Vol. 21 No. 2 · 21 January 1999
pages 27-29 | 4925 words
Dangers of Discretion
Alex de Waal
- Dunant’s Dream: War, Switzerland and the History of the Red Cross by Caroline Moorehead
HarperCollins, 780 pp, £24.99, May 1998, ISBN 0 00 255141 1
- The Warrior’s Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience by Michael Ignatieff
Chatto, 207 pp, £10.99, February 1998, ISBN 0 7011 6324 0
Over a century ago, Gustave Moynier, a stocky middle-aged Genevan lawyer, author and philanthropist, proposed an international court to enforce respect for the Geneva Convention. Moynier was the second president of the Red Cross, a man whose dedication turned the flamboyant Henri Dunant’s vision into an institutional reality. Dunant, a journalist and entrepreneur, documented the agonies of the wounded soldiers left to die in the fields and vineyards of Solferino after the battle of 24 June 1859, and went on to propose both a corps of volunteers to treat the casualties and a set of ‘international principles, conventional and sacred’, to enjoin armies to respect these volunteers. The ambitions of the two men were too large to fit within the confines of a single institution. Disgraced by bankruptcy, Dunant resigned from the Red Cross to live in seclusion, until he was awarded the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901. This infuriated the self-righteous Moynier, who in the latter part of his 46-year stint as president, tried hard to expunge any mention of Dunant from the organisation’s records. Such contradictions are the stuff of the Red Cross, whose ‘International Committee’ was, until recently, drawn from a very small circle within the Protestant haute bourgeoisie of Geneva. Much of Caroline Moorehead’s immense chronicle is about the individuals – some extraordinarily courageous and eccentric, a few disastrously timid – who established ‘a movement which has no equal in size or commitment outside of organised religion’.
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[*] Bison, 579 pp., £23.95, 1996, 0 8032 6366 x.
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Letters
Vol. 21 No. 4 · 18 February 1999
From Peter Cadogan
Caroline Moorehead (or Alex de Waal) is mistaken (LRB, 21 January). Whatever the Nigerian Federal Government had to say in June 1969, the relief airlift organised by the ICRC and Oxfam came to an end nearly a year earlier, as did the BBC's on-the-spot coverage of the war in Biafra. In the summer of 1968 I was organising a pro-Biafra rally in Trafalgar Square and the director of Oxfam had promised to speak at it. On the eve of the rally, he withdrew. There's no doubt that the FCO and the MOD were behind his decision. Every bullet fired at Biafra was British. The ICRC gave a hypocritical undertaking that when the war was 0ver, i.e. Biafra defeated, they would 'pour aid in'. They even broke their word on that.
I flew into Biafra via Lisbon and São Tome in August 1968 in a vintage Constellation provided by a freelance American operator. The only freight lashed to the floor of the cargo bay was ammunition and a crate of whisky. The ICRC and Oxfam had vanished. There was a crisis in São Tome when we landed. The plane that had gone in the previous day had turned back in face of fierce fire from Gowon's British anti-aircraft guns. The whole airlift was in jeopardy. Happily an answer was found: to detour via the Cameroons and avoid the guns south of Uli, the Biafran airport improvised from an unfinished motorway. We landed under cover of darkness. All flying was done at night because the Nigerian fighter pilots, in their MiGs and trained by Moscow, would only fly by day. So it was that at the height of the Cold War, London and Moscow were conjoined in an unholy alliance. The main FCO dogma had it that the unity of Nigeria was immaculate. Thirty years on, it is the most divided, impossible and corrupt country in the world.
While I was in Biafra the Nigerian Army launched a major attack north of Port Harcourt and took Aba. I was one of the 100,000 refugees who quit the town in the middle of the night. It was the beginning of the end. A few days later when I flew out in a plane piloted by the Swedish Count von Rosen there was a last-minute addition to the passenger list – Mrs Ojukwu. Shortly afterwards I was invited by Panorama to speak to the ICRC in Geneva by telephone and on camera, and this I did. They had quit and had nothing to say.
Peter Cadogan
Save Biafra Campaign, 1968/70<br />London NW6
