Tour of United Nations and Red Cross Red Crescent Museum

On 17 July I toured the United Nations Office at Geneva and the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum. They are across the street from each other in a district which also hosts the Musée Ariana, the Botanical Garden of Geneva, and seemingly many international organizations set up by people from all countries.

The United Nations Office at Geneva includes the Palace of Nations as well as other more modern conference spaces. Visitors take guided tours to various conference rooms and are told about the work of the organization and this particular office. The headquarters in New York City houses the General Assembly and the Security Council, whereas this office in Geneva has a cultural and humanitarian focus and is home to the World Health Organization including UNAIDS, the International Labour Organization, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, and others. Edward Snowden is in Hong Kong and there is talk about whether he might like to apply for refugee status. I know that the United Nations is underfunded because the office in New York must be one of more dated and run down buildings I can recall seeing in Manhattan, but I did not expect that the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees would be in a former gas station. I could be wrong about this but the building is located in an great space for a gas station on the main road and everything about it looks like a gas station to me. If I were a refugee looking for my last hope I am not sure how I would feel knowing that I had to petition someone who lords over a gas station, and I started thinking about whether this was the building which would respond to Snowden if he wanted refugee status or if it even worked like that.

The RCRC Museum was both scary and encouraging. They had an exhibit called “the witnesses” in which they had recorded people who had been in some kind of crisis, then at the museum they played their monologues on videos which presented the speakers as life size persons for museum guests to stand in front of and hear as if in a conversation. There was a room of boxes with paper cards in them which kept records of prisoners of war and requests for missing persons during World War I. In other parts of the museum I was reminded that I was no longer in America. There was an exhibit in which a former prisoner at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp talked about torture he endured at the hands of American soldiers while held there. He professed his total innocence of crimes, and elsewhere there were exhibits stating that the United States forbid fair humanitarian checks on health and fair detention by the RCRC. I can imagine that these accusations would be taken as very offensive by people in the US government. Elsewhere there was an exhibit on Wikileaks talking about how confidential messages between the RCRC and the US government were leaked, and that they described pressure from the US government on the RCRC for that organization to not report that it was be disallowed to review prisoner conditions at Guantanamo.