WORLD_ Safe zones needed on Syria's borders

Safe zones needed on Syria's borders

By Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.)
- 05/30/12 01:45 PM ET

After three stalled diplomatic  attempts to stop Syrian President Bashar Assad's government from killing thousands of unarmed civilians, it's time for the international community to intervene. The United States should partner with its allies to establish safe zones on the borders of countries neighboring Syria.

Since popular demonstrations began more than a year ago, Syria's democracy movement has evolved into a national uprising. Like their counterparts in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, Syrians took to the streets to demand political reforms. In response, the Assad regime has offered lip service to reform but in fact has confronted peaceful protesters with military force and a campaign of atrocities.

After shelling entire neighborhoods to rubble, the regime has blocked humanitarian aid from reaching injured civilians. Doctors and nurses who try to administer aid have been targeted. Tens of thousands are suffering. The United Nations estimates that as many as 17,000 Syrians have been killed during the 14-month uprising.

The international community is facing a crisis reminiscent of Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur. We must confront ourselves, take stock of our values and decide how we will respond. Addressing this crisis will require coordinated action and a strong commitment from many nations, but leadership from the United States is essential.

The international community has a responsibility to protect innocent populations from mass atrocities when repeated diplomatic efforts fail. We committed ourselves to this principle at the United Nations World Summit in 2005 with the Responsibility to Protect initiative.

Several nations, including the United States, decided they would not stand by whenever war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing or genocide are perpetrated, or when despotic government leaders decimate their country's population.

U.N. Special Envoy Kofi Annan's proposal is meeting resistance, and even U.N. officials have acknowledged that the first group of observers has not stopped the killing. Activists on the ground estimate that 500 people have been killed since the negotiated U.N. "cease-fire" was enacted April 12. The Assad regime has shown no regard for prior agreements. Still, the international community should hold Assad to his commitment and accelerate the dispatch of all 300 U.N. observers.

Even as the United States supports the U.N. plan, we must take additional steps to address the humanitarian crisis. Turkey has discussed creating protected safe zones within its borders. We should encourage these efforts and commit our support.

We should also be prepared for the possibility of Turkey invoking Article 5 of the NATO treaty, since the Syrian army has fired into Turkish territory. Establishing safe zones in Turkey or another country on Syria's border will allow international partners to administer humanitarian relief and better organize the inflow of Syrian refugees.

Taking these steps would put Bashar Assad on notice that the international community will not allow him to repeat his father's brutality. In 1982, Hafez Assad, presided over the slaughter of 20,000 people in Hama, Syria. The United States has acted in the past to prevent similar humanitarian crises, but sometimes too late.

We hesitated in Bosnia and Rwanda and regretted it when hundreds of thousands died, were maimed, tortured or raped. But we acted wisely in Libya, prevented a massacre, and maintained the democratic momentum of the Arab Spring -- until now.

It is true that establishing a safe zone on the border of Syria involves significant risk. What if the Syrian army targets the safe zone? What if Assad blocks refugees' access to it? How long should the safe zone exist? And who will pay for it?

These are questions we must seriously consider. But they should not chill us into inaction. The United States must lead the international community in establishing safe zones to protect innocent Syrian civilians and send a clear message to Assad: the killing has to stop.

One thing is clear: Assad has proven himself to be a merciless butcher who will kill and murder and torture as long as we let him.

No more Bosnias, Darfurs and Rwandas. It's time for the world to act.
Rep. Ellison (D-Minn.) represents Minnesota's Fifth Congressional District in the U.S. House.

Cross posted from the Minneapolis Start Tribune


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Showing 8 comments



Winston Blake  9 hours ago
It is time for other countries to do the heavy lifting. The USA is not a military welfare program for the rest of the world. Balance the f*cking budget. In case you haven't noticed Representative Ellison, we have the same things going on in Mexico. Let the Europeans handle it, we have enough going on in our own backyard.



russell bowles  6 hours ago
in reply to Winston Blake
It's all up to the Arab League.



