Senator Coats: Responding to Humanitarian Catastrophe

Mechanisms that ended the Bosnian War could be applied in Syria

The international community just celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Dayton Accords, a landmark peace agreement that brought an end to the Bosnian War and a grave humanitarian crisis in the Balkans.

Today, relative peace still exists in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia and Croatia — and this situation offers valuable lessons that can be applied to one of the biggest humanitarian problems of our time.

The Syrian refugee and migration crisis is overwhelming the mechanisms set up by the international community to deal with such movements. European countries are caught between their instincts to offer safety and help to desperate people, and their inability to meet the needs of an unmanageable flood of migrants.

The migration, with no apparent end in sight, also has brought growing political pressure from disgruntled populations themselves displaced by waves of migrants. This threatens increased radicalism and political instability throughout Europe. And most importantly, we must assume that uncontrolled movement of hundreds of thousands of people from the Middle East will pose a growing security threat as jihadists take advantage of the movement and hide among them.

That is a threat that we Americans also must address.

The only reasonable alternative to dealing with this disaster is to create the conditions in and near Syria that will permit people to remain there, in humane conditions of relative safety near their home country, within their own culture.

Achieving this will require the United States, our allies and other cooperating powers to create areas in and near Syria where Syrians can find safety from attack.

As difficult as this task sounds — and surely it is — it has been done before.

When Yugoslavia collapsed in 1993, modern, well-equipped armies clashed in open prolonged warfare, involving sieges of towns and cities, generating hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of refugees and displaced persons. In this, as in the current situation in Syria, violence was pervasive and inescapable.

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