The head of the Arab League said its peace monitors were helping to ease a violent crackdown on anti-government protests in Syria but activists said the organisation was being manipulated by President Bashar al-Assad’s forces.
Nabil Elaraby, Secretary-General of the 22-member Arab League, said Syria’s military had withdrawn from residential areas and was on the outskirts of the cities, although gunfire continued and snipers were still a threat.
“The latest telephone report said there is gunfire from different places, which makes it hard to say who is shooting who,” Elaraby said in Cairo on Monday. “Gunfire should be stopped and there are snipers,” he said. “We call upon the Syrian government to fully commit to what it promised.”
Activists said at least 12 people were killed across the country on Monday. The grassroots Local Coordination Committees said the Arab League monitors were unable to end the violence or reach an independent assessment of its causes. “The Arab League has fallen victim to the regime’s typical traps in which observers have no choice but to witness regime-staged events and move about the country only with the full knowledge of the regime,” the LCC said in response to Elaraby.
“This has rendered the observers unable to work or move independently or in a neutral manner.” Army defectors, whose armed insurgency has threatened to overshadow the peaceful popular uprising, captured dozens of members of the security forces by seizing two checkpoints on Monday, the opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Army defectors also clashed with security forces at a third checkpoint, killing and wounding an unspecified number of troops loyal to Assad, it said. Assad is struggling to defeat a popular uprising and avoid becoming the latest leader to be toppled by “Arab Spring” revolutions, after those of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen.
After nearly 10 months of violence in which the United Nations says more than 5,000 people have been killed, mostly unarmed civilians, an Arab League monitoring mission has spent the past week assessing Assad’s compliance with a peace plan.
PEACE PLAN: The League’s plan calls for Assad to pull troops and tanks from the streets, free detainees and talk to his opponents. Elaraby said the monitors had secured the release of 3,484 prisoners and succeeded in getting food supplies into Homs, one of the centres of the violence.
“Give the monitoring mission the chance to prove its presence on the ground,” he said. But many Syrian opposition activists are sceptical that the mission can put real pressure on Assad to halt the violence.
