The ICU download page provides binary downloads for Red Hat, but only as tgz files that need to be unpacked into /. You end up with files all over your filesystem, and no way to remove them in a controlled fashion if you want to upgrade to a later version of ICU.

Exactly the problem RPMs were designed to solve - so I've created an RPM spec file for the current (5 Jan 2012) version of ICU4C (4.8.1.1) and produced an RPM from it.

• Download the latest version of ICU4C.
• Put the tgz in ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES (if this doesn't exist, run rpmdev-setuptree).
• Put the spec file from this repository in ~/rpmbuild/SPECS.
• Update the icu4c.spec Version and Release fields.
• From that SPECS directory run rpmbuild -bb icu4c.spec
• If you get any warnings about missing or extraneous files you may need to update the icu4c.spec to include/exclude these files. If there are many changes you might want to get a list of files (not directories) in the tgz: tar xf icu4c-...RHEL6-x64.tgz && find usr -not -type d