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golden opportunity to enshrine the ‘founding spirit’ of voluntary aid in war. Those at the NAS disagreed. But, as the brio of freelancers in earlier conflicts gave way to attempts at regulated and increasingly regimented civilian aid work – reflected in new provisions in the Geneva Convention – a watershed occurred in the management and organisation of the Red Cross movement
. Emblazoned on armbands and ambulance wagons, it symbolised the neutral status that medical staff and their patients were granted by the 1864 Geneva Convention. As will be seen, not all of those delivering aid were convinced that the flourishing Red Cross movement represented an unqualified good, or were agreed as to its purpose. At home, meanwhile, impromptu warehouses overflowed with a miscellany of
the Red Cross movement, outflanking the ambitions of the League of Red Cross Societies to lay claim to its ‘real’ spirit. As ever, such a position of principled neutrality was also a necessary one: its existence and its authority depended upon its claim to represent all of the signatories of the Geneva Convention. It refused to jeopardise this claim by alienating any one nation
major cause of concern for observers and evaluators was the lack of appropriate coordination mechanisms. Indeed, neither the aid recipient and donor countries, nor the UN agencies (DHA, HCR, WFP, UNICEF and WHO), nor the Red Cross movement, nor the NGOs had succeeded in setting up coordination platforms with the necessary authority to apply their decisions. Donors and aid agencies alike singled out the
’, wrote A. J. P. Taylor, ‘the Franco-German war became the first war of nations; the rules of civilized warfare broke down, and the pattern of twentieth-century warfare was created.’ 5 That the inauguration of the Red Cross movement coincided with the extremes of this first total ‘war’ was more than a regrettable irony. As Bertrand Taithe and Jean H. Quataert have shown
the civilian volunteer. All this, of course, left cold many of those Quakers explicitly opposed to the principle of providing relief to soldiers. It was no coincidence that 1870 saw the intensification of Quakers’ previous efforts in war relief. The FWVRF was conceived as a sally at the Red Cross movement, but it also came at a time when Quakers were publicly accused of
country of some seven million inhabitants, according to the Crisis Committee’s Permanent Secretariat. Map 1.2 Humanitarian issues in Rwanda The Rwandan authorities, UN agencies (UNHCR, World Food Programme (WFP)), the Red Cross movement (Rwandan Red