Guest  10 hours ago
It is time for other countries to do the heavy lifting. The USA is not a military welfare program for the rest of the world. Balance the f*cking budget. In case you haven't noticed Representative Ellison, we have the same things going on in Mexico. Let the Europeans handle it, we have enough going on in our own backyard.



russell bowles  6 hours ago
in reply to Guest
It's still all up to the Arab League.



Guest 10 hours ago
It is time for other countries to do the heavy lifting. The USA is not a military welfare program for the rest of the world. Balance the f*cking budget. In case you haven't noticed Representative Ellison, we have the same things going on in Mexico. Let the Europeans handle it, we have enough going on in our own backyard.



russell bowles  6 hours ago
in reply to Guest
Really! It's still all up to the Arab League.



Kate 13 hours ago
Time of talk has run out and smart action needs to take place. What makes a safe zone honored when this maniac doesn't care who he kills. He is no longer in control of his country and his military is killing whomever...he need to be gone.



Sam  14 hours ago
In 2007 Mitt Romney criticized Democrat Barack Obama's expressed intention as President to go enter Pakistan to kill al Qaeda terrorists even without that country's permission, saying "I do not concur in the words of Barack Obama in a plan to enter an ally of ours... I don't think those kinds of comments help in this effort to draw more friends to our effort.” He called Obama’s statement about acting in Pakistan without Pakistani participation "ill-timed" and "ill-considered." http://in.reuters.com/article/.... Bush did NOTHING to try to catch OBL. He turned down the operatives who asked for reinforcements when they thought they had OBL pinned down in Tora Bora, then he closed down their Alec unit and shipped them to Iraq to prosecute his illegal war based on lies. Voters need to keep the Republicans as far away as possible from running our foreign policy and our national defense. Their VP designate Marco Rubio already rattled rockets at Russia, which has hundreds of nuclear missiles pointed at us, and he WILL do the same to the Chinese. Republican George W. Bush disastrously fostered an atmosphere of unspeakable brutality by authorizing the criminal torture of detainees http://www.politico.com/news/s... resulting in fiascos such as Abu Ghraib and atrocities this year that included cutting off fingers, peeing on Afghans, desecrating their scriptures and the slaughter of 17 civilians by one U.S. soldier. Bush wasted $ trillions of our treasure and tens of thousands of American lives including 4,400 deaths, diverting our forces from Afghanistan and from the search for Osama Bin Laden and instead sent them to murder hundreds of thousands of Iraqi men, women and children, in the process converting that country from Iran's worst enemy into its closest ally. An example of the Bush lies was reported by Sen. Bill Nelson who said that the Bush administration misled his chamber before a vote to authorize the war when they told him intelligence showed Saddam had unmanned aircraft that could deliver chemical weapons to U.S. cities. As it turned out, there was never any such report in U.S. intelligence files. http://www.globalsecurity.org/.... And "In a classified National Intelligence Estimate prepared 
before the Iraq war, the CIA hedged its judgments about Saddam Hussein 
and weapons of mass destruction, pointing up the limits of its 
knowledge. But in the unclassified version of the NIE -- the so-called 
white paper cited by the Bush administration in making its case for war 
-- those carefully qualified conclusions were turned into blunt 
assertions of fact, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee's 
report on prewar intelligence." http://articles.latimes.com/20.... Senior professional staff member on the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Fulton Armstrong wrote, "When we on the National Intelligence
Council finally got a full read of the National Intelligence Estimate on 
WMDs, after its publication, a couple of us expressed grave 
reservations about the fatally weak evidence and the obsessively 
one-sided interpretation of what shreds of information it contained." http://www.nybooks.com/article.... Then Bush nominated a crook with mob links who is now in prison for corruption to run our Homeland Security. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02.... Also, Congress had to intervene and stop Bush when he tried to hand over our most important ports to a Muslim nation. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11....     




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