Introduction: Framing Conflict
In May 1924 an Irishwoman in Barcelona, Monica O’Sullivan, wrote to the League of Nations seeking action in the ongoing conflict in the Rif. Morocco was ‘so far out of the way’, she wrote, ‘there is a danger that people may not realise that innocent lives are frequently destroyed and young men maimed in what appears to most people a most senseless and useless war’.Footnote 1 She appealed to the League to mediate as an ‘impartial and well-disciplined body’ and ‘Europe’s only hope of getting out of chaos’. Though couched in polite terms, her request generated anxieties among the League’s Political Section. Its members feared that failure to respond to letters like O’Sullivan’s would negatively affect popular impressions of the League, even as expectations for the organisation’s ability to prevent or deescalate war exceeded its capabilities.Footnote 2 Three years previously, O’Sullivan had written to another Geneva-based international body, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), seeking intervention in a different conflict: the ongoing British war in Ireland. Highlighting alleged atrocities during that conflict, she appealed to the ICRC’s ‘humanity’ to support a pressure campaign to end the war. The ICRC response directed O’Sullivan towards legal channels for intervention in civil wars, while dissuading her from more general appeals through the rhetoric of ‘humanity’.Footnote 3
Although both organisations had captured public imagination as harbingers of international peace in the aftermath of the First World War, neither seemed comfortable addressing appeals, like O’Sullivan’s, which demanded action against Europe’s imperial powers. Instead, the ICRC, and to a lesser extent the League of Nations, reframed these conflicts as internal disturbances or even civil wars. Today, contestations around the categorisation of conflicts as civil wars have political connotations and increasing legal implications, as the term ‘civil war’ can legitimate the belligerency of insurgents and authorise, or set the limits of, interventions by the international community.Footnote 4 This legal apparatus was emerging in the aftermath of the First World War and generated a dialogue between participants and international organisations, as the categorisation of conflicts evolved to allow humanitarian intervention and provision of relief.
To understand this process, this article focuses on appeals made to the League of Nations and ICRC from three conflicts on Europe’s peripheries: Ireland, Montenegro and Morocco in the aftermath of the First World War. Across all three conflicts insurgents, their supporters, and their opponents used or adapted the designation of ‘civil war’ or internal conflict to appeal for intervention on humanitarian grounds, although none of the three conflicts seems to fit within patterns of wider civil war violence in post-war Europe.Footnote 5 The civil war that followed years of conflict against Britain in Ireland has often been described as an outlier, lacking the extreme fatalities and stark ideological cleavages that characterised civil war elsewhere on the continent.Footnote 6 Similarly, the low-intensity guerrilla struggle against Serbian occupation in early 1920s Montenegro might not meet the casualty threshold for a civil war, though its origins and underlying ideologies centred on control for the state in a process of revolution and counter-revolution. As O’Sullivan argued, the devastating war in the Rif was explicitly imperialistic and expansionist. Yet although Morocco was divided into French and Spanish protectorates, the continued presence of the Sultan as a figurehead allowed the Spanish government to claim that the conflict was an internal disturbance with the Riffians ‘rebelling’ against the Sultan’s authority.
To an extent this reframing is unsurprising, as ‘civil war’ has always been an amorphous concept with no universally accepted definition. Faced with this fluidity, some historians have suggested designating conflicts as ‘civil wars’ if that reflects how contemporaries interpreted the conflict surrounding them. But even for participants in these conflicts, ‘civil war’ was rarely a neutral term. It signified the abandonment of attempts to conduct politics through normal means and was often avoided.Footnote 7 If ‘civil war’ was avoided, imperial intentions were often flatly denied, even by the Spanish and French in Morocco. Similarly, the continued influence of Britain over Irish affairs remained contentious. In the Balkans, as Pieter Judson has argued, many of the states that replaced the Habsburg Empire could ‘more usefully be considered little empires’ due to their retention of imperial strategies of law, ordering, legitimation and conceptualisations of cultural difference.Footnote 8 From this perspective, Serb ethno-nationalist expansion in Montenegro had an imperialist tinge.
This article argues that participants in these three conflicts moved between the framings of civil and imperial war, reshaping the presentation of violence to attract international attention and intervention. Efforts to solicit intervention were often interlinked, crossing transnational networks and currents including women’s internationalism, religious networks and diasporic nationalism. Humanitarian intervention from Geneva captured imaginations after the First World War, as the perceived capability of international organisations to prevent war or alleviate suffering filled the interventionist space formerly occupied by states. Attention focused on the League and ICRC (alongside the wider Red Cross movement), whose actions during the First World War had established its reputation as the pre-eminent humanitarian organisation in Europe.Footnote 9 Examining appeals to both organisations, this article reveals their reluctance to meet the expectations they had acquired as champions for humanity and the evolution of humanitarian intervention in the inter-war period.
Humanitarian Intervention by Humanitarians?
Histories of humanitarian intervention tend to move between the suppression of the slave trade and protection of Christian minorities in the nineteenth-century and the explosion of ‘humanitarian imperialism’ in the last decades of the twentieth century.Footnote 10 Within this framing the inter-war period has been described as an ‘eclipse’, or interlude, as states shattered by war relinquished their previous commitments to intervention.Footnote 11 Instead of direct humanitarian intervention by states, scholars have portrayed the aftermath of the First World War as an era of humanitarian action by non-state actors, as a proliferation of organisations descended on Europe and the Middle East to rebuild destroyed regions and repatriate prisoners and refugees.Footnote 12 In practice, the line blurred between this ‘action’ and ‘intervention’ as humanitarian actors served as the soft arm of military power, often remaking and rehabilitating along ideological lines, particularly as a bulwark against the threat of communism.Footnote 13
For the most eminent English-language legal theorist on humanitarian intervention in the 1920s, Ellory Stowell, intervention constituted ‘the reliance upon force for the justifiable purpose of protecting the inhabitants of another state’ from arbitrary and persistently abusive treatment exceeding ‘the limits of that authority within which the sovereign is presumed act with reason and justice’.Footnote 14 Subsequent accounts have differed over whether this force required military or coercive diplomatic action.Footnote 15 Taking the broadest definition of force opens theoretical space for non-state actors such as the League of Nations or ICRC to impose their will on a state. This was not an outlandish possibility in the inter-war period. The creation of the League had fundamentally altered the question of humanitarian intervention, wrote one law professor, by allowing the collective action of states against threats to international peace or the inhumane treatment of ‘backwards peoples’.Footnote 16 The League, he argued, generated a form of social solidarity uniting previously ‘sporadic, isolated acts of altruistic nations acting as enforcers of the law of nations’. In 1923 the Court of International Justice even provided the legal right for the League to intervene in matters previously considered the domestic jurisdiction of states. From this perspective, the creation of the mandates or even the forcible transfer of minority populations, as between Greece and Turkey, continued the spirit, if not the exact practice, of nineteenth-century humanitarian interventions.Footnote 17
If the League was a new possible enforcer of international law through interventions, the system for minorities protection and the mandates commission established a framework for individuals to push for intervention through petitions.Footnote 18 Although drafters of the League’s Covenant attempted to erect boundaries around the League as a forum for public opinion or guarantor of rights, mandate peoples and minorities now possessed direct contact with the international sphere through petitioning.Footnote 19 Optimism pervaded around the possibility offered by the League and, by extension, Geneva as an international arena for vocal criticism of the world order. As historians of the League have shown, petition-making created new languages and repertoires of international lobbying, claim-making and political mobilisation.Footnote 20 Less well explored is how these tactics extended beyond the League to adjacent organisations like the ICRC.
