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  • Between Bombs and Good Intentions: The Red Cross and the Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935-1936
  • Bahru Zewde
Rainer Baudendistel . Between Bombs and Good Intentions: The Red Cross and the Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935-1936. New York: Berghahn Books, 2006. xviii + 342 pp. Photographs. Appendixes. Bibliography. Index. $80.00. Cloth.

Ethiopia has the habit of gripping world attention periodically. That was the case in 1935, when Fascist Italy launched an armed onslaught that proved the prelude to the Second World War. Half a century later, in 1985, a devastating famine provoked a massive and global humanitarian response. The book under review brings together the two strands—war and humanitarian response—through the saga of the Red Cross as it walked a tightrope, striving to balance humanitarian concern with international diplomacy.

The author is well-equipped to tell this story. A historian by profession, he also has rich experience in humanitarian relief work in the Horn of Africa, including several years of service in the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). The book is rich in documentation, with the author's having tapped almost all the pertinent archival material in Italy and Geneva and having interviewed a number of eyewitnesses. Copiously illustrated and with annexes that set the chronological framework, the work highlights the principal characters—including Max Huber, the powerful president of ICRC whose "reactive ideal" prevented the organization from adopting "a proactive, politically conscious and courageous ideal of humanitarian action" (309).

The carefully crafted narrative reconstructs the story of the ICRC during the 1935–36 conflict as no other work has done before. The reader is ultimately left with no doubt as to the sad reality: the sacrifice of truth on the altar of European diplomacy. In the unsurpassable words of Max Huber: "We remained silent because we did not know the truth" (312).

In the initial chapters, the author surveys the state of the Red Cross in the belligerent countries, focusing on the evolution of the Ethiopian Red Cross and the woeful state of medical relief operations in Ethiopia on the eve of the war. He then moves on to consider the fate of the Red Cross emblem, describing early Italian allegations of its misuse by Ethiopian combatants. This served to a considerable extent as a "smokescreen" for gross Italian violations of the emblem, as evidenced by the bombing between December 6, 1935, and March 17, 1936, of seventeen Red Cross hospitals (notably the Ethiopian Red Cross hospital in Dessie and the Swedish one in Melka Dida) as well as a Red Cross Fokker aircraft. [End Page 234]

The ICRC studiously steered clear of protesting against these flagrant violations, focusing instead on launching an inquiry. Its dismal record in humanitarian diplomacy began with a letter of complaint, which it had to withdraw following Italian protests, and a visit to Rome in March 1936, when it was bamboozled by Fascist authorities into coming out with a "sanitised, non-committal" report on the matter. The cup of Italian diplomatic victory was full to the brim with the dismissal of the ICRC delegate in Addis Ababa, Sidney Brown, for leaking official reports to his anti-Fascist Swiss friend.

The ICRC record proved no better in the two other areas of engagement, the issue of the treatment of prisoners of war and Italian use of the banned mustard gas. Given the fact that the Fascist forces ultimately triumphed, the abuses were manifestly greater on their side. Not only did the Ethiopians lack any chemical weapons but also, as the defeated party, they had only a few prisoners of war (the author could come to a tally of only seventeen), although there were some reports of summary executions as well as their having resorted to the traditional emasculation of captives. Perhaps the most damning indictment of ICRC was its failure to take a clear stand against the extensive and devastating use of banned chemical weapons by the Fascist forces. As the author concludes, "By walking a thin line between its own interests and those of Fascist Italy, the organization came dangerously close to complicity, by abstention, with the power which had committed these violations" (311).

Bahru Zewde
Forum for Social Studies...

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