The Cross of Geneva
Carole Angier
DUNANT'S DREAM by Caroline Moorehead HarperCollins, £24.99, pp. 780 The main heroes of this book are the Red Cross delegates in the field: brave, tireless and inventive, fighting against unimaginable odds, hampered by the Swiss caution of the central International Com- mittee in Geneva. Caroline Moorehead is a Red Cross delegate to the Red Cross: faced with a similarly impossible task, she too carries it off with amazing success, and with similar energy, imagination and justice.
When did you last see the Red Cross symbol, or hear its name, in reports from the world's ever-multiplying wars, famines and assorted disasters? The people who speak from Kosovo, from Sudan, from earthquakes and mudslides on my tele- vision are almost always from Medecin sans frontieres. Dunant's Dream explains why. First of all, the Red Cross is still there, but still restrained by its traditional rule of silence and impartiality; the debate over the value — or destructiveness — of this rule is the central theme of this book. But secondly, the Red Cross has declined from its position as the first and for a long time the only aid organisation in the world. (At the height of the Rwandan crisis, Caroline Moorehead remarks, 160 such organisa- tions descended on Kigali.) Its decline is linked precisely to its rule of secrecy and impartiality; and it is right, therefore, that Dunant's Dream should circle obsessively around that theme, and around that most tragic and controversial instance of it, the failure of the Red Cross to denounce the Is it me or are gays looking younger?' Nazis' genocide of the Jews.
Dunant, as not many of us will know, was a young Swiss businessman who stumbled upon the battle of Solferino in 1859, and wrote a horrified memoir of it. In this he proposed that medical staff should be given neutral status, and that there should be a permanent organisation for assistance to the wounded. Within an extraordinarily short time — only a year or two later the first idea had become the first Geneva Convention, the second the Red Cross.
Clearly Dunant's dream had found its time. Caroline Moorehead shows us why: because it was in tune with the progressive spirit of the age, with its concerns for the emancipation of workers and women, espe- cially the latter, who would find the Red Cross ambulance the perfect vehicle for leaving home; and not least because it was, philosophically, conservative, dedicated to palliating, not abolishing, war. It was itself a model of the best and the worst of the 19th century: founded (and led to this day) by a tiny, narrow group of upper-class Swiss, headed by royals and aristos and staffed by the bourgeoisie; de haut en bas, and exclusively Wasp. All this, which brought such success in its first 60 years, is of course just what has unfitted it for our own democratic day.
Caroline Moorehead traces the great arc of Red Cross achievement up to its peak around the end of the first world war; then its decline, through the harrowing Thirties, the disaster of the second world war, down to the unspeakable horrors of our own time, from Cambodia to ex-Yugoslavia. War has become steadily more barbarous, not less; we know more and more about it, with cameras everywhere; and secret, impartial diplomacy is simply passé.
That is why I say that Dunant's Dream was an impossible task — the vast history of a declining institution. And yet it is a marvellous book, for it is not only the his- tory of an institution, it is the history of modern war. You will need a strong stom- ach for it, but also a strong heart, because each horror is matched by acts of extraordi- nary courage and decency. It is amazingly engaging for a book with a huge cast of Swiss characters and an extremely depress- ing plot. The reason, of course, is that it is very well written. It is full of vivid and mov- ing personal stories — of presidents, nurses and delegates, of prisoners of war, of civil- ian victims (especially, I warn you, of chil- dren).
Above all, it is both brave and fair. Caroline Moorehead does not hesitate to condemn Red Cross failures, but never loses sympathy and admiration for the extraordinary idea. As Telford Taylor, prosecuting counsel at Nuremberg said about the Geneva Conventions, 'If it were not regarded as wrong to bomb military hospitals, they would be bombed all the time, instead of only some of the time.' It may not sound like much, but few have achieved more.
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