Founded in 1863, the ICRC developed a reputation for upholding the Geneva Conventions and provision of medical relief in conflict, before expanding its activities to include investigations into prisoner of war conditions during the Great War.Footnote 21 At the Red Cross movement’s tenth international conference in 1921, the ICRC’s remit of activity was formally expanded to include relief for all victims of conflict. including civil wars and internal disturbances. If requested to do so by a national society, the ICRC could now intervene during civil wars to offer aid or inspect prison conditions, then publish a report of its findings. It could also publicise refusals for its services and, if a national Red Cross society was incapacitated or non-existent, negotiate directly with the belligerents for access to prisoners.Footnote 22 Although these changes suggested wide possibilities for humanitarian intervention, they remained ‘soft law’, not binding on states and lacking in coercive mechanisms other than recourse to public opinion.
Focusing on Morocco, Pablo la Porte has argued that the ICRC was slow to react to the conflict, as its attention lay elsewhere; in Ireland, Greece, Turkey and Russia.Footnote 23 However, viewing one country or organisation alone misses the transfers of ideas, practices and personnel shaping appeals for humanitarian intervention and subsequent ICRC actions across multiple conflicts. Some petitioners evidently knew of the 1921 resolution sanctioning ICRC intervention in civil wars and internal conflicts, but few directly invoked its terms. Rather than adapting what Natasha Wheatley has described as the ‘emphatically legal style’ of mandates petitions to the League, writers to the ICRC were vague on the international legal basis of their appeals.Footnote 24 Instead, petitioners drew from the ‘precedent’ of past ICRC interventions alongside more abstract appeals to civilisational morality and ‘humanity’.
Humanity is now a key principle of the Red Cross movement and a central concept underlying humanitarian action and intervention. In different contexts it conveys this organising principle, the behaviours and attitudes behind it, and a universal ideal of collective humankind.Footnote 25 Though the idea of ‘universal humanity’ has provided justification for military intervention, collective ‘humanity’ has never been wholly egalitarian. Instead, it depends on racial and moral hierarchies of care, suggesting some groups are more worthy of sympathy and protection. Appeals to humanity also presuppose practices of ‘inhumanity’, including torture, degradation and ill-treatment. As Paul Betts has argued, in the aftermath of the First World War invocations of ‘humanity’ were often linked to the memory of these wartime atrocities, reflecting a desire to limit and punish ‘uncivilised’ and inhumane conduct.Footnote 26 Read in this way, petitions reaching the ICRC sought intervention on the grounds of ‘humanity’, both to affirm their inclusion in a sphere of civilised morality and to offer justice, rather than just relief to alleviate suffering.
The Blueprint: The Irish Civil War 1922–3
As the ICRC had indicated to Monica O’Sullivan, the prolonged guerrilla war waged in Ireland from 1919 to 1921 could be perceived as an internal struggle against British rule. Just weeks after her letter in 1921, however, violence ground to a standstill. Months of negotiations resulted in the Anglo-Irish Treaty, effectively ending the conflict with Britain while mandating the partition of the island and accepting Ireland’s dominion status within the British Empire. Though it prompted intense divisions in June 1922 supporters of the Treaty won a decisive electoral majority, seemingly confirming popular support for the Treaty. The subsequent formation of a ‘Provisional Government’, later the Irish Free State, led the anti-Treaty ‘republican’ faction to leave the Irish parliament and establish their own counter-government. Fighting quickly broke out in Dublin between these factions, before giving way to a prolonged guerrilla struggle.Footnote 27 While anti-Treaty republicans conducted ambushes against property and police barracks, the numerically superior Provisional Government enacted emergency legislation allowing for mass internment, trial by military court and the execution of those bearing arms against the state.
From the outset, the pro-Treaty envoy in Geneva, Michael MacWhite, recommended accession to the Geneva Conventions and adherence to the Red Cross’ recommendations for the treatment of prisoners during civil war.Footnote 28 Though this included providing ‘prisoner of war’ treatment, in accordance with the Hague Conventions, the status of these prisoners was disputed and they were described as ‘irregulars’ beyond the protection of international law.Footnote 29 Plans to accede to the Geneva Convention quickly ran aground, as foreign policy in the newly independent Irish state focused on cultivating an image of stability and securing international recognition through the League of Nations, rather than the ICRC.Footnote 30
Dismissing the League as a ‘British-controlled body for the promotion of British economic interests abroad’, their anti-Treaty opponents turned instead to the ICRC and wider Red Cross movement.Footnote 31 As early as 1914, women’s organisations had approached Geneva regarding the possibility of establishing an independent Irish Red Cross, while during the war against Britain republicans had adopted the ‘Red Cross’ moniker for a relief programme backed with funding from the United States.Footnote 32 This ‘Irish White Cross’ projected an appearance of neutrality but was viewed byBritish military authorities as part of a ‘rebel propaganda campaign’ to convince the United States that the Irish ‘were in the last stage of starvation’.Footnote 33 Geneva, and the ICRC, were rarely mentioned, even as the ‘White Cross’ demonstrated the malleability of and international prestige associated with the ‘Red Cross’ name. Perhaps this reflected doubts about the reception for Irish Catholic claims in a deeply Calvinist city, captured by MacWhite’s remark that ‘up until recently, Geneva was, from a religious point of view, almost as intolerant as Belfast’.Footnote 34
It was from Belfast, where fighting had been described as akin to ‘civil war’ since 1921, that the first appeals for ICRC intervention in Ireland appeared, over British attacks on a hospital and the treatment of Catholic refugees.Footnote 35 Appeals for intervention on behalf of prisoners, as outlined by the 1921 resolution, only appeared in November 1922 amid reports of the proposed execution of republican supporter Erskine Childers, also a well-known author and British army veteran. His sentence generated protests from aristocratic French families as a ‘contravention of the Geneva Convention’ and British leftists as ‘violating international right of prisoners of war’.Footnote 36 ‘If the International Red Cross looks on the execution of prisoners without making any protest’, the grandson of former US president Chester Arthur wrote about the execution, ‘it does not deserve its reputation of the first arbiter of Christian civilisation’.Footnote 37 Uniting these appeals was a sense of moral outrage and revulsion against the execution of an elite intellectual in a Christian ‘civilised’ country. All focused on the appropriate moral response of the ICRC to adjudicate this violence, though few explicitly invoked its jurisdiction to intervene in civil wars.
