Pierre Krahenbuhl - Director of Operations, International Committee of the Red Cross HARDtalk

defectors have been sent to labour camps and some were executed.

Now on BBC News, it's time for Welcome to HARDtalk. I'm Stephen

Sackur. The International Committee of the Red Cross is pulling some of

its international staff out of Afghanistan following an attack on

its Jalalabad compound. It is an unprecedented move in three decades

of operations in Afghanistan. In Syria, Red Cross efforts to get aid

into the besieged town of Qusair are being thwarted as fighting

rages. My guest today is Pierre Krahenbuhl. ICRC operations

director. Is this organisation being overwhelmed by the danger and

Pierre Krahenbuhl, welcome to HARDtalk. Thank you.Does it feel

as though the ICRC is in the firing line as ever before -- as never

before? Reworking conflict situations and it is always

extremely challenging to maintain activities. Things We do for people

on a day-to-day basis on many of these conflict sones, Afghanistan,

Congo, Syria and others, and every single day there is a lot of effort

that goes into training the security of our staff and making

sure we meet -- reach the people we make a difference. It seems like

the tipping point in Afghanistan. You know Jalalabad well. Now, you,

as director of operations, have had to respond to a murderous attack on

your compound in that city. And you have decided to pull significant

numbers of international staff out. Why? We have to set it in the right

context. It's a shocking attack and we did lose one colleague. It could

have been more. We need to take this particular event seriously. At

the same time, we have a 30-year long commitment to Afghanistan and

its people and this has taken forms of medical activities, huge numbers

of activities in terms of physical rehabilitation, and the Tees,

people who have lost their limbs as a result of mine accidents,

visiting prisons. -- and the keys. That is not something we will give

up easily. Over 30 years, what sort of signal to the defence to the

people of Afghanistan, particularly in the context of coalition,

Western forces, leaving this year and next year, to be out by 2014,

what sort of signal are you sending to the Afghan people now with this

pullback decision? Festival, we are suspending activities until we have

a better understanding of what happened. Few people may be

withdrawn temporarily but there's no decision whatsoever on the

future. Our commitment is to continue working there. We will

look for a way to continue serving the Afghan people. It should not be

misunderstood for leaving Afghanistan and giving up on our

commitments. We owe it to our staff to take the right decisions, in

terms of security. But the work, that is a commitment, will continue.

