Activists in Syria Contest the Arab League Mission Chief
Lt. Gen. Muohamed Ahmad Al-Dabi
Syrian opposition leader deemed on Wednesday as a “farce” the fact that the chief of the monitoring mission of the Arab League was appointed Lt. Gen. Mohamed Ahmed Mustafa al-Dabi, the commander of the military in Sudan, a country whose president has an international arrest warrant in his name for the alleged crimes committed by the army in the breakaway province of Darfur, while UN reports show that a genocide was conducted in the mountains of Nuba.
Al-Dabi and his team arrived in Homs, the hotbed of the unrest in Syria, a city which was submitted to heavy attacks of the security forces, which used tanks and gun machines against population.
On Tuesday, the Syrian Observatory of the Human Rights said that dozens of tanks were pulled out of Baba Amr neighborhood, where they had operated one day before causing 30 people to die.
Since the delegation arrived in Homs, they went to the province governor and told him they wanted to inspect different parts of the city, where activists reported that security forces acted against them.
The activists and the protesters were suspicious since the mission arrived that the regime would take them in relatively quiet places in order to convince them that the reports about the massive killings in this country were exaggerated.
They fear that the mission’s report will re-establish the respectability of the regime and will buy it some time to crack down on the restive areas in the center of the country.
Since the number of defectors grew, Syria runs the danger of sinking into civil war, with two cities, Damascus and Aleppo, having a relative calm and many others all over the country continuing their protest against the 41-year rule of the Assad family.
Doctors Local Committee in Damascus issued a statement posted on the internet in which they were expressing the opinion that under the actual circumstances it would be better if the United Nations themselves sent a mission to monitor the situation in Syria.
In the statement it is reminded that Al-Dabi is accused of having allowed, or at least turning a blind eye to, atrocities committed in Darfur in 1996, when he was serving as deputy head of foreign intelligence.
Though he is not subject to International Criminal Court investigation, he is not befitting the command of a mission to investigate the alleged crimes in Syria, the statement says. More than that, 30 members of this long-expected mission are of Sudanese origin, which gives the Syrian activists cause to doubt the results of the investigation.
Al-Dabi said mission will continue in other restive regions of Syria, such as Idlib, Hama or Daraa, adding that in Homs they haven’t seen “anything frightening” in Homs, that it was a quiet place, and that there were no clashes. That is sure to increase the suspicions of the activists as to the intentions of the Sudanese general.
On Wednesday, the Syrian activists refused to meet with the Arab League delegation because they were accompanied by a Syrian army officer. A human rights group accused the Syrian regime of transferring prisoners to military facilities in order to hide them from the international observers.
