Arab League to report on Syria mission

Arab League observers meeting with Syrian officials at a government office in the coastal city of Tartus on Tuesday

The head of the Arab League’s heavily criticised observer mission to Syria was due in Cairo yesterday to report on its first month of operations amid growing frustration at its failure to staunch 10 months of bloodshed.
The pan-Arab bloc’s deputy leader, Ahmed Ben Helli, said the “decisive” report would evaluate the Syrian government’s cooperation with the mission, while noting the observers’ difficulty in gaining access to hot spots.
“We are at a turning point, as the Arab observer mission’s report will be presented on Thursday [yesterday], marking a month since the protocol was signed,” Ben Helli told Qatari state media late on Wednesday.
“The report will be decisive,” Ben Helli added, alluding to the expiry yesterday of the hard-won mission’s initial one-month mandate agreed with Damascus after months of exhaustive negotiation.
The League’s Syria operations chief, Adnan Khodeir, said mission leader General Mohammed Ahmed Mustafa al-Dabi would arrive at the bloc’s headquarters in Cairo at around 6:30 pm (1630 GMT).
He would then hand over the report to League chief Nabil al-Arabi, either later yesterday or early today, ahead of meetings of Arab ministers on Saturday and Sunday.
Qatar, whose Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim Al-Thani chairs the Arab League panel on Syria, has been pressing for the observer mission to be given teeth through the deployment of Arab peacekeeping troops.
The Qatari proposal is not formally on the agenda of Sunday’s foreign ministers’ meeting to discuss the mission’s future but could be discussed, Khodeir said.
“Any country that wishes can bring up the issue,” he said, referring to the call by Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Hamad Ben Khalifa al-Thani, to send Arab troops to Syria, which Damascus has flatly rejected.
“What we are talking about now at the Arab League is whether there will be a new approach concerning the observer mission,” he told reporters on Wednesday.
Arabi has also said the idea could come up for debate.
As activists reported another nine deaths at the hands of the Syrian security forces yesterday, a coalition of some 140 Arab human rights groups demanded the withdrawal of the League’s “flawed” mission and called for UN intervention.
Among the dead, were four leading pro-democracy activists who had gone into hiding and were killed in an ambush in Idlib province in the northwest, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
The Arab mission, which currently numbers about 165 monitors, has been in Syria since December 26 to oversee an Arab road map under which President Bashar al-Assad’s government agreed to end violence.
“No observers have been able to do their job: instead, the mission legitimises the Syrian regime,” said Radwan Ziadeh, head of the Damascus Centre for Human Rights Studies, in the rights groups’ joint statement.