Carsten Kofoed: General Secretary of the Danish Red Cross calls for supporting the occupation of Afghanistan

General Secretary of the Danish Red Cross calls for supporting the occupation of Afghanistan

By Carsten Kofoed, Free Iraq Blog of Denmark, November 27, 2007

During the recent election campaign for the national Danish Parliament, Joergen Poulsen, General Secretary of the Danish Red Cross and member of the newly founded New Alliance (a rightist Social-Liberal party), made a very revealing statement about the nature of the Red Cross.

To the Danish daily Ekstra Bladet, Poulsen said on November 11:

“Let us support our boys in Afghanistan who are in war for Denmark in the Helmand Province. So why not make it free to send letters, packages and other things to our soldiers down south.”

Poulsen, who was on leave from his job as General Secretary of the Danish Red Cross while running for Parliament, also proposed that the pupils in primary and lower secondary school could send greeting cards to the Danish occupation forces in Afghanistan. He had been inspired by similar arrangements in the US, he disclosed to Ekstra Bladet.

Denmark has 600 occupation troops in Afghanistan at the moment serving in the NATO occupation of the country, and one of them is even Poulsen’s son.

Poulsen got elected for Parliament on November 13, and now the Danish Red Cross is looking for a new General Secretary to take Poulsen’s position.

But with his unambiguous statements on supporting the illegal occupation of Afghanistan, Poulsen has revealed – once more some would say – that the Red Cross is not a neutral organisation working to relieve human sufferings in the time of conflict. It is an organisation working for the interests of imperialism and hiding its crimes under the “impartiality” that the organisation simply does have when it comes to the point.