Calls for intervention under the 1921 resolution emanated instead from a women’s prison advocacy group in Dublin, the Women’s Prisoners’ Defence League. Their appeals to the ICRC criticised the Provisional Government’s violation of the ‘rules [of] civil warfare’ and ‘Red Cross resolutions accepted internationally’.Footnote 38 Through the socialist and international activist Charlotte Despard these protests gained the support of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), which added to demands for an ICRC investigation in Ireland on behalf of ‘10,000 men and women prisoners of war’.Footnote 39 The WILPF simultaneously facilitated the visit of two Irish women, Kathleen Lynn and Kathleen O’Brennan, to Geneva, to present evidence of medical neglect and torture of prisoners.Footnote 40 Yet when the ICRC solicited the opinion of the British Red Cross, still the nominal Red Cross authority in Ireland, it refused to act, insisting that ‘at present no state of war exists in Ireland’.Footnote 41 Undeterred, ICRC members attempted to establish an independent Red Cross society in Ireland, though friendly relations with the ‘Provisional Government’, now declared the Irish Free State, were also sharply rebuked.Footnote 42 Its Minister for External Affairs, Desmond Fitzgerald, insisted the ‘rebellion’ in Ireland did not require an external humanitarian presence.
Faced with this standstill, republicans became frustrated with the ICRC. On return from Geneva, Kathleen O’Brennan asked ‘whether is any use in the Committee . . . making laws unless they are able to enforce them’.Footnote 43 Perhaps in an attempt to force its hand, she referred to funding republicans received from the United States and asked what twenty-five million ‘American Irish’ would think of the Red Cross, with ‘no force or courage’ for ‘culprits who broke its laws’. This diaspora also appeared to weigh on the mind of the fugitive republican ‘president’ Éamon de Valera, who was directing the compilation of a detailed report of Free State violations of the ‘recognised rights of prisoners of war’ for the ICRC.Footnote 44 Though he stressed it was of the ‘highest importance’, de Valera lacked basic information about the ICRC or Geneva Conventions and seemed unsure what the republicans sought to achieve from the appeals: the end of executions, amelioration of prison conditions or international attention. Plans to form an independent republican Red Cross society or restart the Irish White Cross further complicated the situation.Footnote 45 De Valera acknowledged these might provide some international legitimacy but were ‘only the thin end of the wedge’ of international recognition.
In their interactions with international bodies in Geneva, both sides in Ireland largely avoided directly using the terminology of civil war. To de Valera and other republicans, the conflict was a continuation of the war against Britain in a new guise, providing a handy alternative origin for the ongoing violence.Footnote 46 Taking this line, one advisor to de Valera wrote, ‘I have a curious feeling myself that we are exposing the meanness and cruelty of our own people, but if we can make out that it is a renewal of the Black and Tan hostilities (which it is) matters will be all right’.Footnote 47 The republican appeal to the ICRC, devised by de Valera and his advisors, positioned the conflict as an interstate war and the prisoners as ‘prisoners of war’. In doing so, it avoided invoking the 1921 resolution, instead referring to violations of the ‘laws of war’. While composing it, de Valera criticised the Women’s Prisoners’ Defence League for their appeals that used ‘prisoner of war’ and ‘political prisoner’ interchangeably, along with ‘civil warfare’, and even acknowledged the Free State as a legitimate government.Footnote 48 Yet, Despard and other members of the Women’s Prisoners’ Defence League simultaneously demanded intervention from the League of Nations through claims of violations of ‘article 10 of the 1921 Geneva Convention’. This indication that they believed the resolution was international law, applicable in interstate conflict, is fortified by their appeals, which identified England as Ireland’s executioner and alleged that all officers in the Free State received their commissions from the ‘English King’.Footnote 49
Slippery terminology also generated difficulties for the ICRC, who observed that the Irish Free State viewed their opponents as ‘rebels’ in an internal ‘police operation’, rather than a civil war. Approaching the Free State, ICRC president, Gustave Ador, insisted he had ‘no intention of entering into legal discussion of the facts’ of the ongoing conflict and was motivated solely by ‘humanitarian concern’. Intervention might stem the universal feeling against the situation in Ireland, he claimed, as he provided the Irish government with lists of the telegrams it had received in protest.Footnote 50 But by referencing appeals for intervention received since ‘June 1921’, he unwittingly replicated the republicans’ characterisation of the war as a continuation of the conflict fought against Britain, only formally concluded at the end of 1921. This was not missed by Desmond Fitzgerald, who saw in Ador’s words further evidence of the ICRC’s hostile intentions in Ireland.
Despite Ador’s claim that the ICRC was motivated by humanitarian concerns alone, lurid accounts of torture, executions and suffering prisoners elicited little support from Geneva. A delegation was only agreed for Ireland after the republicans presented the ICRC with de Valera’s detailed report of breaches of international law.Footnote 51 Internal discussions quickly shifted from viewing intervention in Ireland as comparable to intervening in the sovereign affairs of Italy, to perceiving it as the ICRC’s duty to alleviate the suffering of prisoners and ‘hostages’.Footnote 52 In spring 1923 two delegates arrived in Ireland, prepared to conduct parallel investigations of prisoners held by both sides, mirroring their previous intervention in Upper Silesia. Yet due to the lack of prisoners held by the republican faction, Raymond Schlemmer soon returned to Geneva via London, while Rodolphe Haccius remained to conduct a ‘purely technical’ investigation of Free State internment camps.Footnote 53 Offering a frosty welcome, Fitzgerald again insisted that the situation in Ireland was a police operation, not a war. Due to limits imposed on the investigation, including prohibitions on talking to prisoners and their supporters, or visiting the women’s prisons, Haccius’ observations centred on physical elements of the camps, including bedding, sanitation facilities, correspondence and medical provision.Footnote 54 Overall, he concluded that though the prisoners were not officially considered prisoners of war, they were housed and treated in conformity with the ‘general principles’ of international law.Footnote 55
The report, published in the Revue Internationale de la Croix Rouge in July 1923, was touted as a propaganda victory for the Free State, providing it with a bulwark against criticism of its internment policy while tightening its controls. The Free State Prime Minister, William Cosgrave, described the ‘care and attention’ given to prisoners as ‘a sort of seventh heaven of delight’ compared to the conditions of Dublin’s urban poor.Footnote 56 Republicans noticed that a reservation contained in the draft report – that Haccius had not been authorised to question the detainees – was omitted from the official publication in the Revue.Footnote 57 In newspaper editorials, they drew attention to the secrecy surrounding the delegate’s visit, arguing that Haccius had refused to speak to representatives of republican prisoners who arrived at his hotel.Footnote 58 Throughout the summer they orchestrated pushback against the report, including renewed appeals in Geneva to both the ICRC and the League of Nations.Footnote 59 Many of their criticisms echoed Haccius’ own misgivings about the investigation but a revision was still not forthcoming, even when external reports from the British branch of Save the Children appeared to corroborate allegations of torture.Footnote 60
Ultimately republicans viewed their efforts to attract the support of the Red Cross as a failure, though some attributed this to continued British influence over international bodies like the ICRC and the League of Nations.Footnote 61 Despite the announcement of a ceasefire days after Haccius left Dublin, thousands remained interned by the Free State until early 1924 while low-intensity guerrilla violence continued in Ireland throughout the 1920s. By ignoring testimonies of torture and ill-treatment brought to Geneva in summer 1923, the ICRC seemed largely unconcerned with the detrimental consequences of their humanitarian intervention. During later interventions, like those in Morocco and Montenegro, Ireland would even appear to ICRC delegates as an idealised model or blueprint for desirable action in internal conflicts. This was in spite of Haccius’ complaints to the ICRC that the Free State did not treat the republicans as equal opponents, demonstrated an ‘aversion to allowing a foreigner to interfere in internal affairs’, refused to abide by the terms of the 1921 resolution for prison investigations and even hindered his attempts to visit prison sites.Footnote 62 In their dealings with the Free State the ICRC repeatedly chose to maintain cordial relations with the state over insurgents, despite its claims that its ‘committee must, in fact, carefully avoid appearing to take sides in political struggles’.Footnote 63 Finally, though the majority of its information on the situation was drawn from British interlocutors, particularly the British Red Cross, viewed by the ICRC as the dominant humanitarian authority on Ireland, the ICRC’s official reports and internal assessments made little reference to the role of Britain in the ongoing conflict. This negated republican claims that the Free State was supported by Britain but also denied any lingering imperial influence on the ‘civil war’.
