Safe haven plea for Syrian refugees amid warning of no-fly zone

But Turkish leaders held out little hope for the endorsement of a deeply-divided council that has been paralysed on taking action to stop the 18-month uprising that has killed more than 20,000 people.

“How long are we going to sit and watch while an entire generation is being wiped out by random bombardment and deliberate mass targeting?” foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu said. “Let’s not forget that if we do not act against such a crime against humanity happening in front of our eyes, we become accomplices to the crime.”

Mr Davutoglu proposed the security council establish camps for refugees forced to flee their homes and take “long overdue steps” to help the suffering people.
But the path to the security council’s agreement on a safe zone for Syrians is fraught with obstacles, however, headed by the reluctance of Russia and China, Syria’s important allies who have vetoed three Western-backed resolutions seeking to pressure President Bashar Assad’s government with the threat of sanctions.

Before yesterday’s meeting, Britain and France announced funding for refugees and left open the possibility of more aggressive action, including a military-enforced no-fly zone to protect a safe area for those fleeing the
war.

“We are not ruling out any options for the future,” Foreign Secretary William Hague told a news conference.

“We do not know how this crisis will develop ... over the coming months. It is steadily getting worse. We are ruling nothing out, and we have contingency planning for a wide range of scenarios.”

In his speech, the Turkish minister told the council the camps established for fleeing Syrians “should have full protection” and cited examples of “the cost of procrastination” including the 1995 Serb massacre in Bosnia of more than 8,000 Muslims taken from a UN enclave in Srebrenica and Saddam Hussein’s gassing of 5,000 people in the Kurdish village of Halabja in 1988.

But UN refugee chief Antonio Guterres warned against safe zones, though he praised Syria’s neighbours for keeping their borders open to Syrians fleeing the war, and said their right to asylum “must not be jeopardised, for instance through the establishment of so-called ‘safe havens’ or other similar arrangements”.

“Bitter experience has shown that it is rarely possible to provide effective protection and security in such areas,” Mr Guterres said.