She’s Been to Gaza. She Met With the Iranians. Now She Has a Warning.

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I'm Lulugar Sienovaro and today I'm interviewing Mediana Shpojadec,

the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The ICRC works all around the globe and often in secret,

remaining neutral to operate in the world's most dangerous environments.

But with wars, getting more complex due to new technology,

and world leaders increasingly ignoring the rules of war,

Shpojadec felt compelled to sit down with me to issue a warning

about where we all could be headed.

We have to understand the significance and importance of the rules of war,

and why they need to be respected.

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Okay, onto the interview.

Thank you so much for coming in today.

I really appreciate it.

This I know has been very hectic.

We are meeting just at the end of the UN General Assembly.

I want to start.

If you could just briefly tell me,

what is the ICRC and what does it do?

We are a global organization founded 163 years ago,

in Geneva.

Today working in roughly 90 different places across the world,

mainly in conflict, because this is what we were created for.

To bring help and protection in situations of armed conflict.

But then also promote respect for the rules of war.

Because with the creation of the ICRC came the

founding of the Geneva Convention.

And then that led to the 4 Geneva Convention adopted after the Second World War in 1949.

And still today, this agreement has been ratified by all states,

because all states agreed that there are red lines in war.

There are simply certain things that should never be allowed to happen.

You know, I covered wars for a big part of my career as a journalist.

And the world feels more dangerous and more volatile than I can ever remember.

How do you see things?

I see it the same way, because the statistics prove it.

We now count twice as many conflicts 15 years ago.

We are at 130 international and non-international armed conflicts that we classify in our system.

That's the highest number since the Second World War.

So I think it's time we stop admiring the problem and start acting against this.

In my own newspaper, there was a recent headline asking if World War III had already begun.

And I want to speak more deeply about why those fears about a global conflict are taking root.

But first, you rarely give interviews.

The ICRC is quite a secretive organization because it has to be, because of the sensitivity of what you do.

Why are you sitting down now?

Because I want more and more people to understand that we live in a decade or four.

And because we live in a decade or four, we have to understand the significance and importance

of the rules of war and why they need to be respected.

These treaties were created precisely for times like the ones we live in.

I need to reach out to people.

They need to understand the importance of this.

Why do you think they don't?

We hear more and more leaders say that the rules of war don't apply anymore because of the pursuit

for total victory.

But that is not possible.

In history, there has never been total victory.

There has only been death and destruction over and above what was necessary.

Because at the end of the day, whether there is peace always remains a political decision,

not a military one.

Is there such a thing as a necessary war?

As far as I'm concerned, no.

But philosophers and politicians have argued for thousands of years that war is necessary.

But the point is war has always been considered as something in the pursuit of a political objective.

It's a means to an end.

Today, you get the feeling that the wars become the means to an end itself.

And they continue because people want to stay in power.

Because they have created an environment where the war becomes the condition under which they

can continue ruling.

And that's very dangerous.

You ask me whether we are approaching a third world war.

Honestly, history will judge that.

History books will tell us whether today we already were

in the beginning or maybe already in the middle of such a situation.

We didn't know as the ICSE that we were in the Second World War when that was happening.

The awareness of this being one of the most brutal wars in human history,

that awareness wasn't there at that time.

You are one of the few people in the world who regularly travels to both sides of our conflicts.

Can you tell me where you've been since you took over as the head of the ICSE in 2022?

I've been to Gaza more than once during military operations.

My organization facilitated the release and the return of the hostages from Gaza and the

Palestinians, the Palestinian detainees back to Gaza.

I was in Ukraine. I was in Myanmar.

I was recently in Iran, in Iraq.

I traveled to the Middle East often.

But I also traveled to Africa. I was in Sudan. I was in Mali.

I have to go and see for myself what it looks like. I need to understand

what civilians endure in conflict because I'm speaking to the holders of power.

I wouldn't be credible if I didn't know what it is, what it means to be subject to this level of violence.

I want to start with Gaza. Your organization is one of the few organizations that has been allowed inside

and continues to work in Gaza. International journalists, most other international organizations

haven't been given access by the Israeli government. Can you describe what you have seen?

I never go to any place of conflict without people telling me that they want to stop.

Without people telling me that they don't understand what is happening.

I see children without parents. I see children without arms and legs.

Senseless does the world feel to you when you're confronting these things.

And when you then go to the power holders and they tell you that there's nothing that they can do,

you just don't understand how is it that I see these children without parents, without limbs.

And people who have power and influence still tell me there's nothing we can do.

I don't understand it. I often don't understand what I see in connection to what I hear.