A Forgotten Struggle? Montenegrin Independence Efforts, 1919–26
Though ICRC efforts in Ireland had reached an unsatisfactory conclusion for republican petitioners, the publication of its report on Free State prison conditions ignited efforts from another of Europe’s marginalised peoples. Months after it appeared in the Revue a Canadian doctor, General Frederick Burnham, wrote to Geneva demanding ICRC action in Montenegro, ‘in view of the right it conferred on itself to intervene when appealed to and when the principles of humanity were involved’.Footnote 64 Burnham was soon joined by others advocating the ICRC ‘raise its mighty voice’ on behalf of the ‘martyred people of Montenegro’ in the face of Serb oppression.Footnote 65 Largely maligned in histories of post-war Europe, Montenegro was the only victorious Ally in the Great War to lose its independence, symbolised by an empty chair at the Versailles Peace Conference. Its first and last king, Nikola, had escaped via the Adriatic during the war.Footnote 66 This left a power vacuum that was exploited by neighbouring Serbia, in its efforts to unify the southern Slavs within a single state.Footnote 67 With the backing of France and Britain, Serb authorities called a popular assembly in November 1919 at Podgorica on the issue of unification. Entirely opposed by the exiled king and his supporters, represented by ‘green’ voting slips, it was welcomed by the majority within Montenegro who identified as ethnically Serbian. This ‘white’ faction won a substantial majority but faced criticism that the assembly was illegal and illegitimate, leading dissident ‘greens’ to launch paramilitary action.Footnote 68 Amidst internal divisions and worsening famine in the countryside, minority support for the ‘greens’ gradually declined to pockets of sporadic violence in mountain regions. Following visits from British and Italian commissions, the ‘Montenegrin question’ appeared internationally resolved with Montenegro part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.Footnote 69
Was this sporadic violence a ‘civil war’? Enticed by the promise of a liberal democratic, unified and modern Slavic state, the international community largely ignored the violent assimilation of dissidents in Macedonia, Albania and Montenegro.Footnote 70 In the latter, large segments of the population identified as ethnically Serb, leading Montenegrins to be disregarded as a separate ethnic group. Yet for opponents of unification there still existed a distinct Montenegrin identity, ensuring that the Serb state was composed of ‘unwilling subjects’ ‘foreign to the Serbian race’ in a ‘false Yugoslavia’.Footnote 71 Dealing with appeals about Montenegro to the ICRC, Gustave Ador would eventually become frustrated by this impossibility of placing the Montenegrin case. ‘I cannot explain’, he wrote to one complainant, ‘why your committee does not openly refer the matter to the League of Nations since it considers that a minority is being mistreated in Serbia’.Footnote 72 Ador viewed the League’s Commission for the Protection of Minorities as qualified to deal with Montenegrin complaints, which he argued would not prevent the ICRC from conducting prison inspections. However, appeals to the League’s Political Section had already failed, with its members unsure whether the ‘Montenegrin question can properly be called a Minority question’.Footnote 73 Presumably for this reason few, if any, appeals appeared to have been launched to the minorities section of the League on behalf of Montenegrins.Footnote 74
Petitioners for intervention in Montenegro therefore appeared caught between minority protections and civil war, excluded from the former and almost entirely avoiding the terminology of the latter. They did, however, invoke the precedent of the ICRC’s investigation of internment camps and the treatment of prisoners in the Irish Free State, demanding ‘a similar committee be appointed to report in conditions in Montenegro’.Footnote 75 Burnham’s appeals extended beyond drawing attention to prisoners and executions. He sought information from the ICRC on the total number of persons killed or interned, the condition of women and children, the number of orphans and the confiscation of property. Subsequent letters from an Italian committee, under Antoine Baldacci, added to this catalogue of abuses for investigation, including the psychological state of the prisoners and the violation and injury of women.Footnote 76 Baldacci even insisted that, as the British government had allowed the ICRC to carry out research in the Irish Free State, it would be ‘easy to find men capable of assuming the mandate for Montenegro’.Footnote 77 Although the Irish investigation was harnessed as a precedent, the mention of British permission indicated petitioners for Montenegro were not clear that there had been a ‘civil war’ in Ireland.
The ICRC response to these petitions was swift, if not directed towards the alleged atrocities in Montenegro. Burnham’s letter had arrived on the headed paper of the ‘Winnipeg White Cross’, an organisation of which he claimed to be president. This invocation of the Red Cross, albeit tangentially, prompted an internal ICRC investigation, until they were satisfied that Burnham, and his Italian supporter Baldacci, were ‘private individuals’ using their committees to fulfil their ‘eminently idealistic aspirations’. No action, they concluded, was required in Montenegro.Footnote 78
The White Cross moniker also caught the attention of other advocates for Montenegro who had struggled to attract support for their cause. ‘What is this White Cross? Does it still exist?’ and ‘will our old Red Cross respond to General Burnham’, wondered Renée Claparède, founder of the Geneva-based Bureau International pour les Droits des Gens. Footnote 79 This organisation’s previous missives to the League of Nations had demanded the immediate evacuation of Serbian troops from Montenegro and an impartial commission of inquiry ‘to observe the conduct of Serbs’, which they argued was ‘contrary to all sacred principles of international law and of the most elementary rules of humanity’.Footnote 80 After the League refused the Montenegrin government in exile admission in late 1920, the Bureau was among the splinter groups in Geneva which continued to petition the League for recognition of Montenegrin independence and right to self-determination.Footnote 81 Internally, members of the League’s Political Section expressed dismay at alleged atrocities in Montenegro, but their concerns lay with the wider political situation in the Adriatic and the damage atrocity reports could do to Serbia’s position there.Footnote 82 Following Burnham’s White Cross appeal, the Bureau’s attention shifted from the League to potential intervention by the ICRC. It now added its support for an enquiry into prison conditions and for an entire people ‘decimated by famine, cold, disease, destitution’.Footnote 83
Energised by the ICRC’s apparent interest, Montenegrin independence committees in Italy, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and Geneva spent spring 1924 in a flurry of communication, exchanging and translating pamphlets and newspapers on Montenegro.Footnote 84 The ICRC mission presented them with a unified cause though, as in the Irish case, slight uncertainty lingered over what it would achieve. If the main aim was to secure the amelioration of prison conditions these were not discussed in detail, allegedly due to censorship issues. Instead, petitioners claimed that the ICRC already possessed sufficient material on the situation in Montenegro in the ‘very generous amount of time’ it had been under Serb control.Footnote 85 Unlike previous appeals regarding Montenegro to the League of Nations, material presented to the ICRC ranged across this five-year span but remained vague on regional conditions or the exact contours of violence.
