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With him, international Geneva is losing one of its most influential figures. Sommaruga led the ICRC into modern times.
Cornelio Sommaruga was a striking personality: First of all, people noticed the distinctive glasses, the throaty voice, the imposing figure. But also the convictions, the enthusiasm, the charisma and the charm of the Ticino native.
He was the patron of the ICRC for twelve years, three terms, from 1987 to 1999. Definitely not an uncontroversial one. Especially since he succeeded a whole series of pale leading figures whose names have been forgotten.
Caption: ICRC President Cornelio Sommaruga on December 16, 2008 at a media conference in Geneva. Family members confirmed the death of the longtime head of the International Committee of the Red Cross on Monday at the age of 91. Keystone/Salvatore di Nolfi
Coming from a family of diplomats and later becoming one of Switzerland’s best-known commercial diplomats, Sommaruga made humanitarian issues his concern after resigning as State Secretary in Bern.
“The Red Cross attacked me like a virus,” he said in an ICRC documentation: “You can’t let go anymore.” It’s about “seeing the world from the perspective of the victims.”
A terrible decade
Two years after Sommaruga took office in Geneva, the Berlin Wall fell. What followed in the Third World was not a phase of peace, but of bloody wars, “a terrible decade,” said Sommaruga.
Rwanda, Burundi, Srebrenica, Chechnya, Liberia, the Intifada in the Middle East… the ICRC was challenged on all fronts and grew strongly under Sommaruga’s aegis. At the same time, he modernized and opened up the organization.
Help, but also avoid victims
Unlike his predecessors, he refrained from being quiet and instead took a political stand. Despite external and internal resistance, he positioned the ICRC as a key actor for the international agreement on a ban on landmines and later on a ban on cluster bombs.
The ICRC also advocated for an International Criminal Court. From the consideration that “a humanitarian organization must not only help the victims, but must also contribute to avoiding victims and condemning the guilty.”
The locked archives
Sommaruga also had archives that had been closed for decades opened. The organization’s inglorious role, characterized by overcaution and cowardice, against the Nazi regime became public, for example in a dossier in the weekly newspaper “Die Zeit” entitled “Deadly Silence on Lake Geneva”.
Even after his departure from the ICRC, Sommaruga remained present. He became president of the Geneva Center for Demining, was committed to the UN peacekeepers, the Soros Foundation and, in 2020, was a strong voice for the corporate responsibility initiative. Just a few years ago you could regularly meet him at events in Geneva – a grand seigneur who asked critical questions and represented firm convictions.