Red Cross reduces staff in Iraq

The Red Cross is reducing its international staff in Iraq, but remain in the country for the sake of the Iraqi people despite the suicide bombing on its Baghdad headquarters.

“The ICRC remains committed to helping the people of Iraq,” said director of operations Pierre Kraehenbuehl today.

The aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres today pulled out part of its staff from Iraq for security reasons.

The Red Cross made its announcement a day after US Secretary of State Colin Powell telephoned the organisation’s president to urge the agency to stay in Iraq.

Kraehenbuehl said the neutral, Swiss-run ICRC was required by the Geneva Conventions on the conduct of warfare to remain in Iraq because it is an occupied country.

The ICRC is the guardian of the conventions originally agreed upon in 1949 to prevent the recurrences of atrocities that marked the Second World War.

But he said the staff’s “security has priority.”

Any international staffer who wants to leave will be allowed to pull out, he said.

At the same time, Kraehenbuehl said, “we had no choice but to adapt the way we work.”

He said the ICRC would reduce the number of international staff – currently about 30 – and increase the security of those who remain.

The agency also has 600 Iraqi employees working for it, and they will remain in Iraq.

The ICRC said it reconsidered its deployment in Iraq following a wave of suicide bombings in Baghdad on Monday.

One of the attacks badly damaged the agency’s Baghdad headquarters, killing two Iraqi Red Cross employees and as many as 10 other people outside the compound.

The Red Cross, one of the few agencies that stayed in Iraq throughout the US attack on the country last spring, said it was shocked by the attack because it maintains strict neutrality.

ICRC officials said they understood Powell’s desire to keep relief workers in the country, but that they were deciding independently whether it is too dangerous to remain.

Brussels-based Medecins Sans Frontieres said it decided to reduce its expatriate team in Baghdad and move them to Amman, Jordan.

MSF said its medical personnel had been scheduled to leave Baghdad in the near future, but their departure was hastened by the Red Cross attack.

“The reduction was foreseen,” she said. “It was sped up because of events. It’s a balance between the security of the staff and the needs of the population on the ground,” said spokeswoman Linda Van Weyenberg.

She declined to say how many people were evacuated.

The evacuated personnel will stay in Amman until a decision is made on an eventual return, she said.