#SOSHoms #Syria intervention drive mirrors Bosnia’s history

Syria intervention drive mirrors Bosnia’s history

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“The Bosnian War and the conflict in Syria are different in nature,” say Soner Cagaptay and Andrew Tabler of The Washington Institute. But “any international groups looking to provide humanitarian intervention to protect vulnerable civilians in enclaves ‘liberated’ by the opposition [in Syria] should draw on lessons from Bosnia in the 1990s”.

Those lessons show it would require an international force protected by air power and with a mandate to shoot back. It would likely be NATO-led, headed by a Muslim general from NATO member Turkey, Syria’s northern neighbour, and including Arab units.

Turkey months ago called for safe havens for Syrians, and is now collaborating with the Arab League and France. At least 5,500 Syrians have been killed in 11 months, the UN says.

A “Friends of Syria” meeting to be held with Arab states in Tunisia on Feb. 24 “will produce a very strong message of solidarity with the Syrian people and also a warning for the Syrian regime”, says Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu.

France wants the United Nations Security Council to approve its plan for humanitarian corridors into Syria from Turkey, Lebanon or Jordan, to the Mediterranean coast or an airport.

If this won UN backing, Turkey, already hosting refugees and army defectors from Syria, seems the most likely bridgehead...In Sarajevo last week, Hollywood star and human rights campaigner Angelina Jolie screened her new film about the war, In the Land of Blood and Honey. She said she hopes it will serve as “a wake-up call” to the world to stop Syrian atrocities.

NATO secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen says that, even with a UN mandate and Arab backing, he doubts the alliance would get involved. Yet as Bosnia showed, policies can change.

“We got no dog in this fight,” U.S. Secretary of State James Baker famously said in 1991 after a failed mission to stop the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia which ignited Bosnia’s war.

But when it turned into Europe’s worst conflict since World War Two, NATO did get into the fight, starting with a token 50 peacekeepers but ending with 100,000 in the country, after bombing Bosnian Serb heavy weapons to impose a peace settlement.

It took five years and over 100 United Nations Security Council resolutions to extinguish the war the United Nations had hoped would end in the summer of 1992. It ended in the winter of 1995, with more than 100,000 dead and entire cities destroyed.

But many more lives were spared because Bosnia’s atrocities posed a challenge to the power of the United States and its European NATO allies that they could not afford to flunk.

Establishing safe havens and humanitarian corridors in Syria would need a UN mandate. Russia, opposed to “regime change”, says it would have to see the language of such a resolution.

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