Work Undertaken:
The fellowship was construed of periods of archival research of the gathering, sifting and examination of documents, coupled with a return to the university of Verona, and with the aid, counsel and advice of the academic supervisor- taking up the writing of the resulting monograph from this fellowship. The archives visited during this fellowship were: London (National Archives – UK), Copenhagen, Stockholm, Uppsala (manuscripts section Carolina Rediviva Library), Bulgarian National Archives in Sofia (former central Soviet archives of GC-IV), Swiss Federal archives in Bern, US National Archives, U.N. New York archives, archives of the World Jewish Congress (Cincinnati), Geneva Red Cross archives, France – Foreign ministry archives (Paris- La Courneuve) and the archive of the French Council of State (Paris Palais Royal).
Summary of main project findings:
• the fact that the ICRC was initially opposed to the pervasive and all-encompassing language of today’s Common Article 3 – and that we largely have to thank France’s head of delegation and GC-IV’s president Georges Cahen Salvador, in tandem with Gerhard Riegner of the World Jewish Congress for this Article current pervasive humanitarian language as we now know it.
• That once adopted – GC-IV revolutionized completely the ICRC’s approach to its humanitarian work and shifted the organization to the very forefront of affirmative mobilization in favour of civilians and war victims. This radical change came to bear 50 years after GC-IV, when the ICRC became the central saviour in Rwanda’s genocide – against the U.N.’s moral debacle there.
• that we have GC-IV in the first place in large part thanks to the Soviet bloc’s participation at the 1949 conference of plenipotentiaries, having ‘saved’ GC-IV diplomatically
• that atomic weapons were clearly ‘on the table’ in Geneva in 1949 – that the Soviets already came to the 1949 Conference of plenipotentiaries with “the bomb in their pocket. The Soviets who officially demanded – yet to no avail the prohibition of these weapons - carried out their very first nuclear test 14 days after GC-IV’s signing !
• the fact that GC-IV’s three key drafters were all holocaust-surviving Jews who understood full well – and from recent personal experience the implications of NOT having civilians protected in war, and that the prohibition on settlements and the colonization of militarily-occupied territory, so relevant today for the Palestinian- Israeli conflict, was in fact introduced (Art. 49 paragraph 6) by Dr. Georg Cohn – the religious Jewish director of legal affairs of the Danish foreign ministry.
