Humanitarians aim to provide aid to refugees, combatants, political prisoners and victims of natural disasters, regardless of their political affinities and nationality, race and ethnicity. This impartiality is held to be a central principle of their work. Over recent decades, meanwhile, critics of the international humanitarian project have argued that it is, to the contrary, colonial in nature, with reference to the frequently patronising and power-imbalanced relationships between aid organisations and their local partners, as well as the globally unequal distribution of aid (comparing, for example, that granted to Ukraine versus that granted to Sudan). With the conflict in Gaza, Israel’s blocking of access for aid to civilian victims of war has catapulted humanitarianism to new heights of relevance in the realm of grand diplomacy, especially in the field of international law. It is in this context that humanitarians are finding it harder to ignore the obvious colonial patterns of aid provision, which clearly map on to hierarchies of racial inequality. 

An historic example of this schism was a 1986 diplomatic incident in which the delegation of South African government officials was ejected from a key forum of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent movement, in a show of opposition to apartheid. In its efforts to maintain a ‘neutral’ humanitarian posture, the all-Swiss International Committee of the Red Cross (officially the movement’s foremost governing body) had refused to back the expulsion of the South African officials from the conference, which took place in Geneva. Nonetheless, the South African government responded to the expulsion by ordering the ICRC presence in its own country to leave, a decision which was only revoked after ICRC officials there re-affirmed their opposition to the expulsion of the South Africans from the Geneva conference. 

This essay focuses on three key ‘moments’ within this episode: the initial expulsion of the South African government delegation from the conference; the Pretoria regime’s retaliation; and the parliamentary political aftermath in Cape Town. I aim to show how debates over international humanitarian governance in relation to questions of racism can reverberate in domestic political forums – and how the reverberations can take on a different tone when used by domestic political actors for local audiences, as was the case in South Africa. The episode is an example of the limits of even genuine attempts to adhere to principles of neutrality and impartiality. In other words, despite their best efforts, the humanitarians of the Red Cross and Red Crescent movement could not avoid being drawn into the messy political reality of racial discrimination in South Africa.     

1. The Geneva Expulsion

In 1986 a diplomatic furore erupted at the Red Cross and Red Crescent movement’s quadrennial meeting (referred to as the International Conference of the Red Cross), held in Geneva from October 23 to 31. Foremost on the official agenda were tasks like reviewing states’ adherence to the 1949 Geneva Conventions dealing with the ‘humane treatment of prisoners, wounded people, sick people and civilians in international and civil conflicts’. However, after a couple of days The International Herald Tribune reported that the conference had become ‘bogged down’ due to ‘demands by black African and Soviet bloc states for the 144-nation conference to expel the South African government delegation’. The report went on to state that ‘the protesting delegates from 50 countries’ issued a threat to leave if the South Africans remained. The demand, which applied to government officials and not to representatives of the South African Red Cross society, would only be lifted after the end of apartheid. 

The reporting identified the campaign’s leader as Ambassador Alex Afande, the head of the Kenyan government delegation. There were visible splits among the delegates, with those from Western countries such as the US and the Netherlands warning that ‘such an exclusion could wreck the [Red Cross] movement’. Alexandre Hay, the Swiss president of the ICRC, was similarly worried that it would set ‘a precedent’, disincentivising states who had participated in violations of international humanitarian law from participating in the meetings, leaving their victims helpless. The organisation’s statutes stipulated that it was not to concern itself with or debate political matters. 

To understand Hay’s position it is worth briefly examining his style of managing the ICRC. Hay became president (the the age of 56) in 1976, at a time when the organisation was still making efforts to professionalise its staff following the trials of the Nigerian Civil War.¹Here it is worth noting that in 1969, during the famine-catalysing Nigeria-Biafra war, the ICRC’s humanitarian operations had been effectively halted by the Nigerian government. As Desgrandchamps has shown, the Nigerian government denounced the ICRC for amateurism and racial paternalism; there were also sharp tensions over who should have controlled aid access.

