Safe Areas and Humanitarian Corridors: Their Use and Misuse

Humanitarian corridors are fraught with risk. But we should be clear, all parties to the conflict have a responsibility to abide by international law.

Jason Ralph, University of Leeds.

Among the many issues raised by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the use and misuse of ‘humanitarian corridors’.  At the time of writing, warring parties agreed to open a humanitarian corridor from Sumy, Mariupol and other cities.

Humanitarian corridors are a means of implementing international humanitarian law (IHL) in armed conflict.  But they are fraught with humanitarian and political risk.

At the centre of IHL is the principle that non-combatants (civilians) should be distinguished from combatants (soldiers) and should not be targeted.  Another principle is proportionality.  It is a war crime not only to target to civilians but to conduct military operations in way that means civilian casualty levels are disproportionate to any military advantage.

That law applies to both attackers and defenders.  Neither can attack civilians, nor can they hide behind ‘human shields’.  IHL applies to all combatants regardless of whether theirs is a just or unjust cause.

If war crimes occur then international criminal law can be applied to prosecute the perpetrators.  The Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) has said he is monitoring the current situation, which means he may launch prosecutions in the future.

That is important. But of course if we get to that position it is a failure to prevent atrocity;  prevention is always better than prosecution.  This is what underpins the moves to establish humanitarian corridors: protecting civilians by removing them from the battlefield.

A humanitarian corridor in this respect is slightly different to ‘safe-areas’.  A safe area or safe haven is about protected a population in situ, or protecting the area they have evacuated to.  A humanitarian corridor is about moving people from vulnerable areas.

The United Nations created ‘safe areas’ during the Bosnian conflict.  In April 1993, for instance, the Security Council passed Resolution 819, which demanded that all parties to the conflict ‘treat Srebrenica and its surroundings as safe area which should be free from any armed attack’.

As the 1999 UN Report on the subsequent events made clear, however, the UN peacekeeping force on the ground at the time (UNPROFOR) immediately expressed concern that they did not have the resources to enforce such a demand.  Relying only on diplomatic negotiation therefore, UNPROFOR agreed to demilitarize Srebrenica in return for Bosnian Serb promises not to attack.  That was a fateful decision.  In 1995 when Srebrenica was attacked the population had no means of defending itself and the result was genocide.

The lessons of Srebrenica contributed to a rethink of peacekeeping doctrine and the development of so-called Protection of Civilians mandates, as well as the wider movement to convince states to meet the international responsibility to protect populations such atrocity crimes.  International society, and the forces acting its behalf, would not be neutral in the face of genocide.  Peace was always a goal, but it could not be pursued at the expense of atrocity crimes.

The current problem in Ukraine is in some way similar.  The international community has taken sides but NATO says it is unable to extend military protection to make Ukrainian cities ‘safe areas’ because it needs to avoid escalating the violence and increasing the humanitarian suffering.   There is therefore limited scope for an external military intervention in support of humanitarian objectives.  This means the traditional reliance on the consent of the warring parties and the political neutrality of the humanitarian mediator is of more relevance to this situation.  But as events this week (and in 1995) demonstrate, mediated agreements are fragile, trust can be betrayed and the human consequences are tragic.

There is another parallel between current events and the ‘safe area’ debate of 1993.  The Bosnian authorities were concerned that evacuations from cities (through humanitarian corridors) merely facilitated the war aims of their opponents, which included ‘ethnic cleansing’.  Keeping the population in a city and extending the protection of the international community was seen as a way of avoiding that scenario.  The Bosnian government’s dilemma is surely felt by the Ukrainian government right now.  Zelensky’s reported rejection of humanitarian corridors into Belarus and Russia points to that; as well as a concern that Ukrainians will not be safe in those countries.

Indeed, the manner in which Russia and Syria used humanitarian corridors during the 2016 battle for Aleppo also points to the problem.  In that conflict, the High Negotiations Committee (HNC), the Riyadh-based opposition umbrella group, “condemned Russia’s proposal for humanitarian corridors, characterising it as a euphemism for forced displacement” (Quoted in Ross 2020, 19).

Similarly, many humanitarian organisations were against Russia and Syria’s proposal.  Their concern was that an evacuation could create an unwarranted assumption that those who remained in the city were legitimate targets.  A humanitarian move, in other words, could end up facilitating war crimes.

These concerns are surely considerations in the ethical reasoning of those who have influence over the situation.  It is a dilemma in the truest sense.  Deciding what to do involves a terrible choice between problematic options.  These options have both appropriate and inappropriate consequences; which problematizes the idea that R2P is a ‘norm’ that points to ‘standards of appropriate behaviour’.

Perhaps in these tragic circumstances the best we can say is that those who have influence over the situation have – as Jennifer Welsh put it – a responsibility to consider how best to protect civilians knowing that there is a judgment call rather than the implementation of an ideal.

But, what is clear and should not be confused, is that all parties have a responsibility to abide by IHL and its principles of discrimination and proportionality.  If civilians evacuate a city through a humanitarian corridor it does not mean that those who remain are operating in a lawless space.  IHL applies in all spaces for as long as an armed conflict is taking place.  If those laws are violated then the Independent Prosecutor of the ICC will be gathering the evidence.

Jason Ralph is a Professor of International Relations at the University of Leeds. He is currently Co-Editor of the European Journal of International Security and a researcher at the European Centre for the Responsibility to Protect. His publications include ‘What Should Be Done? Pragmatic Constructivist Ethics and the Responsibility to Protect’.

Image credit: https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/03/1113422.

If you are interested in submitting a blog post for the ECR2P’s Fresh Perspectives series, then please contact Dr Richard Illingworth by Email (r.illingworth@leeds.ac.uk) or Twitter (@RJI95).