In his courageous column in Al Hayat last Monday, Dawood Al Shirian asserted that Damascus handpicked the Sudanese General Mohammad Mustafa Al Dabi to lead the Arab League’s fact-finding mission in Syria.
Mishari Al Zaidi, for his part, wrote in Al Sharq Al Awsat that Sudan’s President Omar Al Bashir nominated Al Dabi to League officials, as the latter secured Syrian approval that saw the former head of Sudan’s military intelligence agency entrusted with the hugely critical mission.
Beyond the League’s poor choice that further tarnished the institution’s sullied reputation, Al Dabi’s ill-advised public pronouncements a few hours after his arrival in Syria — when he declared that the situation on the ground seemed “to be reassuring” while killings continued all around him — guaranteed additional international opprobrium.
Still, and irrespective of Al Dabi’s hasty accommodation, some observers took their work seriously. One in particular reportedly accused Syrian authorities of posting snipers on rooftops and demanded they be removed although the good general quickly silenced him.
The incident occurred in Daraa, a historic city that was at the heart of the Arab Revolt nearly a 100 years ago and where the 2011 uprising started, when the League monitor shouted into news cameras: “There are snipers; we have seen them with our own eyes. We ask the authorities to remove them immediately; if they don’t remove them within 24 hours, there will be other measures.”
Astonishingly, this eyewitness’ observations were played down, with Al Dabi maintaining that the official made “a hypothetical remark”, though few asked him why the head of the mission was denigrating one of his lieutenants in public.
Even worse, why was Al Dabi, whose checkered background in the amply documented Darfur massacres — when he was involved in recruiting Masalit tribal fighters that preceded Janjaweed militia attacks that terrorised hapless civilians in ethnic cleansing operations — entrusted such an important task, and which aimed to verify and document alleged Syrian atrocities?
Cognisant that such dangerous developments may well affect the League’s reputation, the speaker of the Arab Inter-parliamentary Union, Salim Al Diqbasi from Kuwait, urged the League Secretary-General Nabeel Al Arabi, to “immediately pull out the Arab observers”.
Although the 88-member Arab Parliament was no more than an advisory committee made up of four lawmakers from each of the League’s 22 member states, it represented public opinion, with several outspoken parliamentarians frequently voicing minority views.
Al Diqbasi may not be ideally placed to voice such criticisms, but in the spirit of democratisation, he asserted that Damascus’ actions were “a clear violation of the Arab League protocol which was to protect the Syrian people”.
Needless to say that such divisions embarrassed many though not Al Arabi who proved to be excessively accommodating. One wondered whether he and his senior colleagues watched any television programmes, or scanned any of the many videos uploaded on a daily basis on to YouTube, which showed the horrors perpetrated against the hapless Syrian people.
Pictures seldom lie and the whole world is confronted with blatant and ugly images that illustrate the violence. Indeed, the numbers of Syrians murdered by secret service operatives, Shabiha black-shirts, and soldiers sworn to protect the people, are growing on a daily basis. With rare exceptions, all are unarmed civilians, men, women and children who believed that they deserved liberty. Ironically, and to the League’s dishonour, several hundred were killed after League monitors arrived and presumably started their investigations.
Criticising League observers so early in their tasks, which consist of a clear writ to check Syria’s compliance with an Arab peace plan that called on Damascus to withdraw troops and tanks from streets, release detainees and talk to opponents, is probably unjustified, but Al Dabi set the tone when he spouted the kind of nonsense that comforted some of the world’s most notorious criminals.
To be sure, the first 60 or so monitors were too few to see all that occurred, though their ranks were expected to increase as several new teams from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Tunisia deployed across Syria. In fact, the month-long mission that kicked off on December 26, 2011, will have its full complement of 500 observers by mid-month, even if much depends on the League’s determination not to kowtow to the Baath regime.
Beyond the Al Dabi scandal, it is fair to ask why the League empowered confused men like the Sudanese general to address the demands of a new generation that seeks liberty, and which is no longer willing to live under dictatorship. Indeed, this is one of the fundamental reasons why heroic Arabs from Tunisia to Yemen, and especially in Syria, are determined to force political change, no matter the time and the sacrifices.
Although few expect the Syrian regime to change its tested behaviour, as it continues to claim that the hundreds of thousands demonstrating on a nightly basis are “terrorists” or members of the fictitious Al Qaida organisation, the League must not sugar coat or distort facts on the ground, no matter the consequences.
In 2012, it is vital for the League not to deceive itself, nor allow its monitors to be manipulated since the whole world is watching. If Arabs want to be taken seriously, and young people will see to it that the international community does, then they must rise to the occasion. Without Al Dabi and men of his ilk.
Dr. Joseph A. Kechichian is a commentator and author of several books on Gulf affairs.