He remained in the presidency until 1987, serving as the organisation’s spokesperson and leading important diplomatic negotiations. Like all members of the governing Assembly (which formulated the organisation’s overall strategies), he was a member of the Swiss elite (he had previously served as the Director-General of the Swiss National Bank). In his history of the ICRC, David Forsythe describes how Hay ‘did not crave the limelight’. Nevertheless, unlike previous and subsequent presidents, he was hands-on in terms of regularly meeting with both the Assembly and the Directorate – that is, involving himself significantly both in strategy and in the ICRC’s day-to-day management (through the Directorate). The influence of the Directorate upon the Assembly is demonstrated by fact that the latter adopted many of the former’s opinions and proposals.  

The divisions over South Africa during the fractious 1986 conference must have come as a blow to Hay. Under his leadership the ICRC had tried to address its tendency to view itself as operating independently from the broader Red Cross movement. The events at the conference would have strained these efforts to further integrate the ICRC into the broader Red Cross ‘family’. The ICRC’s strong emphasis on neutrality made it particularly sensitive to political confrontation. However, Hay’s desire to avoid engaging in critique of the South African government’s apartheid policies can also be viewed in terms of the conservatism of the ICRC . Writing about the ICRC’s work in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1960s, for example Marie Luce Desgrandchamps notes that the Directorate’s mono-national and all-white make-up generated mistrust among decolonial and liberation movements. She goes even further to argue that the conservative ICRC in turn viewed such movements in a negative light, exhibiting a colonial mentality which should be interpreted against the backdrop of Cold War politics. 

That the ICRC’s emphasis on neutrality could be used as an argument ‘against politics’ is evident from an account of the 1986 events written the following year by ICRC Director-General Jacques Moreillon. Subtitled ‘Different Perceptions of the Same Event’,²Jacques Moreillon, “Suspension of the Republic of South Africa at the twenty-fifth conference of the Red Cross (Geneva 1986): Different perceptions of the same event,” International Review of the Red Cross 27, no. 257 (1987): 133-51. the essay tried to minimise the divisions that broke out, describing itself as ‘in no way intended to re-open old wounds but on the contrary to allow them to heal’. Moreillon also called for ‘greater calm and detachment of subsequent reflection’, indicating a discomfort with the sharp nature of the debate (which was ultimately about political values). His ‘personal reflection’ aimed to be that of an ‘impartial’ observer, showing ‘the maximum objectivity’, and highlighting areas of common ground, such as the unanimous condemnation of apartheid and support for the work of the South African Red Cross.

Were Moreillon’s apolitical ideals viable in practice, when it came to accepting the presence of a racist regime? Here we must note that people on different sides of the debate had different audiences, whose biases reflected Cold War divisions.  

Moreillon stated that there were 13 arguments for expulsion; these can be condensed into six main issues: Firstly, supporters of the move to eject Pretoria argued that it was justified by apartheid’s nature as a crime against humanity. Secondly, they stated that, as such, South Africa had violated the Fundamental Principles of the Red Cross. Thirdly, they asserted that it would not create a precedent for other states to be ejected from meetings, due to the uniqueness of the apartheid case. Fourthly, they rejected the issue’s characterisation as a ‘political’ question, arguing that the international credibility of the conference was at stake. Fifthly, they held that the decision would be ‘historic’ in proclaiming ‘for the first time a moral demand’ of all countries, ‘denouncing an inhumanity’ which would previously have been ‘passed over in polite diplomatic silence’. Finally, it was pointed out that whenever the South African government chose to reject apartheid it could always return to the conference.   

Moreillon characterised opponents of the expulsion, on the other hand, as framing the decision in terms of the International Red Cross’s ‘true prestige’ in situations of conflict, which depended on having those who were ‘friends and enemies’ present within it. They argued that it would be contrary to the Statutes of the International Red Cross, which did not allow for a state to be suspended, and maintained that it would set a ‘dangerous precedent’ which could be used to ‘justify other suspensions and exclusions for other reasons’. The opponents of expulsion further argued that it would reduce states’ respect for humanitarian law; and, of course, that it would represent a deviation from the principles of ‘neutrality, impartiality and abstention from politics’. The movement might compromise its reputation as a ‘neutral and non-political institution’, especially ‘among hundreds of thousands of volunteers’.  

