Skip to footer

Why no safe zone in Syria, yet? 5 complications

The flood of Syrian refugees entering Turkey – as many as 5,000 a day for the last 10 days – has ratcheted up the pressure for a safe zone’s creation. But a safe zone is complicated and carries many risks.

5. Why not maintain the status quo?

Turkey has been firm that it is unwilling to risk a repeat of 1991, when Iraq’s Gulf War sent a flood of Iraqi Kurd refugees into Turkey. “Turkey’s lesson from the early 1990s is that if you let a large number of refugees come in, they end up being your problem only,” Soner Cagaptay, a Turkey expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), told The Christian Science Monitor.

Turkey is close to reaching its self-prescribed threshold of 100,000 refugees with no sign of the numbers abating. It has been forced to hold thousands of people just over the border on the Syrian side, where they are receiving food, water, and some medical attention. The corridor has become an unofficial safe zone.

Why not continue with that?

The Monitor reports that an internationally recognized and implemented safe zone would be a stronger deterrent to any regime attempts to attack displaced civilians and would also provide greater reassurance to stranded Syrians that they are safe in Syria and do not need to cross over into Turkey or other neighboring countries.

5 of 5
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.