Do you feel a terrible burden when you get the news that there has

been an attack, one of the staff is dead, and in this case it was a

local member of staff? In the end, the buck stops with you. I wonder

how you cope with the responsibility. It is probably the

heaviest part of the role that I have, with the overview of our

activities worldwide. Every single day, every single hour of the day,

an ICRC team together, sometimes with partners in the Red Cross

societies, is somewhere in the world in harm's way. In all the

activities in Syria at the moment, many of the danger it -- areas are

dangers, certainly Somalia, my own experiences in Afghanistan and

Bosnia. It is one of the most serious responsibilities, to ensure

that when we send staff somewhere, we have invested in terms of the

networks, the understanding for the role of the ICRC, a non-political

role to generate the necessary trust. I come back to the notion of

a tipping point. The Red Cross has been going, I think 150 years this

year you are marking it, and I wonder whether ever before in the

history of your organisation you have operated in a context where,

for example, in the recent past we have seen relief and aid workers in

countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria as well, being

assassinated simply because they were trying to deliver vaccinations

to poor people who desperately needed them. That is the context in

which the Red Cross asked to work today. The context you have never

actually had to cope with in that way before? I think there is a

paradox. On the one hand, I sincerely can say that today we

have a better reach in many parts of the world than we ever had

before. There is more members of ICRC present around the world than

ever before. -- there are more. more are being injured and dying

than ever before. But in overall terms, the worst year we ever had

in terms of loss of life is 1996. The very serious attacks in

Chechnya and the windier. It is true that every single year we face

the risk. -- volunteer. But there is perhaps more of the element of

targeting. Perhaps being at the wrong time in the wrong place,

maybe an incident that was very unfortunate. This element of

targeting, which appeared in the incident in Jalalabad, is one we

have to take very seriously. Again, mindful of the history of your

organisation, you are intimately tied with the notion of certain

rules that govern warfare, the Geneva conventions. In essence, you

are seeing as one of the organisation's key to monitoring

the way in which conflict and warfare is conducted. It seems to

me in so many of the conflicts we see today, which are often internal,

within states, not necessarily involving front lines, armies,

uniformed personnel, much more diffused and complex than that,

they are the traditional assumptions made by people like you

at the Red Cross headquarters no longer apply? One thing you can be

sure about when you turn 150 is you know that you constantly have to

revisit the assumptions that you were quick and actually when we

talk about the Geneva conventions, adopted in 1949, or when they talk

about the ways in which we worked in the post-cold-war environment,

where it was more about a mix of grievances. Very fragmented from

the 50 armed groups we deal within the eastern DRC or the many

different factions the find across Syria today. People you are having

to deal with, negotiate with, to try to reach what you need

humanitarian wise, these are not symmetries doing any conventions,

not people who have made commitment to abide by any particular laws of

war at all. That is one of the challenges, when they are so

fragmented and diverse, how can you make sure that the role you have is

understood? This is something I remember from a few years ago. A

number they are the group said it took them four years to get used to

last there. Every time you talk about neutrality, your independence,

we look at the list of donors and wondered how it worked. My

experiences, where I have worked myself in Bosnia or Peru,

Afghanistan, also what I see in teams around the world today, is

you can only convince and create trust by making sure that what you

do is quality and that to make a difference for people. It is work

over a long period of time that convinces people. And it does not

always work, does it? You just used a key word. Neutrality underpins

what the ICRC is all about but I would put it to you that in a

conflict like the current conflict in Syria, the notion of your even-

handedness, your eye to neutrality, can't work because the fact is you

can only do what you do with the authorisation, the say so, of the

airside government in Damascus. Therefore, you are seeing by those

who live in rebel-held areas, the rebel fighters themselves, as an

organisation that is in hock to the sad regime. -- President Assad

government. There's no doubt I -- the ICRC negotiates in order to

reach populations and people that need help. But you do not go out to

the Syrian opposition held areas, as you could, through borders,

without you could do that but you choose not to. Over the last four

weeks, we had a team permanently held in Aleppo. One of the city's

most effective and very seriously affected. We have now spent four

weeks there every morning. We have gone across the lines into

opposition held areas and we have provided medical assistance. That

is how we build our way. Patiently on the ground. Building relations,

focusing on needs and actually reaching them. It is making a

difference. We have progressed significantly in Syria. You say

that but the fact is, you at the ICRC have to work in conjunction

with the local Red Cross, Red Crescent, organisations inside

Syria. We know the Red Crescent has faced huge amounts of pressure from

the Damascus government. Key officials we in the Red Crescent

have been detained for long periods. We have had reports of at least 12

Red Crescent volunteers killed since the conflict began. People

say there is a concerted effort to intimidated. That is the reality.

There are always pressures at very senior level scholar from political

levels and on military terms. Every group would like to serve its own

side. But it is not possible to be fully impartial, as the conflict

has suggested. It deserves a lot of credit for what it has achieved. It

has thousands of volunteers. That is in every single district of the

country. It is in contact with very different sides. The role of the

ICRC is also to support that role. We are open for a critical review

but it is true that they deserve a lot of credit. Is the wider war

historical truth the lesson of the Red Cross's history? I am

particularly thinking of the experience in the Second World War

and the crushing failure of the ICRC to speak out against what the

Nazis did. Is that not a lesson that tells us more, rather than

this notion of the iron rule of neutrality? World War II is a very

big topic and it is true that even today we continue to try to draw

lessons from the mistakes that were made at the time. But nobody

warning the ICRC was born neutral. We all have our hearts in the right

place. When we come and we see a particular result of a gruesome

attack and the impact of people on the ground, our very first instinct

is to call a press conference and announce what we have seen. But the

thing about our way of working is that we know that the next day we

must return to that place of detention to try to continue to

monitor conditions of detainees. It is one of the most enduring

dilemmas of the ICRC and every staff member, to find a balance

between what we do say publicly, because we do speak out, and how do

we preserve the trust and understanding of the parties in

order to preserve the possibility to help you will completely. But

sometimes going back in and thinking about the next thing, the

desire to work with the perpetrators of the evil that you

want to denounce, it simply serves to buttress the position of those

people who have done with good things, does it not? E is a form of

acknowledgement. It is absolutely true that that is

right. -- it's a form. We are not naive about the fact that there

will be those who try to manipulate the role of the ICRC. But added

element is over time and we do not take no for an answer easily. --

our development. We persist and that leads to results. Let us not

just stick to lessons learned from the 1930s and 1940s and the

Holocaust and the ICRC's mistakes, let's talk about more recent events.