By June, however, the petitioners’ hopes were dashed, as the ICRC sent their letters directly to Serbian authorities. Claparède bemoaned their naivety, while Burnham denounced the ICRC as ‘purely political and its funds [as] used to further political propaganda’.Footnote 86 Both viewed this as a political act, ‘treacherously giving away to the reactionary Government our names and those of our informers!’Footnote 87 Who these informers were is not instantly clear from the ICRC’s files, as none of the letters remaining in Geneva are from Montenegrins. It is also unclear whether the Montenegrin government in exile fully supported these appeals to the ICRC. That September, the exiled government had asked the League of Nations to reconsider the Montenegrin question, describing Serbia’s negation of international law and violation of ‘the most elementary humanitarian principles’.Footnote 88 They did not mention ongoing efforts to solicit intervention from the ICRC. Just weeks before, a committee for Montenegrin independence in New York had placed its own appeal before the League, citing their efforts to draw the attention of the ICRC and American Red Cross.Footnote 89 They framed the plight of the Montenegrins as a minorities question and demanded the ‘immediate, impartial and unobstructed investigation and removal of Serbia’ but made no reference to intervention on the grounds of civil war or internal disturbance.
Behind the scenes the ICRC was conducting covert negotiations with the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. Its delegate, Raymond Schlemmer, was refused access to prisons when he visited Belgrade in April 1924, due to the ‘political exploitation’ of such an investigation and ICRC’s ‘lack of tact’.Footnote 90 Through unofficial interlocutors the ICRC conveyed that it ‘would like to be able to put an end to the complaints it receives . . . as quickly as possible’, suggesting that a likely positive report would ‘disarm’ the opposition.Footnote 91 While the ICRC awaited a response from Serbian authorities, Baldacci and Claparède published an ‘open letter’ to its president, Gustave Ador, accusing the ICRC of acting as ‘Pontus Pilate’ in the Montenegrin case, washing its hands of the situation while transmitting confidential documents to the accused. Continuing this Christian imagery, the ICRC was further compared to Judas Iscariot, ‘readily avoid[ing] anything that brings troubles’. ‘Humanity’, the authors wrote, ‘aspires to peace, tranquillity and the suppression of imperialism, particularly the terrible imperialism in the Balkans’.Footnote 92 Baldacci and Claparède concluded that even though petitioners had demanded an intervention from the Red Cross, not the Ministry for Foreign Affairs in Belgrade, they had been given the latter.Footnote 93 Incensed, the ICRC scrambled to protect its reputation, informing the Serb Foreign Minister that it would publish all correspondence between them and repeating its demands for a mission to Belgrade.
Finally, on 20 September 1924, the Serbian Red Cross society sent a report of a prison investigation allegedly conducted the previous month.Footnote 94 This acknowledged structural issues within the prisons but claimed the absence of widespread abuses. The entire report was published in the November Revue, though the ICRC campaigned for its own investigation to ‘close the file’ on the subject.Footnote 95 Past successful investigations were cited, including those in Hungary, Upper Silesia and Ireland. To this, the Foreign Minister insisted that these examples ‘will in no way constitute a precedent for the case in question, since there are no detention prisons or internment camps in the Kingdom’. The ICRC’s political aims were already obvious, he wrote, for suggesting that there existed ‘Montenegrin prisons’ as though those were subject to a special regime.Footnote 96 This response appeared to firmly repudiate any unspoken insinuation that the situation in Montenegro could be classified as a civil war or approached through the 1921 conference resolution.
Despite refusing the ICRC’s investigation, the Kingdom’s Foreign Ministry held out the possibility of a visit in a ‘private capacity’ which the ICRC readily accepted. On 20 April 1925 Lucien Cramer arrived in Belgrade claiming he was just ‘passing through’ on a visit to Eastern Europe. A report of Cramer’s visit to Montenegro was published in the Revue in June 1925. He argued that although the ICRC had conducted previous prison investigations, pro-Montenegrin committees had taken advantage of these precedents while grossly misinterpreted the ICRC’s capabilities. ‘In the minds of these petitioners’, he wrote, ‘the Committee would have had the power to open an investigation into the state of the prisons, the executions of supporters of the deposed Monarchy, the treatment imposed on prisoners, the state of the civilian population notably women and children, the number of people of every sex and every age killed and interned, confiscations, the relief and health care service’.Footnote 97 Faithful to its tradition of not interfering in the internal affairs of governments, he claimed that the ICRC had only attempted to find out the number, condition and health situation of prisoners and was laudatory towards the Kingdom’s August report. This was a clear warning to future independence movements that the ICRC would not be sympathetic towards their claims.
‘“We have nothing to hide”, the Minister for Foreign Affairs reported with a smile’.Footnote 98 So began Cramer’s assessment of the Montenegrin prisons, whose deficiencies in terms of overcrowding, lack of bedding or poor facilities were excused by reference to the general economic state of the Kingdom. Issues like a prison ‘falling into ruins’, ‘forced promiscuity’ of cramped living conditions for prisoners, including children, and prisoners sleeping on asphalt did not dampen the overall positive assessment. Echoing Cosgrave’s remarks about the poor of Dublin, Cramer reported that ‘the material situation of the defendants held in prison was hardly different from that of the peaceful inhabitants of the country who find themselves poorly housed, poorly fed and deprived of everything that constitutes the comfort of existence’.Footnote 99 Not only was the Kingdom absolved of responsibility for prison conditions, but the prisoners themselves were detached in the report from any insinuation of political agitation. Instead, it was the historical conditions of the Austrian occupation that had driven peasants to the forests, creating ‘a new class of delinquents’ ready to shoot for political and ‘less noble’ reasons. Greed, retributive justice, demoralisation and tribal animosities were also presented as justifications. Though Cramer mentioned two or three inmates, ‘who could, at a pinch, have passed for victims of politics’, he insisted they were currently held on criminal charges and would otherwise have been released as part of general amnesties.Footnote 100 Perhaps these ‘amnesties’ accounted for the disparities in the prison population, dropping from 512 in the Kingdom’s report to 262 during the ICRC visit.
Most strikingly, Cramer’s report insisted that a large proportion of the incarcerated prisoners were Muslim Albanians, who were responsible for seizing cattle or attempted assassinations. These prisoners were exotically described as using oriental rugs as beds, smoking Scutari cigarettes, drinking coffee and ‘waiting with the fatalism inherent in their race’.Footnote 101 In placing blame for unrest in Montenegro on foreign and othered Albanian Muslims, the report indirectly argued that this was not an internal conflict, while eliding questions about Montenegrin national identity. Muslims were presented as the real outsiders, an unwelcome minority disrupting an otherwise peaceful society. In response Burnham drafted letters to newspapers alleging a Serbian cover up of prison conditions and mocking Cramer’s belief that ‘a large proportion of the people of Montenegro are bandits, thieves, and assassins’.Footnote 102 Though he did not comment on it, his letter seemed to confirm the racial hierarchies of suffering in the prisons. He too, had watched a dying man dismissed as ‘only an Albanian’.
