Post-Second World War laboratory 

The decades following the Second World War served as a ‘great laboratory for humanitarianism’, according to historian Silvia Salvatici. During this period, the architecture of the international humanitarian arena was rebuilt amid considerable uncertainty. In newly independent countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, which were to form the Non-Aligned Movement, as well as in socialist countries in Eastern Europe, individuals and groups both in and outside government played an active role in this process, although their contributions have been downplayed. These efforts were often dismissed as being overly ideological, and therefore less relevant to a concept of humanitarianism conventionally understood as an arena of practice, expertise, and influence dominated by Western countries. However, our research shows that the contemporary understanding of humanitarianism and politics was shaped by the ideologically diverse proposals and interactions of that era.

The contributions made by humanitarian actors in socialist Yugoslavia provide one example that may complicate the picture of how Cold War politics shaped the evolution of relief work. For instance, in 1950, Yugoslav government representatives proposed a clause in the Statute of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) stipulating that ‘[t]he work of the High Commissioner shall be humanitarian and social’ (the clause was ultimately incorporated as Paragraph 2 of the statute). The Yugoslav proposal was driven by the concern of many Eastern European socialist states regarding the status and treatment of individuals who fled from the East to the West as political refugees. The insistence that the UNHCR’s work must be non-political and humanitarian aimed to prevent the West from exploiting the organisation for political gain, though it should be noted here that socialist Yugoslavia was not part of the Soviet bloc, but one of the founders of the Non-Aligned Movement.

The fall of colonial empires, decolonisation, and the rise of the Third World movement complicated the binary Cold War framework regarding international discussions on national sovereignty and humanitarian issues. Established in 1961, in Belgrade (then the capital of Yugoslavia), the Non-Aligned Movement was an effort by a group of countries to position themselves independently of the two major power blocs, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Warsaw Pact. The Non-Aligned Movement was a loose alliance, and a framework for foreign policy rather than a unified ideological faction. It allowed its members to exert international influence and experiment with political and economic models from both the East and West. Member countries of the Non-Aligned Movement collectively challenged Western humanitarian narratives by demanding equal participation in the international humanitarian convening spaces.

This challenge was most forcefully articulated in the 1970s by the Yugoslav Red Cross, which spearheaded a series of initiatives to encourage the international Red Cross and Red Crescent movement to reconsider its humanitarian principles. Criticising the silent diplomacy of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the Yugoslavs argued that speaking out against tyranny and racism was a humanitarian duty, and they sought to persuade other humanitarian actors to adopt a distinction between neutrality and non-political behaviour. In doing so, they occupied an ambivalent position, straddling the European communist East and the Third World/Global South.

The Yugoslav Red Cross was aware of its own relative insignificance within the global Red Cross movement, but nevertheless undertook to drive reform across the movement as a whole. Its efforts included initiating discussions about racism within the international Red Cross movement; hosting the First Red Cross Conference on Peace in Belgrade in 1975; and publishing and distributing materials promoting an alternative vision of humanitarianism. It also established a centre to train Red Cross/Red Crescent staff from Non-Aligned countries and liberation movements, provided humanitarian aid to these countries and movements, and initiated new networks of the Red Cross/Red Crescent Societies in the Balkans and the Mediterranean. This essay will explore some of these activities more closely.

(Anti-)racism within the Red Cross movement in the 1970s

The United Nations proclaimed 1971 as the International Year for Action to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination. In response, the Yugoslav Red Cross proposed placing the issue of eliminating racism, both within the organisation and outside of it, on the agenda of the 31^st session of the Board of Governors of the League of the Red Cross Societies (hereafter ‘the League’), held in Mexico that October. During that session, the Board of Governors established a working group to address racial discrimination, appointing to it the Yugoslav Red Cross alongside the Societies of several other nations.

To give an example of the League’s approach to racism within the national Societies, the working group naturally had concerns about the South African Red Cross during apartheid. Following the October session of the Board of Governors, the chairman of the League sent the General Secretary, Henrik Beer, on a mission to the South African Red Cross Society in February 1972. In his report, Beer succinctly states that the South African Government’s policy of racial segregation led to racial discrimination. This discrimination did not remain hidden; it took place publicly and officially, grounded in the apartheid laws. It also affected the work of the South African Red Cross, which was decentralised and carried out in sections and groups segregated by ‘race’. Beer concluded that there was no racial discrimination when helping victims, but there was ‘not only racial discrimination, but also an antidemocratic system’ in how this national Red Cross Society was organised. He recommended holding the General Assembly of the South African Red Cross at the airport hotel in Johannesburg, where segregation was not always strict. Beer also proposed a system of council members, including from the Indigenous provincial sections, who could participate in the General Assembly as advisors.

