Dunant's Dream: War, Switzerland, and the History of the Red Cross (review)

Caroline Moorehead. Dunant's Dream: War, Switzerland, and the History of the Red Cross. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1999. xxxi + 780 pp. Ill. $38.00.

The author of this huge tome is not an academic historian but a British journalist and broadcaster with a special interest in human rights issues and a considerable talent for writing lively narrative history. The volume is in two respects timely: first, because recent international crises have drawn unprecedented attention to humanitarian issues and agencies; and second, because Moorehead, having begun her work just as "outsiders" were granted access to most of the archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Geneva, was able to see documents denied to previous researchers. The result is a volume whose compassionate tone, broad sweep, and vigorous pace will delight those who look to the past for "infotainment."

Moorehead is particularly good at capturing revealing moments, and at producing striking thumbnail sketches of individuals. On the other hand, more-demanding readers will be disappointed by her numerous inaccuracies, frequent superficiality, incomplete research, and idiosyncratic, not to say whimsical, approach to the citation of sources. Dunant's Dream is, alas, mostly thick description; despite its prodigious length, serious analysis is only rarely attempted. Social class, for example, figures here only as an opportunity to relate (admittedly sometimes hilarious) anecdotes about members of the aristocracy. Chapters serve not as vehicles for the discussion of problems, but rather as platters upon which are heaped generous servings of episodes, garnished with colorful, often piquant, anecdotes. Thus, notwithstanding all those months spent in the archives, the author sheds new light on surprisingly few substantive issues.

How far has the Red Cross movement, and the ICRC in particular, kept faith with the dream of its progenitor Dunant? In 1864, he wrote that "the duty of the International Committee . . . is to know and then to utter the whole truth, to publish this truth in all its good or evil, to set the facts straight and to stigmatize every kind of hateful occurrence" (quoted on p. 43). Yet from its earliest days the ICRC refused to police observance of the Geneva Convention by its signatory states, and demurred when urged to act as an international tribunal that would punish violators. During World War I, to be sure, it publicly denounced reprisals on prisoners, attacks on hospital ships, and the use of poison gas, but since this last condemnation came almost three years after the horror of Ypres, it is hard to agree with the author that this was an act of "courage and vision" (p. 256). When Lenin Bolshevized the Russian Red Cross in 1917, the ICRC withdrew recognition, but when the German Red Cross was Nazified in the mid-1930s, it did nothing (to the dismay of some of its members). As the rest of Europe filled with rumors about concentration camps and persecution of the Jews, the all-Swiss ICRC was dominated by Max Huber and Carl-Jacob Burckhardt, men who "did not wish to believe the Germans capable of atrocities" (p. 354). At a crucial meeting in October 1942 (the drama of which the author exploits to the full), the ICRC, urged on apparently by the Swiss government, opted for silence and refused to publish the evil truth about the death camps. That it behaved no differently from the Allies or the Vatican scarcely absolves it from blame; in the author's opinion, shared by countless others, it should have intervened, and its failure to do so weakened the entire organization.

By 1992, when the ICRC was driven to hire gunmen to protect its relief operations in Somalia, Dunant's dream of a more civilized world was clearly in tatters, although Moorehead is far too charitable to say so. She concludes by lamenting that "the . . . Red Cross is accepted only when its interests coincide...