As in Ireland, campaigners contested the report through editorials and pamphlets directed towards the ICRC. It was a ‘simple repetition of the first [Serbian] investigation’, ‘smacking of irony’ and full of ‘arbitrary judgements, poignant assertions, contradictions’.Footnote 103 They insisted that it was neither impartial nor objective and questioned whether nations should continue to subsidise the ICRC when it was not fulfilling its mandate.Footnote 104 Claparède and Baldacci still held out hope for intervention from the British or American Red Cross, yet both societies were reluctant to act, insisting that discussions with governments over political detainees was the domain of the ICRC.Footnote 105 Though the Montenegrin diaspora in the United States criticised the American Red Cross for failing to publicise Serbian crimes or pressure their government, there was little appetite to revive Anglo-American support for an independent Montenegro.Footnote 106
With the publication of the ICRC report, Montenegrin supporters had now exhausted the three primary repertoires of the international legal order at Geneva: humanitarian intervention, self-determination and minority protection. Further efforts offered a circuitous return to these same avenues. When the Montenegrin delegate gave an impassioned plea at the 1926 conference of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in Dublin, (where a pro-Montenegro committee had been founded in 1924), enthusiastic Irish supporters suggested that the WILPF could petition the League of Nations.Footnote 107 What other options existed? Those defending the rights and efforts of small states established affinities and connections between themselves yet lacked an overarching international organisation willing to intervene on their behalf.
Capturing Attention: War in the Rif, 1921–6
Dissolving, shrinking and expansionist empires shaped the conflicts in Ireland and Montenegro, even if they appeared peripheral to the conduct of hostilities. By contrast, the war waged in the Rif region of northern Morocco appears an uncontestably imperial struggle.Footnote 108 Decades of French and Spanish efforts to extend control over Morocco were consolidated by the 1912 Treaty of Fez. Though under nominal control of the Sultan, the territory was divided into two protectorates, a larger French zone in the south and a Spanish zone along the coast. At the border of these zones the Rif region fiercely resisted Spanish encroachments, leading to open conflict in July 1921 with devastating early losses for Spanish forces. By September Abd el-Krim proclaimed himself leader of the newly formed ‘Rif Republic’, now heavily armed with artillery, rifles, ammunition and equipment seized from the Spanish.
Claiming to represent forty-one tribes of the Rif and neighbouring Yomara regions, el-Krim sought to portray the Rif as an independent state internationally. To establish the viability of the Rif Republic he further emphasised his embrace of commercial and diplomatic relations with Europe and challenged perceptions of Riffian backwardness by signalling his openness to ‘modern civilisation’ and ‘projects of reform’.Footnote 109 These proclamations portrayed the Rif as challenging Spanish and French imperial ambitions in an interstate, rather than imperial war, through claims that the Rif had not itself been subjected to imperial rule. For the Spanish, the situation in the Rif was not a war at all but a ‘police operation’, echoing language adopted in Ireland and Serbia to violently suppress insurgents. Yet efforts to deny their imperialist ambitions in the Rif occasionally led Spanish authorities to claim that the conflict resembled a civil war, with the Riffians under el-Krim rebelling against the dwindling authority of the Sultan and Cherifian Empire. At the same time, the Riffians’ own aspirations and the reactions the conflict provoked lent it an international dimension, attracting supporters for both sides in Europe.Footnote 110
As in Ireland and Montenegro, representatives from the Rif first appealed to the League of Nations for recognition as an independent state. After the declaration of the Rif republic in September 1921, a British resident of the Rif, John Arnall, contacted the League claiming to represent the Riffians as the only European living in their territory. He declared that the Rif had never been conquered by Spain and sought recognition for the Riffians under international law. ‘These people are belligerents’, insisted Arnall, ‘they ask the right to organize a Red Cross or a Red Crescent, to be considered belligerents and not as rebels’.Footnote 111 Legitimation of belligerency and recognition of statehood appeared again connected to the establishment of an independent Red Cross or Crescent society. This request was not passed on to the ICRC, particularly after enquiries about Arnall in Britain led the League to dismiss him as an ‘undesirable’ trade unionist. Arnall also forwarded direct appeals from el-Krim to the League, which stressed that its purpose was to uphold standards of civilisation and uplift humanity.Footnote 112 El-Krim’s rhetoric reflected the expectations inspired, and delicately managed, by the League as a body capable of intervening to end conflict. Public and private demands for humanitarian intervention led to a Council Resolution in October 1923, stressing that the League was not a supranational institution but could only represent the will of the states that constituted it.Footnote 113 Under this resolution the League declared arbitration impossible in the Rif, as el-Krim was not recognised as a head of state while his self-declared territory did not have international legal status.Footnote 114 This view stuck. Even as the conflict in the Rif escalated further in the 1920s and became a focal point of international attention, no colonial powers or pan-Islamic solidarity groups sought direct intervention from the League.Footnote 115
In July 1924, the ICRC received a letter from the London-based Near and Middle-East Association, requesting a relief mission to investigate conditions of Muslims in the Rif.Footnote 116 Instigated at the request of one of Abd el-Krim’s agents in Tangiers, it was followed two months later by another appeal from an organisation self-described as the British Red Crescent. Drafts of this appeal characterised the war as a ‘desperate struggle, on one side animated by a fierce resolution to maintain their independence; on the other by an equally firm desire for conquest’. Though appealing to the ICRC’s ‘powerful voice’, like petitioners in Ireland it appeared to conflate the Geneva organisations by suggesting that the conflict should also be considered by the League of Nations Assembly.Footnote 117 Unlike the White Crosses in Ireland and Montenegro, the British Red Crescent had a long trajectory of supplying hospitals, funding and medical personnel during international conflicts in the Balkans and Tripoli. To do so, it had raised money from Muslims within the British Empire, largely in India, for the relief of other Islamic populations in need.Footnote 118 It co-existed with the British Red Cross, who supported its activities and even acknowledged its ‘valuable work’.Footnote 119
Condoning British Red Crescent operations in Morocco allowed the British Foreign Office to ignore appeals for direct British intervention, which they had dismissed on grounds of Spanish imperial supremacy in the region. Making this imperial comparison clear, one Foreign Office official recorded that, ‘some months ago the Americans wanted to send a Red Cross mission to Ireland, but we sternly repelled this suggestion’.Footnote 120 Later in the conflict, the Spanish ambassador to Britain suggested British government aid to the Riffians would be like the Spanish Red Cross supporting rebellious tribes on the Indian North-West Frontier.Footnote 121 Though politically expedient, this tacit recognition was unpalatable to the ICRC, who readily dismissed the British Red Crescent. As with Burnham’s White Cross in Montenegro, its appropriation of the ‘Red Cross’ became more of a hinderance than an asset.