There were three days of back-room efforts to try to broker a compromise during an adjournment of the conference, but these proved unsuccessful. On 28 October, 1986, Reuters reported that the matter had been put to a vote, with 159 delegations in favour of the removal of the South Africans to 25 against. For countries who abstained, such as the US, the invocation of neutrality was strategic – while they claimed to be saving the ICRC movement from a dangerous precedent, they also were able to avoid the appearance of active support for the government of P.W. Botha without diplomatic repercussions.  

Again, this must be viewed in the context of Cold War international relations. The Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act had just been passed by the US Congress. Popular – and political – opinion in America had turned against the policy of ‘constructive engagement’ led by Chester Crocker, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs. Yet hawks in Washington, such as Dick Cheney and President Ronald Reagan himself, continued to view the Botha regime as a strategically important bulwark against the infiltration of foreign Soviet-aligned forces into Southern Africa. For states in the West, being seen to be anti-apartheid in a soft, neutral, humanitarian way had obvious appeal.

There were other occasions in the 1980s when the ICRC could not escape Cold War geopolitics, and struggled to maintain its ‘neutral’ posture. Forsythe has highlighted the case of the Iranian government, which had already blocked the ICRC from visiting its Iraqi prisoners of war. Similarly, as Reuters revealed in an article fortuitously published during the October conference, the Soviet-backed Kabul government had denied the ICRC access to Afghan fighters it was holding. In a period where the Pretoria regime was aligned with ‘the West’ in the face of the growing international movement against apartheid, and craving sources of international legitimacy, it was inviting comparisons in the international press with the behaviour of countries involved in proxy wars against the Western bloc. 

The removal of the South African government delegation was the first time a country had been ejected from the movement since its formation in 1876. Moreillon described how the ‘particularly “telegenic” image of the South African Permanent Representative throwing down his badge’ was ‘shown on television screens in many countries’. According to François Bugnion, this dramatic gesture ‘was recorded for posterity the world over’.  

2. The Backlash From Pretoria

The reaction from the regime in Pretoria was swift: according to a New York Times article published on October 27, 25 ICRC representatives were ordered to leave South Africa. The ICRC’s firmly established presence made it a convenient target for retaliation. According to reporting from the Sydney Morning Post, during this period the ICRC was involved in visiting 300 political prisoners in South Africa, helping the national Red Cross society, and assisting 20,000 Mozambican refugees in the east of the country. Indeed, historian Andrew Thompson has pointed out that the ICRC was the sole international institution ‘to gain widespread access to political prisoners in apartheid South Africa’, which, according to Reuters, raised ‘fears [of] serious consequences for people it helped and protected in South Africa’. 

The ICRC’s visits to political prisoners who experienced human rights violations had begun in the 1960s and were fundamental to its work in the country. Initially, as Desgrandchamps describes, the ICRC was reluctant to respond to the South African government repression after the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, which set the stage for the armed struggle against apartheid. As the apartheid state mounted a campaign of escalating repression in the early 1960s, there had been a sharp increase in numbers of political prisoners, many of whom were sent to Robben Island.  

The ICRC’s visits to these political prisoners and meetings with the prison authorities made Robben Island a major locus of its activities in South Africa. The historian Fran Buntman presents a nuanced picture of the ICRC’s changing and contested role there. On the one hand, several former prisoners ‘credited the ICRC with helping to improve conditions in the prison’. But as Buntman has shown, this must also be placed in historical context, with reference to who was leading the visits at different times.  

For instance, when the ICRC started its visits, the team was led by Georg Hoffman, who, according to Buntman, was ‘a conservative man who was so uncritical of the prison that the regime published his report’. In his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela recounts a meeting with Godfrey Senn (the next ICRC lead visitor to the prison) in which Mandela outlined several grievances in relation to ‘food, visits, letters, studies, exercise, hard labour and the behaviour of the wardens’. Senn then met with the commissioner of prisons. 

