Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. A real humanist can be identified more by his trust in the people, which engages him in their struggle, than by a thousand actions in their favor without that trust. And then I explained to him how naive we were, that the world did know and remain silent. They talk about the people, but they do not trust them and trusting the people is the indispensable precondition for revolutionary change. Our converts, on the other hand, truly desire to transform the unjust order but because of their background they believe that they must be the executors of the transformation. As Desmond Tutu stated, If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. The generosity of the oppressors is nourished by an unjust order, which must be maintained in order to justify that generosity. Accordingly, these adherents to the people's cause constantly run the risk of falling into a type of generosity as malefic as that of the oppressors. Indeed, like a swimmer, the ICRC is in politics up to its neck. Red Cross institutions must beware of politics as they would of poison, for it threatens their very lives, wrote one of the organization’s major thinkers, Jean Pictet, 20 years ago. It happens, however, that as they cease to be exploiters or indifferent spectators or simply the heirs of exploitation and move to the side of the exploited, they almost always bring with them the marks of their origin: their prejudices and their deformations, which include a lack of confidence in the people's ability to think, to want, and to know. The corpus of ICRC doctrine on the issue of neutrality is well established. Theirs is a fundamental role, and has been throughout the history of this struggle. “The fact that certain members of the oppressor class join the oppressed in their struggle for liberation, thus moving from one pole of the contradiction to the other.
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