Following what by now appeared routine procedure, the ICRC forwarded appeals about the Rif directly to the Spanish Red Cross. An international humanitarian commission was not needed, this society insisted, during ‘the police operations necessary to re-establish order disturbed by rebels, not belligerents, who ignore the legal authority of the Maghzen [Sultan] protected by the Spanish government’.Footnote 122 In November 1924, Raymond Schlemmer travelled to Madrid to negotiate with the Spanish Red Cross and Ministry for Foreign Affairs. In these discussions, Spanish authorities reiterated that the Riffians were rebels, outside the law, and that any intervention would be an affront to the Spanish ‘international mandate’.Footnote 123 The ambiguity of these terms and their elision of Spanish expansionism in Morocco allowed the Spanish to position the conflict as an internal conflict, rather than international or imperial war, where the Spanish were merely trying to protect the Sultan’s authority as established under the 1912 Treaty of Fez.Footnote 124 Schlemmer explained that the ICRC also did not view the situation as an international conflict, but as ‘an affair comparable to the disturbances which motivated its interventions in various countries and in particular Upper Silesia’.Footnote 125 Unconvinced by this invocation of precedent, the Spanish insisted that in the Rif the ICRC lacked a mandate to act. Extra-national intervention under the pretext of civil war required the direct request of Abd el-Krim or the Sultan, they argued, while international intervention required the request of Spanish authorities. Publicly, this response formed the basis of the ICRC’s claims that they had no right to intervene in this ‘special case’, while privately Schlemmer seemed satisfied with the ‘very good’ Spanish reasons for the refusal.Footnote 126
Echoing government officials in Ireland and Montenegro, Spanish authorities portrayed their efforts as police operations against rebels and expressed surprise that the ICRC sought to intervene on behalf of a ‘bandit’ like el-Krim who lay ‘outside the law’.Footnote 127 They argued that humanitarian intervention would prolong suffering by suggesting recognition of the Riffians as belligerents. This framing painted Spanish action as non-belligerency, merely overseeing an internal disturbance between the Sultan and the Riffians. Though appeals for humanitarian assistance had emanated from el-Krim’s agents, the Spanish insisted that these were from third party intermediaries and did not constitute a formal request. The ICRC echoed this view in a report published in the Revue in February 1925, denying that appeals for humanitarian aid had been received from el-Krim.Footnote 128 This was challenged by supporters of the Rif, who insisted that direct appeals on behalf of el-Krim had reached Geneva over eighteen months earlier. Robert Gordon-Canning, a British adventurer who had travelled to the Rif, insisted that the Riffians were an unconquered people, fighting a war of resistance justified under the Hague Conventions and according to international law.Footnote 129 As Francisco Javier Martinez-Antonio has argued, this latter part was technically untrue, particularly as reports had circulated in the early years of the war regarding the mistreatment of Spanish prisoners.Footnote 130 At the heart of these debates was an awareness, shared by the ICRC, that any engagement with el-Krim or suggestion of intervention ‘would allow him to claim to be considered as a sovereign and regular head of state by an authoritative institution’.Footnote 131 As Éamon de Valera had observed while compiling the Irish appeal to Geneva, even the ‘thin end of the wedge’ of international recognition was still some recognition.
Avoiding a stance on the conflict was increasingly difficult by early 1925, as multiple national Red Cross societies appealed to Geneva for humanitarian intervention, including the Swedish, Dutch and German Red Crosses and the Turkish Red Crescent.Footnote 132 Support for the Rif spread rapidly in Scandinavia, where an article by Swedish journalist Sven Hedin drew attention to the destruction while asking ‘where is the Red Cross?’Footnote 133 Despite this growing international attention to Spanish tactics, including the killing of civilians through aerial bombing and the use of poison gas, the ICRC still refused to intervene. Allegations of the use of asphyxiating gases were removed from its February report, just a year after the ICRC had led international calls to ban its use under international law.Footnote 134 When the French commenced hostilities alongside Spain in early 1925, it ‘seemed to give the conflict the nature of undeclared war’.Footnote 135 Still, ICRC efforts continued to focus on unofficial diplomacy, such as choosing to use the Sixth Assembly of the League of Nations to conduct meetings with the French Foreign Minister and Spanish ambassador. However, the French too rejected any international humanitarian intervention due to the ‘special circumstances in the Rif’ and echoed the Spanish designation of Abd el-Krim as a ‘rebel’.Footnote 136
These ‘special circumstances’ and the supposed impossibility of providing humanitarian relief were intimately bound up with the imperial politics of the Rif, despite all pretensions by the Spanish that the situation was an ‘internal disturbance’. Petitions to the ICRC for intervention overwhelmingly centred on the need for urgent medical aid to the Riffians and el-Krim’s lack of sanitary facilities, rather than prison conditions.Footnote 137 In insisting that a Red Cross humanitarian mission would be ineffective and useless, the Spanish Red Cross repeatedly argued that the Riffians were incapable of either using or appreciating modern medicine.Footnote 138 Its representatives claimed that there could not exist any Red Cross or Red Crescent in Morocco, ‘because it absolutely lacks all the conditions that the international committee requires for their recognition’. Establishment of a national society was portrayed as a component in a civilisational scale, requiring the assistance of Spain. In this view, Morocco was, allegedly self-admittedly, not ready for accension to the Geneva Convention because of the supposed irregularity and disorder of its combatants. By failing to recognise this, the Spanish Red Cross argued, ‘[i]t seems that Europe ignores the psychology of Morocco and its chaotic organization’.Footnote 139 Similarly, when recounting their surprise that no ‘official’ communication had originated from Abd el-Krim, the ICRC wondered if ‘the Riffians wish and would welcome a foreign health mission’.Footnote 140 Internally, such reservations were more firmly staked on religious grounds, suggesting that Abd el-Krim would refuse help from ‘infidels’ such as the ICRC or European Red Crosses.Footnote 141
Contrasting this view of chaotic and non-existent health provision in the Rif, ICRC publications repeatedly praised the work of the French and Spanish Red Cross societies, with the latter’s efforts described as ‘a beautiful page in the history of the Red Cross on African soil’.Footnote 142 Rodolphe Haccius travelled to Morocco in October 1925 to direct the construction of a field-hospital. In a subsequent laudatory report in the Revue he praised the provision of medical care to an apparently backward population, writing that ‘as their instinctive distrust disappears the Red Cross will endeavour to propagate among them some fundamental principles of hygiene’.Footnote 143 Civilising through medicine was part of the war effort, with Haccius suggesting that extensive Red Cross activity in ‘subjugated areas’ would ‘contribute in a most noble way to their definitive pacification’. Humanitarian action was a key component in intervention. Yet most relief efforts operating out of Tangiers were the result of private pan-Islamic initiatives, ensuring that when an ICRC delegate arrived there in November 1925 he found little immediate relief the organisation could offer. Instead, by advocating long-term development projects, the ICRC focused on rebuilding and transforming the Rif over mediating its claims to legitimate belligerency.Footnote 144
In spring 1926, a Swedish journalist returned from Morocco with a signed letter from el-Krim addressed to Prince Charles of Sweden, the president of the Swedish Red Cross. This sought help for the wounded and declared the Rif was ‘cut off from the rest of the world’.Footnote 145 It was forwarded to Geneva by the Swedish royals, who suggested intervention might be possible under the 1921 resolution for cases of civil wars or internal conflicts. The French Red Cross response was withering, describing el-Krim’s appeal as ‘only a pathetic demand for aid’, as well as an attempt to mislead public opinion on his apparent generosity.Footnote 146 Swedish publications asserted that the Riffians accepted Christian aid, treated French and Spanish prisoners as prisoners of war (despite their limited resources) and had communicated direct appeals for international aid.Footnote 147 Conscious of the publicity these claims attracted, in early 1926 the ICRC sent Raymond Schlemmer to Rabat to orchestrate a humanitarian mission to prisoners held by el-Krim. But he was consistently ignored by French authorities, who repeatedly delayed his departure to el-Krim’s territory. Just as this was finally confirmed, el-Krim’s surrender was announced, and with the war over the ICRC deemed the mission as no longer necessary.