In his account of his final interaction with Senn, Mandela describes the former’s racism (attributed by Mandela to Senn’s years in Rhodesia) and apparent comfort in dealing with prison officials. Before returning to his cell, Mandela ‘reminded him of our complaint that African prisoners did not receive bread’.  Senn then ‘appeared flustered’ and looked over at the colonel who was the prison’s head warden. Senn then made the ludicrous assertion that ‘“Bread is very bad for your teeth, you know, Mandela”’, adding that ‘“Mielies (corn) are much better for you. They make your teeth strong”’.

According to Mandela and other prisoners, Senn did, however, effectively demand that the state make at least some improvements to prison conditions for political inmates. Buntman argues that some of the most effective interventions in the 1960s and 1970s included providing money to wives and relatives to visit inmates, and paying for ‘fruit, milk, records or sporting equipment to supplement their diet and improve their quality of life’.

In his biography of former Robben Island inmate Mac Maharaj, the Irish peace activist Padraig O’Malley describes how political prisoners slowly but successfully used the ICRC to bring an end to forced labour in the island’s lime quarry. According to Maharaj, the ‘prison authorities promised the Red Cross’ that ‘it would stop’. Nevertheless, ‘they took a long time to stop it – not until about 1975 or 1976’.

Over time the ICRC made more frequent visits to the island, partly due to the role that human-rights anti-apartheid activists played in creating conditions that favoured improved ‘humanitarian’ assistance to political prisoners. The speed and range of the ICRC’s growing influence on prisoners’ conditions should not, however, be overstated: according to Buntman, it was only following two years of requests that prisoners were granted access to newspapers, in 1980. 

This history of contact, even cooperation, may have figured in the negotiations between the South African government and the ICRC in 1986, which eventually resulted in the organisation being allowed to remain in the country. The disagreement was also widely reported in the international and South African media. For example, on November 26, Reuters reported that the South African authorities had ‘reconsidered their position’, adding that the ICRC had taken ‘note of this decision with great satisfaction’, and would ‘now endeavour to reactivate its operations’. This article makes clear that the ICRC had been able successfully argue its case to be allowed to remain in the country by expressing to the regime its opposition to South Africa’s isolation from the highly influential, international humanitarian body – reminding the government of the ICRC’s refusal to vote against it at the conference, and its original stance that the expulsion was contrary to the movement’s own statutes.

3. Parliamentary Afterlives Of The Event

Some four months later, in February 1987, the issue was also discussed in a South African parliamentary debate where representatives of the official opposition – then the liberal Progressive Federal Party (PFP) – criticised the government for its ‘impetuous rejection’ of, and inconsistency in its dealings with, the ICRC. This was obviously a piece of political theatre designed to generate support in the lead-up to the elections of May 6, 1987.

Ray Swart, the leader of the PFP, sparred with Foreign Minister Pik Botha (not to be confused with P.W. Botha, the Prime Minister) over the issue in Parliament. Swart argued that South Africa’s standing in the ‘international community’ was ‘at an all-time low’, and observed that ‘One would hope to see some sign of finesse or sensitivity in the conduct and handling of … a very difficult and highly critical situation for the country’. He claimed that the government had instead forced on the country ‘one piece of bungling incompetence after another as if we had some sort of diplomatic death wish’. Directly attacking the Foreign Minister as having behaved ‘like an incompetent amateur’, Swart framed Botha’s decision to expel the ICRC from South Africa as irrational, given the Committee’s largely friendly stance during the arguments in Geneva. Swart characterised this as a mistaken display of ‘kragdadighiet’ (a hardline stance). He went on to point out that ‘Within a few weeks [Botha] had changed his mind and stated that [ICRC] representatives could stay in South Africa’.

Foreign Minister Botha then responded with his own account of the affair: the government did not reject the Red Cross. According to this account, Mr Shearar, South Africa’s ambassador at the conference in 1986, ‘repeatedly requested an opportunity to state South Africa’s case but was refused’. After the vote to suspend South Africa, he left the hall ‘out of protest’ and immediately wrote a letter to the president of the ICRC demanding the right to speak against the vote, a demand which was refused. Having returned his conference registration card, he had reported to Botha.  