Millions of Palestinians who live in Gaza are now forced to live on only around 30% of the territory.

Over 80% of the buildings in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged.

And in a 2025 interview with the BBC during the active conflict, you called Gaza

worse than hell on earth than you described to people stripped of their human dignity.

Have the rules of war been followed there?

When I said about Gaza, it's still valid today. What happened to Gaza and in Gaza,

to Palestinians in Israeli supersedes every legal moral and human standards.

You know, there's so many people complicit in what happened there and continues to happen.

The worst now is the fact that people are deprived of human dignity.

The perception created that if there is enough food, that's good enough.

For some people it's good enough to just barely survive in rubble and for other people it's

only good enough if they can return to normalcy and bring their children back to a normal school.

It's applying to standards and this will backfire.

We cannot assume that for certain people, certain things

are sufficient for a situation when it doesn't apply to everybody else.

You can see that by how we measure humanitarian needs in Europe, in comparison to South Sudan,

or Somalia, intuitively and because we can't prevent it, we continue applying to standards and

that some human lives are more valuable than others.

Yes, and I always fear that if you allow double standards, it can happen to you.

You never know when you find yourself all of a sudden on the other side of the line.

And it happened in this Second World War to the Jewish people, but it happened to a lot more people

than we nowadays keep in mind.

I want to stay with Gaza for one more moment before we broaden out.

Did the ICRC have access to the hostages while they were in captivity because

there were horrific stories of their conditions and captivity and obviously that is one of your

main roles is to make sure that detainees, prisoners are treated well.

Visiting hostages is much more complicated than bringing them back.

And in my opinion, they should have come back unconditionally as of day one,

but that's not the reality in which we operate and so we have to work with the tools that we have.

There's nothing more complicated, more complex and to a certain extent, also more brutal,

than hostage-taking.

We know that also because our own colleagues find themselves more often than they should in such situations.

We know how important it is to negotiate them out as quickly as possible.

So the objective always has to be to bring the hostages back.

And the longer it takes, the more complicated it becomes.

I personally think that pressure should have come earlier on the negotiations.

We could have saved more lives, many more lives.

And this was the subject of our conversations.

I traveled twice to Qatar to meet with the leadership of Hamas,

to sit with his man, Hanir at the time.

I sat with Prime Minister Netanyahu myself.

These were tough discussions.

And trust me, we have very frank in these meetings.

And this is why these meetings have to always remain confidential.

I'm also thinking of Israel and how it has not allowed you access to the detainees inside of Israel.

I mean, how have they explained that to you?

And how do you then have to respond?

It's true that prior to October 7, DICS, he has had access

for decades to detainees held by Israel.

And we organized tens of thousands if no more family visits.

And that's important.

Access to prisons in

situations of war is extremely challenging and complicated to achieve.

And at a certain point in the conflict, parties decided for security reasons they don't want to give us access.

It's the most common argument.

There may be others, but that's the most common one.

But it doesn't matter what the reason is.

It's a sovereign decision by the state to prevent us.

However, according to the Geneva Convention, with all these states have ratified,

they have a legal obligation to give us access.

And in my opinion, also a moral obligation.

Because we need to inform the families about the whereabouts of or the fate of their relatives.

You know, you capture soldier, this person is detained, but a soldier is not per se a criminal.

And no matter how you classify,

these situations torture is never allowed, never for any party to the Geneva Convention.

That is clear.

And this is what we discuss with those who don't give us access.

But you know, detention has a different reason for me.

To be able to go irrespective of my legal mandate.

Detention is the place where you lose your identity.

Detention is when there's no possibility to notify the families and to receive information

about them, detention becomes the place of utmost deprivation of yourself.

And we've seen more often than not that people detained under horrible conditions over extended periods of time.

Forget who they are.

And when I visited recently a detention facility in Iraq,

the detainees told me our biggest challenge is information.

You know, they are very content if the food situation improves.

If they have more access to sanitary facilities, all these things are important to them.

But what is most important for everyone always is to have information about what month it is,

what day it is, where the families are, where the children are,

whether the children are safe.

You're talking to human beings.

This is a bit of a basic question.

Why does it matter how you treat your enemy?

Of course it matters because you dehumanize yourself if you torture.

If you tell your soldiers go and kill women and children, go rape them,

looting is loud.

It's our strategy in warfare.

These people dehumanize themselves.

They will never be able to return to a normal life.

I listen to so many interviews of former soldiers because I need to understand them as well.

All of them always say that what haunts them is this child that was left in the street

because they weren't allowed to turn around and collect it.

