The International Committee of the Red Cross is facing the most serious crisis in its history

Another wavering citadel of legendary Swiss stability. After major bank Credit Suisse was forced to sell to rival UBS in March under pressure from the Bern government to avoid bankruptcy, it is the International Committee of the Red Cross’s (ICRC) turn to step up. Terrible financial crisis.

An essential tool soft power Swiss, the organization is often presented by the federal government as a natural extension of its policy of neutrality, which itself has come under fire since the start of the war in Ukraine. Thus, the crisis that is shaking the ICRC comes at a very bad moment for the Swiss diplomacy that has provided its general management for decades.

In fact, the ICRC, the depository of the Geneva Conventions, has a huge hole in its accounts. It lacks 430 million Swiss francs (441 million euros) to complete the 2023 budget. It has doubled in ten years, from 1.18 billion francs in 2012 to 2.84 billion in 2022. As a very immediate result, the organization said. That it will have to cut its workforce massively: 1,800 employees, out of 22,700 worldwide. Most of these jobs involve field delegations abroad. Twenty-six of the 350 will have to close and a dozen more will have to downsize. While they sometimes operate in emergency theaters such as Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, within reach of the chaos of Somalia.

“It’s disappointing for us because we’ve had to scale back some of the needs we’ve been covering before.says Gilles Carbonnier, vice president and number two of the institute. We will focus On our mission as a neutral mediator, guarantor of international humanitarian law and facilitator in armed conflicts, and on the areas where our added value is the greatest, such as the front line or disputed territories, because we are the only ones who have access to all the actors of armed violence. »

On the other hand, the place of the institution is relatively spared, since only thirty-five positions will be removed there. Internally, rumors in the corridors of headquarters on the Avenue de la Pex in Geneva suggest a sharper estimate of the cuts. If you count non-renewed contracts and people who are ready to deploy to the field and whose mission has been canceled, the job cuts are more like 3,000. A poor observation by a careful observer of the Geneva humanitarian galaxy: “15% of the budget is uncovered, 15% of the workforce is trapped. If it were not the ICRC, but a private company, we would be talking about bankruptcy. By getting into this situation, the organization leaves the battlefield. »