In this studio, we spoke to the Dutch journalist not long ago who

has written extensively about what she sees as the fundamental flaws

in the notion of neutral, in partial aid delivery. Perky

instance his 1994, will wonder, and the fact that international aid

organisations ended up offering safe haven, shelter and long-term

support to the genocide perpetrators. -- Rwanda. Hutu

Apology for the loss of subtitles for 90 seconds

killers were sheltered by aid There are things that we do not do

in order to be avoiding being And there are so much money in this

relief. In a sense, they need to have a crisis to respond to to

raise the money. She would Guards it now as almost self perpetuating.

-- she regards it. I'd look at what we are dealing within Syria and in

northern Mali when the country was split in half and under control of

radical opposition groups. We were very much alone. There was no

caravan there. There was no gap. Huge gaps. One of the things that I

think is the most important is the importance of returning to more

active management in political terms. The reasons why concerts

last for so long, and I can confirm that with t?I ? that with t

Afghanistan and Congo, the scene to be so difficult to end Millett

Adderley or resolved politically. The political management in this

day and age is to do with missing links in the system which create

the dynamic of long-term assistance. That has to be looked at very

carefully. Another political question is one that the

International Red Cross has not engaged with but perhaps you should.

Looking at the way the Geneva Convention is used today. There are

so many challenges. The way the American administrations since 9/11

has interpreted its legal right to conduct mil?I ? conduct milration

would call it acts of war, against terrorist targets around the world.

The just had an interview with the State Department former lawyer

saying that we regard this as being internationally sanctioned under

the rules of government warfare. I am talking about drone strings. Is

that how you see it? -- drone strikes. There were challenges.

People said the Geneva Convention was outdated. Up people said it

needed to be devised. We said that we should take care what is

generated. There is the legacy of World War II. That was the

consensus that emerged from the biggest calamity mankind ever

inflicted on itself. Of course we need to reinforce the lot. You talk

about drones. Drones are not in themselves an instrument or a

weapon of war that is illegal under international law. It is how they

the battlefield, say in Afghanistan or Yeoman... Yemen is not a

Pakistan. Hundreds and hundreds of people had been killed including,

according to a Washington think- tank, more than 300 civilians

killed in a US don't strike. Does the International Committee of the

Red Cross not have a duty, when you talk about the duty to sometimes

break your own rules and speak out, have a duty to express your opinion

about how this squares with the international rules that govern

conflict and war? We have just put out a series of public points on

the use of drones. That is where I was making this distinction. We do

not agree on the notion that there is one Global World Wide

battlefield on which people can be targeted under the laws of war at

any time throughout the year. We had to take a complex view what the

legal framework is that applies to the use of drones. The final

thought is an important one. It is about your relation with the

International Criminal Court. We have characterised you as wanting

to defend the basic standards and conventions that governed conflict.

When you're opera pits on the ground come up whether it is Sri

Lanka, 2008, Syria, today, we ever it is, then you see the worst

abuses of the rules of conflict and war fare, is there not a long-term

duty on your people to give their testimony, to bear witness before

the International Criminal Court. It is clear that the role of the

criminal court is very important in terms of fighting impunity. That is

a role that we support very clearly. What we will not do, the line we

will not cross, is to provide testimony or elements that we have

seen on the ground or observations by our own staff. From the moment

that I have been sitting with you, if you were a commander somewhere,

if that person thought we were having a conversation that seeks to

define the control or the behaviour of his people towards detainees,

the bond they thought that this exchange could be part of a

criminal proceeding, that would end the possibility for us to help.

the argument about making rules without exceptions? Going back to

the Nat says. What about an individual responsible for mass

killing today. You're seeing your people will not testify under any

circumstances? From World War II, it was less that the committee at

the time chose not to speak out that the fact that they did not

send someone to tell the German authorities at the time but they

had learned. It takes a great deal of the zillions and courage to go

and sit down, as I have done and others have done, with people who

are in charge and have the fate of populations and their hands and

tried to influence the decisions they have. This is not about

arrogance. This is about a deep- seated belief. It is backed up with