That they are all bleeding to death.

It remains with you.

You debase yourself.

This is why soldiers normally, when they return also have all these problems.

I refuse to believe that the core human essence is bad.

We are good people.

We want to live with people we love.

We want to have children that thrive.

We want to be able to build a house.

And know that our, you know,

grandchildren would be better off than us.

This is a very normal human motivation to continue living.

Our motivation is not to live in Rapplund.

Never.

How could it be?

I want to just take a pause here because I want to learn a little bit more about you.

You are Swiss Croatian.

You studied philosophy.

You worked primarily in international development and peacemaking for most of your career,

including for the Swiss Foreign Service, the United Nations.

I'm curious why you wanted to take on a job about war.

Do you have memories of the war in Croatia?

My first memory of war was what my great-grandmother, her brothers, my father,

everybody told me at the time about the Second World War and how they endured it.

You know, my father was born in the middle and my father said,

yeah, when he was five years old, he had to work in the field.

For 12 hours in the sun for a glass of milk at the time.

He said, this whole child taught for the smart by the memory of being hungry.

And my mother, she was equally, you know, traumatized to the point where she said,

every time a child died of a disease in her neighborhood, she thought that the parents were lucky

and happy probably because there was one less child to feed.

And so they felt relieved. Can you imagine thinking as a little girl that

somebody is happy about losing a child because you don't have enough food for everyone?

This is, these are the stories that marked me probably more profoundly than anything else.

And then came the Yugoslavia war, you know, my direct exposure to the impact of conflict.

But I cannot imagine how anybody could say, we need this war because you always forget that there are

people in this war that suffer. And if you keep the people in mind, you will always

favor a political solution. I'm not naive, you know, I'm surrounded by, you know, by

heart-interlocked in a heart-environment. But still, I think if you keep the people in mind,

if you, if you had all times remembered that it could happen to you, it could happen to your

children, you will think twice before you start the war. You are the first woman to be president

of the ICRC. I mean, do you think gender matters and how you're dealing with conflict?

You know, I often say this when I came into office, everybody was asking about

how is it being the first woman president of the ICRC after 160 years of male dominance.

And it's not only at the top, I mean, it's across the institution because it's an,

it's an organization that was created in war four wars. And then I went to Mali to know the

Mali and they sat with the women. And for the first time in ICRC president could sit with the

women in a tent because, you know, social norms prevented my predecessors from doing the same.

And I felt so shaken throughout the night when I realized what is happening to women

in conflict and how brutal it is, you know, because you have an overlap of many things affecting women

and, you know, just depriving them of even the minimum protection that any human being should have

at all times. And that night I realized it is a difference when it's a woman, you know, because

if there would never be a woman at the head of these organizations, we wouldn't be as conscious

of what it means for 50% of the world's population. You've seen many horrible things as part of your

job. You deal, as you said, in a very harsh environment, probably the harshest. How do you protect

yourself from the relentlessness, awfulness? I mean, I've seen you get, if I may say a little

emotional, thinking about it, I don't go, in, in Germany, we say, I was built close to water. Can you

say that? I'm very emotional. I try to be hard, but it doesn't work.

Maybe it's good that I'm emotional. Maybe it's good that I get angry when I see bad things or

unjust things because it keeps me going. You know, it keeps up feeling alive that you have to do

something. You can't just admire the problem. You, there's something that you have to be able to do.

And I've always had that feeling. I remember when I was a child, I wanted to say,

for all the sea turtles, because I watched this documentary about how they're being tortured.

You know, when they're being caught and how they are being killed, you know, getting to the meat

and how much suffering that entails, I said to my parents, I want to become a veterinarian,

I need to save the turtles. I think I would have. I probably would have started a global movement

for the sea turtles, but then so many other things happened in between and I now do it. I try

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You know, as as I was thinking about the ICRC and the difficulty in this era of staying neutral,

right, this idea of neutrality and this idea of coming in and having to speak to both sides and

not taking sides, it really made me wonder about the challenges of that in this environment.

There have been many accusations that the ICRC hides behind its neutrality, you know, to mask

inaction. You know, the Holocaust is a moment where the ICRC failed catastrophically to

prevent or at least to even acknowledge the extermination of the Jews.

I know your background is in philosophy and I know you feel all this very deeply.

And I'm wondering what does it mean to be neutral in the face of extreme suffering? I mean, is there

an inherent tension in that?

