Unclear if safe zones are viable
Kamal Al-Labwani, one of the fathers of the Syrian opposition and a man who spent over a decade in the prisons of Bashar al-Assad before his release in 2011, has come up with an idea. Since we can’t end the war or the carnage, he says, let us try to ease the suffering of civilians through the creation of safe zones. It’s a modest enough proposal, but it nonetheless faces what may be insurmountable hurdles.
The Western world has not found a way to stem the tragedy of Syria. The second Syrian “cessation of hostilities” within a single week was announced yesterday by US Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov as violence continued to rage.
Regime change, armed intervention, ceasefire, no-fly zones, airstrikes against the government, airstrikes against the Islamic State (ISIS )– each solution has been proposed and each has collapsed within days, sometimes minutes.
Close to half a million people have died since the start of the civil war in Syria five years ago. Over five million Syrians have fled the country leading to the worst refugee crisis since the Second World War.
Al-Labwani proposes creating “civil and safe areas inside Syria. We’ll try to create these with the help of the UN, with Israel and the international community,” he said in a meeting with The Media Line while in Israel to drum up support for his idea.
“What we need now is to create a safe zone inside Syria with help going through Israel’s border,” he said.
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An area close to the Israeli border could act as a haven for refugees fleeing Syria’s conflict, allowing food and medical aid to flow into the warzone. At the same time a corridor could be created for people to pass from Syria to a port and on to a haven elsewhere, Al-Labwani said. Such a program could start out small and grow, he added.
History provides both warnings and encouragement to those considering the establishment of safe zones in conflict areas. The consequences of doing so in a half-baked manner were made brutally clear in the Srebrenica Massacre when 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were rounded up and murdered by Serb military units in an area designated by the United Nations as a haven. The act represents the worst mass murder in European history since World War II.
However, other examples from history show that safe zones can work, Matthew Bennett, an historian and a former lecturer at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, told The Media Line.
“If you look at somewhere like Srebrenica, (a safe zone) looks like something that can’t possibly work, but that’s not necessarily true. The idea goes back to China in the 1930s with the special area in Shanghai,” Bennett said. The historian referred to safe zones, pioneered by French Jesuit priest Robert Jacquinot de Besange, during the Second-Sino-Japanese War which were credited with saving as many as half a million Chinese civilian lives. Dialogue between different warring groups, through an interlocutor where necessary, is required to keep violence from creeping into the safe zone.
The viability of Kamal Al-Labwani’s proposal depends on how successful he is at getting each of the players in the south of Syria to buy into his scheme. The fact that Al-Labwani is not the first person to consider the notion of safe zones – the US administration mulled the idea over but ultimately rejected it– indicates the difficulty he faces in forming any agreement.
“The logic of the safe zone is pretty solid, especially from the West’s perspective,” Nir Boms, a research fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University, told The Media Line. In terms of dealing with the country’s humanitarian crisis and stopping ISIS, it offers some of the best solutions, Boms said.
“If you have the courage to do it, the capability is there,” Boms stated, going on to explain how it could be achieved. A peacekeeping force could be used to create a boundary, a line in the sand which would prevent groups like ISIS entering. Anybody in theory could do this, but Saudi Arabia is possibly the best choice, the academic added.
Civilians would then be allowed to enter the protected area. In order to hunt down infiltrators and eradicate pockets of resistance, a local paramilitary group would be enabled, a group like the Free Syria Army. In addition to this, air cover would be required to prevent outside parties from intervening.
This is only the first problem which stands in the way of agreement. Russia is unlikely to allow any scheme which restricts its operational freedom to attack the enemies of the Syrian regime. “The safe zone is not good for Russia because it will empower the moderate forces, the same moderate forces that they happen to be bombing,” Boms concluded.
But something needs to be done, and since other solutions have all failed, a safe zone could be the answer, Matthew Bennett opined. “Everybody is so caught up in rigid ideas about what is possible that it is almost impossible to introduce ideas like a safe zone,” he lamented.
For Kamal Al-Labwani any solution will not come soon enough. States around the world have resisted intervening to help out Syria’s civilians, and are increasingly preventing refugees from seeking asylum, but they do not baulk at dropping bombs on the country, he commented cynically.
For the people of Syria this has left few options. “They are forbidden to travel, and forbidden to stay alive. They must die on Syrian land. I will challenge this by creating a safe zone. It is not Al-Qa’ida, it is not ISIS – it is women and children.”