The President of the ICRC, accompanied by Mr. Michel Convers, Head of the Operational Support Department, and Mr. Jean-Luc Blondel, Acting Head of the Division for Principles and Relations with the Movement, visited members of the Netherlands government and the National Red Cross from 22 to 24 January 1990.

Mr. Sommaruga was received by the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr. Hans van den Broek, and the Minister for Development Co-operation, Mr. J. P. Pronk, to whom he conveyed the ICRC's deep gratitude for the steady and substantial support it receives from the Netherlands.

The ICRC continued activities in a variety of fields in Mozambique in 1990. The delegation extended the scope of its visits to prisons, helped set up a specialized course for local orthopaedists, and opened a sub-delegation in Xai-Xai and an office in Chimoio. In addition to the local work of the Maputo delegation and the ICRC's four sub-delegations, delegates assessed the situation in governmentcontrolled areas of Tete, Niassa, Cabo Delgado and Inhambane provinces, where the ICRC had no permanent presence. However, many of the ICRC's relief and medical activities in the field, and especially those in areas under the control of the opposition and in contested regions, were suspended or reduced for months at a time because of security constraints or owing to lack of authorization from RENAMO. Despite these constraints, the ICRC continued year-round to provide relief and medical assistance to conflict victims in the field.

Ask any number of Dutchmen out in the street the name of a nonprofit organization and 93 out of 100 will spontaneously answer: the Netherlands Red Cross. And when you ask these 93 people for their appreciation of Red Cross activities, 92 of them will say: “Very good!”

I suppose your reaction will be: “That's fantastic! That means the Netherlands Red Cross has to invest hardly any energy in raising funds! The money comes rolling in automatically, so to speak.”

The main area of ICRC activity in Namibia remained the northern border region, where the institution assisted people affected by the conflict in neighbouring Angola. Late in the year, the delegation also set up the logistic base necessary to carry out cross-border operations into south-eastern and southern Angola.

As reported in the previous issue of the Review, surveys carried out regularly by ICRC teams to monitor the civilian population's nutritional status showed that the food situation in several districts of southern Huambo and Benguela provinces was worse than at the same season in previous years. During the period under review, the ICRC therefore stepped up its programme of food assistance to civilian victims of the combined effects of drought and conflict. A fifth Twin Otter aircraft was sent to reinforce the system established to transport food from the Atlantic coast to towns in the provinces of Benguela, Bie and Huambo. The nutritional status of the people in Ganda (Benguela province) made it necessary to set up a therapeutic feeding centre, in addition to the large-scale food distributions carried out in the area. The centre was opened on 7 February. The ICRC also provided support to Caritas, which was organizing “soup kitchens” for particularly needy groups. In all, the ICRC distributed 2,270 tonnes of food to some 100,000 people between 1 January and 28 February.

ICRC President Cornelio Sommaruga, accompanied by Mr. Angelo Gnaedinger, the Delegate General for the Middle East, was in the Middle East from 3 to 7 September 1990 for high-level talks with the Jordanian, Iraqi and Iranian authorities concerning the Gulf crisis. To quote President Sommaruga, the purpose of this mission was to achieve a “comprehensive humanitarian mobilization”. The mission itself was in keeping with the ICRC's mandate to act in the event of international armed conflict on the basis of the 1949 Geneva Conventions and the institution's statutory right of initiative. It had four main objectives:

• to provide protection and assistance, in both Iraq and Kuwait, to the various categories of civilians affected by the events;

• to improve co-ordination and step up the ICRC's operation in Jordan in behalf of foreigners transiting through the country;

• to examine possibilities of assisting foreign nationals crossing other borders (particularly into Iran);

• to review the current situation with regard to the repatriation of Iraqi and Iranian prisoners of war.

In November, the ICRC completed its seed distributions to civilians affected by the conflict on the Angolan Planalto. During the operation, which started at the end of September, delegates distributed over 1,000 tonnes of seed to about 120,000 families in the provinces of Benguela, Bié and Huambo, where the conflict had seriously disturbed the normal crop cycle. ICRC teams conducted regular nutritional surveys which revealed a particularly high incidence of malnutrition, resulting from drought and the continuing conflict. To remedy the situation, the ICRC started to distribute food rations as early as October, along with the seed. Food distributions were stepped up in November and in December, reaching a total of about 65,000 people at the end of the year.