The working group’s Plan of Action proposed steps for the International Committee of the Red Cross, the League, and the national societies, focusing on countries that had racist legislatures, as well as on the global population of non-white migrant workers who sought a better life. Among other things, the plan urged all parties to amend their respective statutes, focus on youth, and collaborate with other national Societies as well as with their respective governments. Implementation, however, dragged. Only a few national Societies responded after the draft plan was sent out for feedback in October 1973. The League was supposed to establish a permanent specialist body to review reports from national Societies on the struggle against racial discrimination, but this failed due to financial and budgetary constraints. In 1974, a joint League-ICRC working group was formed to study the concrete actions that had been taken according to the original working group’s Plan of Action. It sent three letters to the national Societies: one joint letter explaining the next steps, one letter from the League, and one letter from the ICRC addressing the national Societies directly. By the end of July 1975, only nine out of around 120 national Societies had replied to the joint letter, twelve to the League’s letter, and two to the ICRC’s letter. The lack of interest shown by the national Societies was one reason why the Plan of Action stalled in 1975.

The call to recognise racial discrimination as a humanitarian issue was brought back to the Board of Governors of the League in 1977, although without any new information to help drive progress. Several attempts were made to reactivate the Plan of Action during the 1980s, including an ad-hoc group appointed in 1989 to oversee actions, respond to questions from national Societies, and report to the Commission. Although the conversation about racism within the Red Cross movement developed unevenly and slowly, the role of the Yugoslav Red Cross was not entirely forgotten. In 2011, the ICRC awarded the Henry Dunant Medal to Dr Boško Jakovljević, the director of international relations of the Yugoslav Red Cross and later a prominent member of the Red Cross of Serbia. His active involvement with the Red Cross and Red Crescent programme against racism and racial discrimination was mentioned among his many notable contributions.

First Red Cross Peace Conference

Another international initiative of the Yugoslav Red Cross during the 1970s was the First Red Cross Peace Conference in 1972. The conference took place in Belgrade from 11 to 13 June, 1975. It was attended by over 200 delegates from 80 national Societies.

It was relatively difficult for the conference participants to agree upon a shared understanding of peace, with the Henry Dunant Institute being invited to help work out a definition of the concept. As a result, two approaches to peace were defined: first, the state of peace was defined as an absence of war-like behaviour at a specific time and place; and second, peace was understood as a balance in harmony between individuals based on prevailing social dynamics. One result of the conference was a move away from the former negative definition, towards a positive understanding of the concept, as seen in the report of the League of Red Cross Societies 1978: 

The Red Cross does not view peace simply as the absence of war but rather as a dynamic process of cooperation among all states and peoples, cooperation founded on freedom, independence, national sovereignty, equality, respect of human rights, as well as a fair and equitable distribution of resources to meet the needs of peoples. (p. 23)

A second achievement of the conference was the creation of the Programme of Action of the Red Cross as a Factor of Peace, developed to increase the commitment to peace within the movement. This plan was reviewed in the Second Red Cross World Peace Conference, held in Finland in 1984. Delegates reported on how they had individually implemented the Programme of Action, and shared ideas and experiences. In addition to mutual aid and support, fundamental elements of the discussion included human rights and the dissemination of the Geneva Conventions.

Reverberations of Yugoslav activities for other Non-Aligned members and the symbol of the movement

The Belgrade Peace Conference not only discussed the international Red Cross movement’s humanitarian mission but also the use of the red cross with a white background as an emblem – specifically, its religious connotations. This was an old argument within the movement. Muslim member states, such as those represented by the Society of the Crimson Crescent (the Ottoman and then Turkish national Society), claimed that the Christian connotations of the cross symbol excluded other religions. A red crescent and a red lion with a sun had also been recognised as the movement’s official emblems in 1929, and various proposals for new symbols were repeatedly made, often aiming to reflect the neutral and non-religious character of the humanitarian organisation’s protective stance. The debate about the emblem peaked in extensive discussions in the 1970s, when the movement was confronted with criticism by several national Societies stressing internal discrimination and inequality among member nations. Drawing on its national identity as an active member of the Non-Aligned Movement, the Yugoslav Red Cross postulated rethinking the concept of neutrality that the emblem of the international Red Cross should represent. 

