the calorie content of their Froot Loops, but whether the venerable Red Cross, still reliving yesterday's conflicts, can catch up with the terrorist shift now redefining modern war. If it can't, the U.S.--which provides more than 25% of the ICRC's funding--might do well to rethink its ties to the Red Cross.

Should the detainees be designated prisoners of war, which is what the Red Cross wants, then under the Geneva Conventions they would be required to divulge no more than name, rank, serial number and birthdate. That could be a problem, because these men are not garden-variety captured conscripts. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has described them as "hardcore terrorists." Given what Sept. 11 told us about the hatcheries of horror in Afghanistan, there is a case for giving the U.S. government some benefit of the doubt. It is plausible, not least, that the detainees at Guantanamo may have information which, obtained in time, could prevent further mass murder of civilians.

Because the ICRC is the world's flagship relief agency, its fuss over Guantanamo Bay has become an open invitation for every player in the humanitarian aid game to pile on--running the Geneva Conventions up the flagpole and demanding that America salute. By now this circus includes Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the U.N. Human Rights commissioner, officials of the European Union, assorted British tabloids and a group of U.S. activists who want the whole show moved to a California court.

Meanwhile, the Red Cross has been fueling the frenzy with disapproving comments, such as criticism by ICRC spokesman Darcy Christen that the release by the U.S. government of photos of detainees was "incompatible with the Geneva Convention" because it exposed them to "public curiosity" (though the U.S. has also come under fire from rights groups for not exposing enough). In an effort to cooperate, the U.S. government is allowing ICRC delegates to inspect conditions at Guantanamo Bay. They are doing it now. But in explaining this mission to the press, another ICRC spokesman, Kim Gordon-Bates, chose phrases that pretty much damned the U.S. by insinuation: "They will look at the premises very, very carefully. They'll check the water supply. They'll check the food. They'll check the living conditions, whether they have access to proper medical treatment if required, and whether they can communicate with their families." What the ICRC itself seems to be violating is its own policy of discretion, stressed in a Jan. 18 press release, that "In no circumstances does the ICRC comment publicly on the treatment of detainees or on the conditions of detention."

So why the hoopla over Guantanamo? Perhaps because the relief business, pioneered by the ICRC, has mushroomed into a global industry entailing rivalry for attention, funding, access and authority. Humanitarian aid is in many ways a business like any other: The field has become crowded, and there's a lot of jockeying to hitch relief wagons to headlines. The ICRC itself alludes to such problems in a 1997 report pondering its own future, in which it notes that the proliferation of humanitarian agencies, though "a welcome development in itself," gives rise to "competition and confusion" that causes problems in "ethical and operational terms."

Even without Guantanamo, there would be no dearth of work for humanitarians. But now that they've turned it into a media event, what leaps to light is that with the spread of terrorism, the respected old ICRC--and the conventions it tries to uphold--are woefully out of date. The problem goes way beyond such quaint stuff as the clause that POWs be allowed free postage to send cards and letters to their families--a stipulation not geared to an age in which Mohammed Atta worked by email. No, the hubbub over Guantanamo springs from an entire set of assumptions about the customs of conventional warfare. There's no clear mechanism designed to help the ICRC, in reasonable fashion, provide pigeonholes for detainees suspected of ties to such activities as terrorist mass murder, accomplished at long distance by suicide bombers flying hijacked jets into buildings.

There is plenty of precedent for revising the Geneva Conventions. The ICRC's origins go back to 1859, when Swiss citizen Henri Dunant observed the suffering of the wounded left untended on the field after the Battle of Solferino. Dunant founded a movement that, from a simple agreement to help the war-wounded, grew into a series of treaties. It is has been an adapt-as-you-go process. As the Geneva Conventions stood during World War II, there was no provision for delegates to visit the concentration camps in which millions of Jews and others died. After the war, in 1949, the conventions were revised to address this problem, giving us the version now being invoked. It seems high time to adapt yet again.

What a good set of revisions might look like is a tough call. The ICRC's basic role has long been to serve as a broker between warring parties--trading on whatever interest both sides may have in ensuring decent treatment of prisoners and civilians. This is what earned the Red Cross high marks in dealing with the POW camps of World War II, and in many of their doings since. But such humanitarian wheeling and dealing doesn't always work. The ICRC has a mandate to try to persuade, but it has no actual power to enforce--all it can do is register protest and maybe leave. Does anyone think that banging the drum for civilized values will alter the ways of Osama bin Laden and his ilk? Recall the video footage of bin Laden sniggering as he described dispatching his own followers as suicide bombers.

The ICRC Web site details the need in handling POWs to respect their "convictions" along with their "personal rights." But if these convictions include the idea that it is good to engage in mass murder of civilians, we have a large problem. Nor is it even clear that tight security measures--including, if necessary, shackles and floodlights--are misguided. We have already seen one uprising of such prisoners in Afghanistan last November. Those prisoners killed a CIA agent, then fought and died in large numbers before the revolt could be put down. Had there been Guantanamo-level security, all those people might be alive today.

As it stands, the ICRC's harping on Guantanamo has elements not of serious policy, but of a sick joke. It has already served as grist for a scathing skit on last week's "Saturday Night Live," in which actor Jimmy Fallon asked why the Red Cross is so fixated on the detainees' living conditions: "They're suicide bombers. They hate living conditions."

If the ICRC and fellow humanitarians could stop their huffing over Guantanamo long enough to catch up with the shift in the nature of warfare, they might spot an opportunity. There may well be a role for independent monitors as this war against terrorism goes on. But for that, the ICRC would have to get beyond the current tempest in a holding tank, and urge the international community to focus with wisdom and imagination on devising conventions the ICRC could proudly uphold--not as a joke, not as a throwback, but as an important contribution in a new age of warfare.

Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Her column appears Thursdays on OpinionJournal.com and in The Wall Street Journal Europe as "Letter From America."