According to Botha’s parliamentary account, the government then decided that it had ‘no choice’ but to ask ICRC ‘to remove itself from South Africa’, because it had not fought hard enough for the South Africans to retain their rights. The ICRC’s president then wrote to the South African Red Cross Society, which took a ‘stronger and more decisive stand on our rights’, leading the government to allow the ICRC mission to remain. Botha went on to cite a letter from the president of the South African Red Cross expressing gratitude in relation to the government’s decision to rescind suspension of the mission, and expressing the hope that that, going forward, the principles of the Red Cross would be respected ‘for the good of all nations’. The emphasis on principles of neutrality, here and elsewhere among those who opposed censuring South Africa within the Red Cross movement, could have been interpreted by apartheid’s humanitarian opponents as selective and a convenient cover for a conservative approach. (This suggestion was only reinforced by the South African government’s failure to sign the additional protocol to the Geneva convention.) 

Botha went on to add that the South African Red Cross was ‘impressed with the Government’s understanding of the fact that the humanitarian principles of the Red Cross are of such fundamental importance in the issue’, and had asked him to share their ‘appreciation’ with his colleagues in cabinet. The government hoped that this expression of trust and admiration would ultimately imply the restoration of South Africa’s rights at future international Red Cross conferences. Botha then used this notion to counter Swart’s charge of government incompetence in the affair: it was a sign that the government was trying to protect the country’s interests as it aimed toward ‘stability’ and ‘reform’.

The ICRC and South African Red Cross’s arguments in favour of the South African government delegation must also be viewed in light of the fact that in this period all important decision-making positions in South African society, as well as all those within the all-Swiss ICRC, were occupied by white people. Indeed, two years later, as reported by South African newspaper The Citizen on January 8, 1988, the Zimbabwean Red Cross once again raised the question of expelling the South African Red Cross from its international parent body, on account of its limited efforts ‘to appoint Blacks and other ethnic groups to top positions as it was asked to do in 1986’. The Zimbabwean members pointed out that ‘the executive of the South African Red Cross was still dominated by Whites and if changes were not introduced pressure would be exerted for its expulsion from ICRC’. Anthony Mabaso, vice-chairman of the Zimbabwean Red Cross, stated, ‘As long as they seem to remain part and parcel of the government, I don’t see them being retained in the international body of the Red Cross’.  

The South African Red Cross did remain part of the wider movement, though it continued to debate these issues internally. The University of the Witwatersrand’s records of the Students’ Health and Welfare Centre’s Organisation (an anti-apartheid organisation) show that, by 1991, a South African Red Cross national conference was grappling with the ‘burning issue’ of how to change an organisation in which ‘White domination and a “baaskap” [white supremacist] attitude’ prevailed. The South African Red Cross gradually came to recognise in this period that there was a need for affirmative action to ensure more black representation at management and decision-making levels. 

Meanwhile, South African parliamentary politics were influencing, and being influenced by, the extra-parliamentary ‘Struggle’ politics of affiliates of the United Democratic Front (UDF) – a non-racial civil-society umbrella body – and the African National Congress (ANC) itself (which was banned until 1990). In July 1987 the South African Youth Congress (SAYCO) launched a campaign called ‘Save the Patriots’ with the support of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), the UDF, as well as the Release Mandela Campaign and National Education Crisis Committee. Here, we can note the importance of trade unions and popular political organisations (such as SAYCO and the UDF) in stringently demanding the application of international humanitarian law in relation to South African political prisoners. This is in sharp contrast to the ICRC’s reticence to directly and publicly condemn the regime’s violations thereof.  