The Yugoslav criticism referring to internal discrepancies in the movement found approval among other member nations. In 1975 the Ethiopian Red Cross Society proposed abandoning the various equivalent emblems and adopting the symbol of a red heart (referred to as the ‘humble heart’) instead, to reflect the basic facts and needs of human life and unite all member nations under a universal banner.¹Many thanks to the Asta International of Johannes Gutenberg University and Kultur- und Sprachmittler e.V. for helping to translate the relevant historical document from Amharic to German.
However, most of the participants of the Belgrade Conference did not agree to the Ethiopians’ request, stating that it would be too precarious to change the well-established emblem.

Ultimately, the status quo won out. The international Red Cross movement established a working group on the emblem, distributing a questionnaire in 1979 to find a solution. In this case, however, Societies from the Soviet bloc and the geopolitical West tended to agree that the cross was too well-established an emblem to abandon. Several Non-Aligned national Societies participating in the questionnaire also favoured the status quo over the other options provided. Finally, they stated a preference for one single emblem, whether the cross symbol or an entirely new one, although the latter was declined as unrealistic by the working group.

Conclusão

The humanitarian vision behind the initiatives of the Red Cross of Yugoslavia in the 1970s significantly differed from the dominant humanitarian approaches of the time. Unlike the liberal moral project of the Societies in Western countries, which sought to save the ‘Third World’ through expertise and science, the Red Cross of Yugoslavia and its Non-Aligned partners perceived anti-colonial liberation as a humanitarian goal. Their argument was that the international Red Cross did not necessarily need to support the liberation of former colonies, but that it could not truly be serving humanity without doing so. In this view, a humanitarian organisation’s role extends to promoting global social transformation, and working towards a more just and humane world for all.

The calls made by Yugoslav humanitarians in the 1970s to rethink some of the foundational premises of humanitarian work must be critically examined. Scholars such as Paul Stubbs have demonstrated the ambivalent position and racialised privilege of Non-Aligned, socialist Yugoslavia, which was ‘in some moments speaking on behalf of ‘developing countries’; at other times standing back and differentiating themselves from those countries; and even, on occasions, presenting themselves as a developing country.’ One thing is clear, however: neither nostalgic glorification nor ironic disregard of socialist and Non-Aligned actors and their initiatives will help us understand the conversations through which the humanitarian sector emerged in the shape we know today. The discussions within the international Red Cross movement during the 1970s, over the meanings of peace work and the proper ways of being non-political and humanitarian, contain multiple histories and point towards alternative imaginings of humanitarianism that warrant further critical analysis.

Literature recommendations

Brković, Čarna. 2024. “Socialist Modernist Worldmaking: Yugoslav Interventions in the International Humanitarian Debates in the 1970s.” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 15, no. 1 (2024): 18–40, https://doi.org10.1353/hum.2024.a941434. 

Brković, Čarna. Realigning Humanitarianism in the Balkans. From Cold War Politics to Neoliberal Ethics. Indiana University Press, 2025.

Cretu, Doina Anca. Foreign Aid and State Building in Interwar Romania. Stanford University Press, 2024.

Iacob, Bogdan C. “Paradoxes of Socialist Solidarity: Romanian and Czechoslovak Medical Teams in North Korea and Vietnam (1951-1962).” Monde(s) 20, no. 2 (2021): 117–140, https://doi.org/10.3917/mond1.212.0117

Kirasirova, Masha. The Eastern International: Arabs, Central Asians, and Jews in the Soviet Union’s Anticolonial Empire. Oxford University Press, 2024.

Kyoichi, Sugino. “The ‘Non-Political and Humanitarian’ Clause in UNHCR’s Statute.” Refugee Survey Quarterly 17, no. 1 (1998): 33–59, https://doi.org/10.1093/rsq/17.1.33

Report of the League of Red Cross Societies on the World Red Cross Conference on Peace (Belgrade, 11-13 June) and Programme of Action on the Red Cross as a factor of peace (final edition), ICRC Archive, Geneva, 1978.

Salvatici, Silvia. A History of Humanitarianism, 1755-1989: In the Name of Others. Manchester University Press, 2019.

Stubbs, Paul. “Socialist Yugoslavia and the Antinomies of the Non-Aligned Movement.” LeftEast, June 17, 2019. https://www.criticatac.ro/lefteast/yugoslavia-antinomies-non-aligned-movement/

Van Dijk, Boyd. Preparing for War: The Making of the Geneva Conventions. Oxford University Press, 2022.

NOTAS DE RODAPÉ

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  Many thanks to the Asta International of Johannes Gutenberg University and Kultur- und Sprachmittler e.V. for helping to translate the relevant historical document from Amharic to German.