The Red Cross museum in Geneva is warning that it risks closure after its funding was axed in a broad government cost-cutting plan, with some suggesting it could be moved to Abu Dhabi.The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum has been a national institution in Switzerland for nearly four decades, playing a key role in promoting and explaining international humanitarian law and principles in the birthplace of the Geneva Conventions.Museum director Pascal Hufschmid said he was shocked to learn last September that the fate of the museum was, apparently inadvertently, being threatened by a small administrative measure in a government savings drive.The entrance of the Red Cross museum.“It jeopardises the very existence of the museum,” the Swiss historian, who took the helm of the institution in 2019, told AFP in a recent interview.The museum, built adjacent to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) headquarters, opened in 1988. It welcomes around 120,000 people annually, ranging from elementary school classes to visiting dignitaries.It keeps a collection of around 30,000 objects, including the first Nobel Peace Prize medal, given in 1901 to Red Cross founder Henry Dunant, an award shared with the French pacifist Frederic Passy.It also houses the archives of the ICRC’s International Prisoners of War Agency, established to restore contact between people separated during World War I, which have been listed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register.‘Incredible heritage’ “Through this incredible heritage,” Hufschmid said, the aim is to create “a dialogue on what humanitarian action means on a daily basis”.He said the Swiss government had long recognised the value of the museum, and its role in telling “the story of an idea born in Switzerland, of major figures of Swiss history”, like Dunant.A statue of Swiss humanitarian Henri Dunant.Since 1991, the private museum has received an annual subsidy from the Swiss foreign ministry of 1.1 million francs ($1.2 million), accounting for about a quarter of its overall budget.But a general cost-cutting measure, proposed by a group of experts and approved by the government last September, included the decision to transfer responsibility for subsidising the museum to the culture ministry.At first, Hufschmid said he was not too concerned at what appeared to be merely an administrative change, until he realised “the transfer actually meant a major reduction of the subsidy”.A wall showing portraits of children from a ‘photo-tracing’ campaign following the 1994 Rwandan genocide launched by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to reunite children with their families in the permanent exhibition.This was because the culture ministry requires museums seeking its funding to take part in a competition, facing off against hundreds of other museums. When successful, Hufschmid said, museums typically obtain a subsidy of “between five and seven percent of their
‘Incomprehensibil’: Muzeul Crucii Roșii se teme de închidere din cauza reducerii fondurilor elvețiene