By April 1989 this campaign was routinely citing the government’s failure to ‘observe the 1949 Geneva Convention on the conduct of war’. It also noted that the government should have been ‘a signatory of the Geneva Convention of 1977’, which the ANC had already agreed to adhere to in a declaration delivered to the President of the ICRC in 1980. The Geneva convention referred to here was Protocol I, which extended the protections offered by the Geneva Conventions to cover wars of national liberation. In this sense the ANC was effectively recognised as a rival state to the National Party regime. This update to the Geneva Conventions had been drafted at a Diplomatic Conference on Humanitarian Law held from 1974-5, with precisely the ANC and other national liberation movements – which were recognised by the African (Organisation of African Union) and Arab (League of Arab States) regional organisations – in mind. 

The ANC call for the guerrillas of its armed wing (called Umkhonto weSizwe, ‘Spear of the Nation’) to be granted Prisoner of War status, and for the government to observe the 1949 Geneva Convention on the conduct of war” capitalised on this change to international law. In this context, the extent to which the ICRC could be effective in monitoring South Africa’s compliance with a Geneva Convention that it had never signed was, obviously, highly questionable.    

***

Interpreting later resonances

Today, it is impossible to read this episode without thinking of the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Gaza. Indeed, it is worth recalling another International Conference of the Red Cross, which was also mired in conflict over the failure of a regime (and its Western allies) to recognise the humanitarian (and political) aspirations of people it had colonised: In 1991, the major conflict within the organisation was over Israeli and American opposition to Palestinian participation. The conference scheduled to take place that year in Budapest was cancelled immediately before it was to begin because of sharp differences over whether Palestinian representatives could participate as state parties to the Geneva Conventions. The ICRC tried to broker a compromise in which Palestinian representatives would serve as observers, but the US and Israeli state representatives continued to object to their participation even on those terms. The Arab States would not accept the exclusion of the Palestinians, and as a result the conference could not go ahead. Once again, the ICRC was unable to skirt fundamental issues of race and colonialism in tension with its humanitarianism.  

How should we understand the ICRC’s earlier abdication of its moral responsibility to support the isolation of a government which, in its actions, did not respect humanitarian principles? Firstly, we have to understand that Hay, the ICRC President, ran an organisation whose leadership was all-white and exclusively made up of members of the Swiss elite. Secondly, it almost certainly feared losing its legitimacy as a non-political and non-aligned institution among nations in the West, who in a Cold War context, fundamentally mistrusted liberation movements.  

This fear was not misplaced. It is true that the affair had consequences in terms of the ICRC’s important humanitarian efforts: it invited a swift diplomatic response from the South African government who decided to expel ICRC delegates from the country. Moreover, there could potentially be damaging consequence if they were forced to halt their singular work assisting political prisoners. It is in this context that they successfully used their decision to abstain from the conference vote as an argument for them to be allowed to continue to their operations in the country: — “Neutrality” did have its uses to access those in need of humanitarian assistance, in this case most notably political prisoners, even if that neutrality could be weaponised to legitimate a racist regime with scant respect for humanitarian principles. The ICRC had been unable to avoid making the choice between political effectiveness in promoting humanitarian principles through the international Red Cross meetings and ‘on-the-ground’ operational impact in visiting political prisoners and providing aid in South Africa. Opting for the latter was not, however, purely pragmatic in terms of the maximum provision of humanitarian assistance; it also served the interests of the Western-aligned, Swiss elite-led institution. 

Geopolitical alignments still fundamentally shape how international humanitarians operate. Assertions of neutrality cannot always take precedence over, distract from, or forestall the political impacts of colonial patterns which map on to racial inequality. It is in this sense that it is worth recalling the causes and consequences of the South African government delegation’s dramatic, internationally televised ejection from the 1986 conference.

FOOTNOTES

• 1
  Here it is worth noting that in 1969, during the famine-catalysing Nigeria-Biafra war, the ICRC’s humanitarian operations had been effectively halted by the Nigerian government. As Desgrandchamps has shown, the Nigerian government denounced the ICRC for amateurism and racial paternalism; there were also sharp tensions over who should have controlled aid access.
  
• 2
  Jacques Moreillon, “Suspension of the Republic of South Africa at the twenty-fifth conference of the Red Cross (Geneva 1986): Different perceptions of the same event,” International Review of the Red Cross 27, no. 257 (1987): 133-51.