International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement - Criticism

Criticism

The Australian TV network ABC and the indigenous rights group Friends of Peoples Close to Nature released a documentary called Blood on the Cross that alleges the involvement of the Red Cross with the British military in conducting a massacre in the Southern Highlands of West Papua in connection with the World Wildlife Fund hostage crisis of May 1996. Following the broadcast of the documentary, the Red Cross announced publicly that it would appoint an individual outside the organization to investigate the allegations made in the film and any responsibility on its part. The report categorically states that the Red Cross personnel accused of involvement were proven not to have been present; that a white helicopter was probably used in a military operation, but the helicopter was not a Red Cross helicopter, and must have been painted by one of several military organizations operating in the region at the time, possibly including the British military, although no hard evidence was found for this; and that the Red Cross should have responded more quickly and thoroughly to investigate the allegations than it did.

Allegations of poor governance and concern over accountability and transparency within certain national societies have led to high profile resignations.

Read more about this topic:  International Red Cross And Red Crescent Movement

Famous quotes containing the word criticism:

    Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.
    Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)

    ...I wasn’t at all prepared for the avalanche of criticism that overwhelmed me. You would have thought I had murdered someone, and perhaps I had, but only to give her successor a chance to live. It was a very sad business indeed to be made to feel that my success depended solely, or at least in large part, on a head of hair.
    Mary Pickford (1893–1979)

    The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.
    George Steiner (b. 1929)