From the time that man discovered fire and devised ways to use it as a tool for survival and advancement, it also has been employed as a weapon for destruction. Sun Tsu's The Art of War (500 B.C.) refers to incendiary arrows, while Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War describes a flame weapon used by the Spartans in 42 B.C. Edward Gibbon, in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ascribes Roman success at Constantinople (1453 A.D.) to “Greek fire,” ignited naptha mixed with pitch and resin and spread upon the surface of the water. Great Britain employed Greek fire almost five centuries later as a defence along its coastlines in anticipation of an invasion in 1940.

In the European wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, armies employed compulsory taxation of the countryside in lieu of looting to finance their activities. A defaulting town would have some of its buildings burned, leading to the tax being referred to as Brandschatzung, “burning money.” This practice became widespread during the Thirty Years war.

The conflict that broke out in Nimba county, in the north, late in December 1989 slowly spread to the capital during the first half of 1990, leading a growing number of refugees to flee the country. In January, the ICRC set up a delegation in Monrovia to provide assistance within Liberia. The institution also quickly established tracing offices for Liberian refugees in neighbouring Cȏte d'Ivoire and Guinea, and later set up another tracing office in Sierra Leone. The ICRC's regional delegations also provided assistance to the National Societies of the neighbouring countries as they dealt with the influx of refugees.

Several surveys carried out by delegates during the period under review showed that the next crops were being disastrously affected by the lack of rainfall. Certain vulnerable groups of the population (children, elderly and newly displaced persons, etc.) are already suffering from the drought. Since it is impossible for other agencies to get food to Malakal (by barge along the Nile) and Aweil (by train), the ICRC organized an airlift to supply these two points. Relief was also flown by large cargo aircraft to the town of Leer, in the area controlled by the SPLA, pending an ICRC barge service there.

Having reached the tenth anniversary of the Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons Which May be Deemed to be Excessively Injurious or to have Indiscriminate Effects, adopted on 10 October 1980 (hereinafter referred to as the 1980 Convention), we can measure the progress brought about by the treaty within the limits which the law sets for the suffering caused by war. Paradoxically, however, we are witnessing an increasing number of situations which, in form at least, fall outside the scope of application of the 1980 Convention, namely non-international armed conflicts.

Yet international humanitarian law on methods and means of combat includes general rules applicable to all armed conflict, and hence to non-international armed conflicts too. The provisions of the 1980 Convention are an application of those general rules to the means of combat which the treaty is intended to regulate. The question thus arises whether some of the rules of conduct laid down in the 1980 Convention are applicable to all armed conflicts, whether international or non-international. In the present study, we shall attempt to reply at least to some extent to that question.

Henry Dunant very clearly understood the value of good communications or he never would have written A Memory of Solferino—a book that moved the conscience of nations to action. In the United States, Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, was also a communicator. Unlike many of her time, she maintained good rapport with the press because she recognized the value of timeliness, human interest and repetition. What she conveyed to the public was an image of consistency and devotion to humanitarian ideals.

The Salvadorean Red Cross Society was founded on 13 March 1985. It has been in existence for 105 years, and so has a long record of service in the emergency situations that have arisen in El Salvador. These range from everyday emergencies in which it gives first aid, provides an ambulance service for sick and injured persons and processes and distributes blood, to major national disasters, especially earthquakes, and the internal conflict that has now been raging for more than then years.

In October, when the conflict broke out in northern Rwanda, an ICRC team reached that country within a day of the first reports of incidents, and provided about ten tonnes of supplies (mainly food) to hospitals and displaced people through the Rwandan Red Cross. Delegates began a series of visits to people arrested in connection with the events on 13 October. By the end of the year, they had visited 5,341 prisoners in 27 places of detention (18 Ministry of Justice facilities, eight gendarmerie installations and one military camp). During these visits, delegates provided about three tonnes of food, cleaning equipment, jerrycans, clothing and educational material to the prisoners. The ICRC also processed 3,550 Red Cross messages in Rwanda in 1990.