WASHINGTON, 21 October 2005 — Only two emblems are currently recognized under the Geneva Conventions: They are the Red Cross and the Red Crescent. Never meant to have any religious significance — the Red Cross was simply the reversal of the Swiss flag and intended to signify neutrality.
Try explaining that in Iraq where four staffers almost lost their lives over it.
The president of the Iraqi Red Crescent, Said Hakki, has urged the International Committee of the Red Cross to stop sending aid marked with Red Crosses into Iraq.
According to a report released to journalists this week, Hakki said two truck drivers and two volunteers were delivering water and medicine to the city of Haditha four weeks ago when they were captured by insurgents.
“They were seized by a terrorist group who threatened to behead them because they thought the crosses on the water and food containers meant they were Christian missionaries,” Hakki told colleagues during his visit last week to the ICRC headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.
He said the attackers seemed unmoved by the fact that the two trucks themselves were marked with the Red Crescent symbol — which is typically used in Muslim countries.
The kidnappers bound and blindfolded the four men and told them to say their final prayers before the aid workers convinced their captors that they were Sunni Muslims from Fallujah and that their supervisor was a Sunni with strong tribal connections in the area, said Hakki, a neurology professor who returned from Florida last year to take charge of the Iraqi relief operations.
After a series of frantic calls from their satellite phones, the drivers were able to reach Red Crescent officials, who enlisted the support of a local tribal leader, which led to the eventual release of the four men. But the insurgents kept the trucks and their contents.
“We know the trucks were sold in an illegal market in Sulaymaniya, in northern Iraq,” said Hakki, who hopes to recover them through the assistance of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd.
The Red Crescent has since suspended truck-delivered aid to most of the western parts of Anbar province, asking instead that local branches to send in their own unmarked trucks to pick up supplies in Baghdad.
As a result of such problems, both the International Red Cross and Red Crescent movement have welcomed the Swiss government’s intention to convene a diplomatic conference before the end of the year, to adopt another emblem alongside the cross and crescent emblems.
The two aid organizations say the additional emblem would be free of any religious or political connotations and enable national societies that have not been able to use the existing emblems to become full members of the movement. The decision comes after the two-day conference in Geneva, Switzerland that Hakki attended.
The new sign is “a red frame in the shape of a square on edge on a white ground” and would enjoy equal status in all respects with the Red Cross and Red Crescent. It would be known as the “Red Crystal.”
