A week or so ago, fueled by frustration about the awful treatment of activists in Zimbabwe, I telephone the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Harare and asked to speak to their head of mission. I was put on hold for awhile, and then the receptionist gave me a good grilling on who I was and what exactly I wanted to speak with the head of the ICRC about.

So I said something like “well there are many activists currently detained who have sustained injuries whilst being zealously arrested and I think some of them need medical attention, and I was hoping that the ICRC might help in some way”. Not that i know a lot about what the ICRC does but hey, contacting them was better than Doing Nothing.

The receptionist said that she’d call me back and I specifically said that it would be good if it was soon because the situation, in my mind, appeared urgent. Well, here I am 13 days later still waiting for their telephone call.

In the meantime I managed to find the email address of someone who works at the ICRC and wrote to him about my concerns and mentioned that I had written to the ICRC’s head of mission. He replied saying that he’d forwarded my email to the ICRC’s top dog. That was on the 11th April.

Zimbabwe Association of Doctors for Human Rights is on record as saying:

In one incident, eight victims of police assault were forcibly removed from a private health facility, where police had first taken them, without the consent of doctors there. All eight had been denied medical care in custody.

Even with information like this the ICRC clearly sees no urgency in my request for assistance. Not even to write back saying that they don’t offer help in these circumstances.

Is it fear, arrogance or just plain ineptitude on their part, I wonder?

This entry was posted on April 16th, 2007 at 4:04 pm by Bev Clark and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.