“My General, to reiterate to the rest of the world, in our helicopters you carried no emblems?”

“No emblems whatsoever, Mr. President, no emblems at all, neither from the Red Cross, nor anything similar”.

This quote from a live broadcast the day Ingrid Betancourt and three American defense contractors were released, corresponds to the instance when a victorious Colombian President Alvaro Uribe publicly asked the commander of his armed forces general Mario Montoya Uribe how the rescue operation was carried out.

Few weeks later CNN broke the news; Colombian forces had used the emblem of the Red Cross to trick guerrillas into handing over some of the hostages.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, protested the unlawful use of its emblems.  Quoting from international conventions the Red Cross defines such misuse as “Perfidy, i.e. making use of the emblem in time of conflict to protect combatants or military equipment; perfidious use of the emblem is a war crime in both international and noninternational armed conflict.”

Colombian President Uribe, apologized as he had in months past when downing a guerrilla commander in Ecuadorian soil.

There is no indictment against freeing hostages, or against combating criminal activities and their perpetrators. 

The urgent concern stems from the trampling of certain values and conventions, which were set in place to protect the innocent and neutral parties providing disaster relief and humanitarian aid as the Red Cross, thus constituting a war crime.

True, way too often criminals strive to find shelter under the same provisions created to protect the innocent.

Perfidy amid perfidious foes may sound fair, but this perfidy was perpetrated not against the guerrilla or its victims, it was perpetrated against the Red Cross itself, undermining the trust without which no humanitarian agency can function in a world already torn apart by endless turmoil.

Perfidy is also the title of a Spanish romantic song or “bolero” immortalized in the Anglo world by singers Nat King Cole and Linda Ronstadt.  In tune with its lyrics we wonder about some individuals and their governments:   “Only God knows where you are; who knows what affairs you got yourself into; oh how estranged you have become from me…”