Red Cross Blogs

Guest Blog: Respecting the Geneva Conventions

By Jamie
August 17, 2009 at 2:16 pm

The following post is from Ros Armitage,  operations manager at the British Red Cross:

Last week was the 60th anniversary of the Geneva Conventions. To a non-lawyer such as myself the Conventions and their Additional Protocols are “the rules of war” and form the cornerstone of international humanitarian law. They are incredibly important as they are designed to limit how war is conducted and the effects of war. They exist to limit suffering and to protect people not involved in a conflict such as civilians (including health workers and aid workers) and those no longer taking part in a conflict such as the sick and wounded, shipwrecked and prisoners of war. 194 countries have signed up to the Conventions signalling the significance in which they are held worldwide. The Conventions cover mainly international wars, or wars between countries but one of the Additional Protocols specifically covers wars within countries.

I want to give an example from my own experience about the reality facing aid workers in war zones and why the Conventions and their Protocols are important. It is about aid workers having safe access to people affected by a war. We have been working with the Uganda Red Cross in the north of the country for many years in response to the internal conflict between the government of Uganda and a group called the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). At the height of the conflict up to 1.7 million people were living in appalling conditions in camps, many of them too frightened to leave the camp for fear of attack, leaving them dependent on humanitarian organisations to cover their basic needs. I remember travelling with the Uganda Red Cross to carry out a distribution of relief items of blankets, mattresses and cooking pots. We had to drive in a convoy of two vehicles through miles of very remote and unpopulated bush with our lights on and flags displaying the Red Cross emblem flying above the car to make sure that we were very visible. We passed through the military checkpoints to the distribution point without a problem because the army knew and understood the role of the Red Cross in the provision of life-saving assistance to people affected by the war. The Red Cross also used to leave leaflets about international humanitarian law or the “rules of law” by the side of the road so that they could be picked up by LRA fighters. This was another way of spreading the message about the role of the Red Cross and ensuring that Red Cross staff and volunteers could get safe access to the camps. We knew that they were picked up as an LRA fighter was arrested and found to have one of these dissemination leaflets in his pockets. They also aired messages on the local radio stations explaining about the role of the Red Cross.

One of the basic principles of international humanitarian law contained in the Geneva Conventions is that in any armed conflict the wounded and sick should be cared for. I visited the ICRC’s field hospital in Lokichokio in northern Kenya which was set up in the late 1980’s to care for people wounded in the fighting in southern Sudan. One could not but be impressed with the hospital which performed thousands of operations every year and at its largest had a 700-bed capacity all housed in enormous canvas tents. In its 19-years of existence it treated over 37,000 patients from Sudan – people who had been wounded and surgical emergencies. The majority of patients had to be flown out for treatment and then returned to South Sudan and according to the ICRC this was one of the largest – and longest-running – cross-border, non-military medical airlifts in history. As the British Red Cross, we provided many staff including surgeons, anaesthetists’ and nurses for the hospital. On one of my visits, I even gave a pint of blood that was desperately needed for one of the patients.

Today the ICRC is running a mobile surgical team in Darfur in the west of Sudan. It is available to all, fighters and civilians, who require medical and surgical help but cannot reach hospitals. Its services are impartial and available to all based on need alone. The team moves either by plane or road or a combination of the two to reach patients and can literally set up under trees or in existing clinics. When I was in Gereida, a small town in South Darfur, some wounded patients were brought into the town’s hospital late one night. The hospital staff and ICRC’s Gereida health team were able to stabilise them before the surgical team flew in the following day.

These are just a couple of examples of how the Geneva Conventions make a difference to people’s lives. It is impossible to do them justice in this short article, but I hope I have given a flavour of their significance and relevance in today’s world of uncertainty. They have been successful over the past 60 years in saving countless lives and allowing thousands of families separated by war to be reunited and providing support to prisoners of war. The critical issue now is that they are respected. Without them, I really feel that the risk to all sick and wounded people could increase and respect for human life could be lost.

Image © Bir Meza/ICRC

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Comments (2) »

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Tags: Geneva Conventions, ihl, International Committee, international humanitarian law, sudan darfur, surgeon, war

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