Humanitarian principles put to the test: Challenges to humanitarian action during decolonization

Principles put to the test

*. This article draws on research in the archives of the British Red Cross Society in London and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Geneva. I am grateful to Jean-Luc Blondel, Fabrizio Bensi, Paul Castella, Geoff Loane, Jacques Moreillon and Daniel Palmieri for their guidance and advice on the history of the ICRC.

Time and again, the wars of decolonization¹starkly exposed the weaknesses of international humanitarian law (IHL) in the face of armed conflicts of a non-international character.²The type of conflict experienced during the end of empire was uncharted territory for many humanitarians. Decolonization was the cumulative consequence of forces of disintegration, and those forces destroyed not only colonial relationships but an entire global order.³Anti-colonial insurgencies, guerrilla warfare and liberation movements required aid and relief agencies of all kinds to devise new means of crisis response and new ways of protecting the victims of armed conflict. Even though the "hottest" of these conflicts - such as Algeria - reverberated internationally, they were regarded by Europe's colonial powers as matters that fell entirely within their domestic jurisdiction. The wars of decolonization brought into sharp relief, therefore, the legal characterization of violent insurrections and revolutionary warfare and the limits of humanitarian action in situations that were poorly provided for by the 1949 Geneva Conventions.⁴Barely had the ink begun to dry on those Conventions than the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and other leading humanitarian organizations were gathering themselves to press for a fortification of Article 3 common to the four Geneva Conventions - the "mini-Convention" which sets out certain minimum rules in conflicts that occur within rather than between States, or so-called "non-international armed conflicts". Their efforts to bring a very different type of conflict more firmly within the realm of the laws of war were resolutely resisted by Europe's colonial powers - Britain, for example, did not even ratify the four Geneva Conventions until 1957, out of concern that they would restrict the operations of its security forces when fighting insurgents in anti-colonial struggles.⁵(Most of Europe's other colonial powers ratified earlier - France in 1951, Belgium in 1952, the Netherlands in 1954 - and only Portugal...