Publicly the ICRC insisted that this intervention in Morocco had been motivated by touching requests from the families of prisoners of war held by the Riffians. Though some of these exist in the ICRC archive they are scarce among the remainder of correspondence on the Rif.Footnote 148 Instead, as Schlemmer reflected later, the ICRC felt as though its hand had been forced by third party groups, motivated by political rather than humanitarian aims. It was in the Rif, more than Ireland or Montenegro, that the weight of the expectations placed on the ICRC became most apparent. Constrained by unwilling empires, it was unable to orchestrate prisoner exchanges, visit any detainees or even provide aid to refugees. It is perhaps telling that by the conclusion of hostilities in the Rif, Schlemmer condemned the politicisation of humanitarian relief and reflected nostalgically on the ICRC’s successful intervention in Ireland.Footnote 149
Conclusion
Writing on the humanitarian intervention interlude of the inter-war period, Michael R. Marrus notes that ‘when humanitarian commitments must rely on collective expression, they are no one’s responsibility’.Footnote 150 This article has argued that in the aftermath of the First World War, the ICRC and League of Nations appeared to present a form of collective expression through grassroots petitioning, as an alternative to state-directed interventions. These ‘idealistic hopes’ projected onto Geneva-based international organisations, of social solidarity and justice for inhumane conduct or crimes against humanity, were quickly dashed.Footnote 151 Petitioners hoped for a supranational investigator that ‘would have eagerly welcomed our invitation and would have placed itself in the forefront to unmask the crimes used by the oppressor’.Footnote 152 In reality, the interventions, largely conducted by the ICRC, merely served to buttress the sovereignty of the state and imperial system.
The ICRC continued to publicly insist on its apolitical nature, even though its humanitarian interventions were geared towards the preservation of liberal internationalism, amid the lingering threat of Bolshevism. Supporters of Montenegrin autonomy formed allegiances with the Communist party in the 1920 elections, before that party was forcibly disbanded.Footnote 153 The Irish Minister for External Affairs alleged that republican activity in Europe was supported by the Bolshevik government, while in Britain and France advocates for the Rif were repeatedly linked to communist activity.Footnote 154 Against this political backdrop, suspicion abounded that humanitarian claims were being adapted, not simply for political ends but also for subversive Bolshevik purposes. Though accounts of inhumanities, like torture or the use of poison gas, may have elicited horror amongst members of the League and ICRC, they were reluctant to act if doing so destabilised the post-war international order.
Helping to disguise the political nature of its interventions was the rhetoric of objective, technical investigation rooted in the expertise of ICRC delegates. Men like Schlemmer, Haccius and Cramer rotated between these conflicts, producing evaluative judgements of prison conditions rooted in quantitative observations, while sidestepping moral questions about the reasons for imprisonment. The finality of this technocratic approach, with little recourse after investigative reports were published, rejected both sentimental humanity and humanity-as-justice. Though these investigations posed as humanitarian interventions, none of the three case studies were conducted under the 1921 resolution.Footnote 155 Even in Ireland, Haccius recorded his frustration that he was not permitted to conduct his investigation along the lines prescribed by the resolution. Investigations were conducted through informal arrangements or agreements with political authorities, often predicated on a positive assessment, allowing the ICRC access to prisoners without legitimating the belligerency of insurgents. When compiling his official history of the ICRC in 1985, André Durand argued that this process of intervention in civil wars was a learning curve, as the committee realised ‘that there was nothing to be gained in becoming involved in discussion on the status of prisoners or on the political situation – all that mattered was that the prison doors be opened to its delegates’.Footnote 156 This strategy created an emphasis on access, achieved through negotiation, reference to precedent and agreements with states, that continued to define ICRC interventions through to wars of decolonisation.
Rather than expanding its remit, the 1921 resolution limited the ICRC’s capacity for intervention and reduced the sphere of humanity deserving of protection from suffering. Appeals from Ireland and Montenegro emphasised their inclusion within humanity through Christian and judicial imagery; the ICRC was the ‘first arbiter of Christian civilisation’ or ‘Pontus Pilate’ sentencing Christ to death. Further religious division was baked into the very distinction between ‘cross’ and ‘crescent’ societies. Though the British Red Crescent claimed that efforts to send a medical mission were an ‘act of humanity’, they also drew inspiration from the ‘Islamic spirit of brotherhood’.Footnote 157 ICRC reluctance to intervene in the Rif centred on the alleged absence of Christian civilisational standards, while the limited intervention that did occur was justified on behalf of European prisoners, not Riffians. This creation of racial and religious hierarchies of suffering continued a long tradition of humanitarian intervention as understood in terms of Christian solidarity and sympathy for non-Muslims subjects in the Ottoman Empire. It reinforced the borders of European ‘humanity’ to include Christian peoples on the peripheries like the Irish or Montenegrins, while excluding Muslim Riffians and Albanians.
These three conflicts were, as O’Sullivan wrote, ‘out of the way’ on the edges of Europe, and the voices of those caught up in conflict are often absent from petitions. Irish prisoners directly wrote to the ICRC and the League, with some even visiting Geneva to describe the conditions of their internment, but supporters of Montenegrins and Riffians spoke on behalf of anonymous informers or faceless sufferers. To their opponents they were ‘rebels’ or ‘bandits’ held under detention conditions resembling those of criminals, placing violence firmly back within the domestic sphere. Few petitioners used the language of ‘civil war’. Instead, appeals referenced the precedent of other comparable conflicts, leaving open the idea that these were also ‘imperial’ or ‘interstate’ wars. Irish republican rhetoric, for example, concentrated on the British enemy to hide the ‘meanness’ and ‘cruelty’ of ‘our own people’.Footnote 158 Casting the conflict as a continuation of imperial struggle left space for the emergence of the ‘real nation’, unsullied by the divisions inherent in civil wars.
Is it useful, then, to think about these three conflicts as ‘civil wars’? For insurgents, framing the violence as a civil war, or at least under the terms of the 1921 resolution, was certainly an experimental tool for soliciting intervention and publicity. Nathaniel Burnham has argued that el-Krim manipulated the rhetoric of international law for his own ends, shifting his self-presentation and claims to territory depending on his audience and purpose.Footnote 159 For the ICRC and imperial powers, including Britain, Spain and France, a level of indeterminacy about whether they were ‘civil wars’ could equally provide a way of masking more complex situations of covert or continued imperial expansion. Armed with ICRC reports, states could dismiss atrocity allegations or claim their repressive tactics were lenient. Rather than appearing as a category of experience, these conflicts show that ‘civil war’ was a constantly shifting category of dialogue between belligerents and the international sphere, including both international organisations and imperial powers. As would become the case throughout the twentieth century, claiming the moniker of a ‘civil war’ was a way of elevating state violence on an international stage, disguising imperial ambitions or reframing violence to fit with international standards required for intervention or relief.
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