When I started my studies, I had my thoughts and I could also get impatient with

the stubborn insistence on neutrality and confidentiality. I very, very quickly changed my mind when

I became pressed in myself. Having accepted this unique opportunity, I had to learn quickly and then

also had to acknowledge that we wouldn't be able to do what we do without this strict insistence

on neutrality, not in the context of prisoners of war in Russia and in Ukraine, but definitely,

definitely, we wouldn't have been able to bring back the hostages from Gaza. I mean, you see the

pictures, you see our colleagues are unarmed amongst, you know, thousands, if not tens of thousands.

I'm men and in a situation surrounded by a rubble from which there was no escape, we had to

negotiate the terms with everyone. Nobody would have trusted us to be able to do this. Highly complex

operation. If we hadn't defended our neutrality over 160 years because we are predictable in it,

you tweak it once, you become political and that's it. I know it makes so many people angry,

but that's the essence of our mission. In that context, I want to also ask you about Iran

because you noted that you have also spoken with the Iranians about the negotiations and about the

situation there. I understand your role as a neutral party. I understand that you cannot divulge

the nature of those discussions, but I am wondering how much you can say about what you've seen there

and how this conflict may or may not be resolved. It became very clear to me and I followed at the time

the nuclear talks between 2013 and 2015 between former President Obama and the other

under President Obama. It became clear to me at the time how complex these negotiations were.

It's much more complicated today in comparison. The first challenge to establish is the trust.

We have in the meantime created a world where war is not a means of last resort.

It happens at any moment in a process which leads to a situation where parties

always keep that possibility in mind and always keep a high readiness and preparedness to return to

conflict. That in itself is not helpful because you know that these negotiations will take a long

time, will require a lot of compromise. But on top of this we have created a situation

that is much more complex because of the overlapping of conflicts and challenges.

Today's conflicts are not limited to a given situation. They are turning into systems.

Explain what you mean exactly. Look, you have countries aligning over continents as states.

You have shifts in military cooperation. You have shifts in interests and economic goals.

So speaking of Iran, so Iran's relationship with Russia, Russia's relationship with China,

the conflict spreading to Saudi Arabia and Yemen with the Houthis.

And then you have the non-State-on groups that are connected with other non-State-on groups in

the Horn of Africa and you can follow these streams through the Sile

as far as Western African countries. You know, certain groups, ideological groups or radicalized

groups, however you want to name them. They share ideologies, they share common objectives,

they align, they realign, they trade their arms, they ensure the availability of technology

and cheap weapons across many, many countries and thousands of kilometers. So you never limited

one situation. And if now the situation escalates in Yemen, you can be sure that it won't remain

contained to that territory for a long time. You already have two very important sea

straits affected. It means that the number of actors that will need to get involved and exercise

political pressure is increasing. So you have a lack of trust. You have asymmetric warfare

that allows these conflicts to continue for an extended period of time. And on top of this,

and I haven't mentioned this yet, there's a total absence of economic growth.

And you know, a fast loss of development gains that have been essential for the welfare of the

people in many countries of the world, take Iraq to begin with. You know, over the last 10 years,

the country has been recovering from very large conflicts that have had a heavy impact on society

and the economies. These gains are being undone. Countries don't have the fiscal space anymore

to cope with the fallout created by continued warfare. And at the same time, there's no

prospect of economic growth that would allow us to feel capable of repaying the debts that

are being created today. So the combination of these or the convergence of these trends is extremely

dangerous. I still insist we will not be able to get out of it without negotiations, but these

negotiations have to happen yesterday. There will last as long as it takes. There will require

a lot of consensus and a lot of people involved. This has to be understood. And now what do we need?

We need political will. There's not much we can do if this continues to escalate. We need

negotiations. We need powerful politicians. I personally, I want politicians to have power to

negotiate. President Trump, in his recent speech at the UN General Assembly, was threatening the

annihilation of Iran by U.S. forces, speaking of this idea of trust and using war as a method of

negotiation. Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country

than it ever was before? Maybe one of the greatest in the Middle East or even the world.

Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic? And he's used language like that quite a bit.

But it was notable to me in that particular speech because he made that statement at a body

explicitly created to stop wars, which is the United Nations.

And I'm just wondering what you think that kind of language says about America's understanding

and commitment right now to these very complex in-depth negotiations that you say are needed.

You know, I started my career as a diplomat about 25 years ago in New York.

And since I've been observing

eroding language, you know, certain things set back then would have triggered points of order.

You know, people would have left the room. They would have been outraged.

I remember when at the time Hugo Chavez spoke at the General Assembly and

what reactions this triggered. Yes, more and more.

More and more, and the smell of sulfur and playing that he was the devil.

Exactly. This is a gradual erosion and all of a sudden makes you realize,

but there are things being said that, you know, given in certain situations, could

even lead to war crimes because you, depending on who you are and what the situation looks like,

could entice people to do things that would actually amount to war crimes.

This is why hate speech and this brutal language is so dangerous.

But, you know, I'm not accusing a specific person today because this erosion has been happening

for far too long. And I've been alert for many years now, or I know what he's standing up and

saying, this cannot happen because this in itself is preparing for war.

But most importantly, every politician that uses the term, any term that points at

their own rules and their own red lines, sends this signal to any person in the world that

bears a weapon that holds a weapon. You have to be conscious that as a holder of power,

you have a far bigger reach. So far, many more people here, oh, they're not red lines.

I have weapons. I can use them. One of the things that struck me about why we're in such a period

of global conflict is that it's relatively easy to get into wars, as you've said,

but increasingly hard to get out of them. So they drag on and accumulate. So a war that started 15

years ago doesn't get resolved. And then new wars are added to that. And so what we're seeing is just

conflict upon conflict upon conflict. Are we losing our capacity to resolve conflicts?

Definitely. I mean, that's a fact. If you don't negotiate over 10 years, you lose the practice.

You know, you cannot, it's like being a heart surgeon. You don't stop operating and then come

back and they give you the instruments and you resume. You know, negotiation is something that

you need to master. I spoke once with a senior representative of the ANC in South Africa who told

me our adversaries never had to negotiate anything. They did not have to do it. So we had to train them first

before we could sit at the negotiation table. You know, negotiations require so many things.

And they require, especially political weight, courage and compromise. But you need to know

what your red lines in the negotiation are, how far you prepared to go and how you get the

other party to agree. When you look at Ukraine and Russia, Iran and the US, there have only been

sporadic attempts to negotiate. Because there's no, you know, this is not yet the expression of

courage and will to come to an agreement. I mean, sending the vice president, for example,

to Iran for a day, that's not a negotiation strategy, I think. When you think about the context

of the Iran nuclear deal, hundreds of people, years, you know, you know when it's serious and you know

when it's happening. You know, undergirding this whole discussion and your call for leaders to

pick up the phone is the breakdown of many democracies and the institutions that hold them together.

You know, the weakness that we're seeing in upholding liberal democracy means that international

organizations are also weak, you know, look at Germany, a country you know well, the far right,

the far left, surged in recent elections, citizens are angry, they're looking for solutions,

they have a lack of faith in politics to solve their problems in a way that feels beneficial to them.

And governments seem to be increasingly afraid of their own populations.

Are you worried about the complete breakdown of the post-World War II order?

Of course I am because that order made it possible for Europe to stay out of a third world war,

to stay out of the levels of these distractions that we have seen, you know, coming from these wars.

Europe is in a certain way also the leader of bad forces, you know, I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm

I feel very bad saying that but we we have to acknowledge that the European or the Western

history is not one of peace and security but coming out of that trouble there was

there were a few people who had the foresight and the courage to establish an international

system that is in no way is perfect but for a long time prevented the worst.

And that's the system is there including the Geneva conventions. I mean,

everything that is written in the Geneva conventions today is still as valid because if you had

to rewrite them you would come back with the same principles trust me because they're so

intuitive and logical in any society religion culture nobody will tell you it's it's correct to

torture a child I mean how how unimaginable would that be for any society to come back to

this idea of where we are in the world right now that perhaps we might already be in this

third global war without us knowing.

What can we do? What should we be doing? You know, let's go back to that time when when we

believed in peace. Why is it so wrong to start a global movement around the notion of peace and

world peace? It's possible. I think when I talk to my children for them pieces is not something

completely away and absent. This is how they imagine their future. I think we have to listen to

them and we have to we have to start you know retreating from an overfocus on weapons weapons systems

defense technologies we also have to recreate a positive narrative about humanity about peace

about coming together and working together and living together because there is a minimum ground

that nobody has left yet and that is the ratification of the Geneva conventions.

The commitment to a set of rules that you know prevent the worst that prevent the destruction of

humanity. We have to come back to recognizing that humanity is what holds us together and that

this is something we need to protect as a priority today because we are debasing almost everything.

Mariana Spalaric thank you so much. I have really found our conversation very so

I thank you.

My Attépler Eddie Costas, Leland James, Gabby Contreras, Kathleen O'Brien and Brook Mentors. Our

executive producer is Alison Benedict. Next week David talks with Bono and the Edge about

you two's 50th birthday and the band's fourth coming album. I'm Lula Garcia Navarro and this is

the interview from the New York Times.

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