Arab League monitors are only giving Syrian authorities more time to crush their opponents, opposition figures said on Monday after the League opted to keep the mission in place despite Syria's failure to comply fully with an Arab peace plan. The observers, who began work on the ground two weeks ago, have so far failed to stop the violent suppression of protests against President Bashar al-Assad in which the United Nations says more than 5,000 people have been killed in 10 months.
After a review meeting in Cairo on Sunday, the Arab League said the government had only partly implemented a pledge to stop the bloodshed, free detainees and withdraw troops from cities. Adnan Khodeir, head of the monitors' operations room in the Egyptian capital, said more observers would reach Syria this week, bringing the team's strength to 200 from 165 now.
"The initial report is too vague, and it essentially buys the regime more time," said Rima Fleihan, a member of the Syrian National Council, a leading opposition group in exile. "We need to know what the League will do if the regime continues its crackdown in the presence of the monitors. At one point it needs to refer Syria to the UN Security Council." The Arab League appears divided over whether to take such a step, which in the case of Libya led to foreign military intervention that helped rebels topple Muammar Qadhafi.
Russia and China have opposed any Security Council move on Syria, while Western powers hostile to Assad have so far shown little appetite for Libya-style intervention in a country that sits in a far more combustible area of the Middle East. Gunfire erupted near a car carrying Arab monitors away from an anti-Assad demonstration they had attended in the turbulent city of Homs on Monday, but no one was hurt, activists said.
They said the shooting came from a security checkpoint. A video posted on YouTube shows a crowd following a black car. When gunfire is heard, the car stops and the protesters flee. Then the car slowly moves again and the shooting stops. As with most events in Syria, where most independent media are banned, it was impossible to verify what had happened.
Rami Abdulrahman, of the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said keeping the Arab monitors in Syria without a substantial increase in their numbers would only "give the regime more time to deal with the Syrian revolution". He said Syrian authorities had hidden tanks in military and security compounds or repainted armoured vehicles in blue police colours. Only a small proportion of the many thousands of detainees seized during the unrest had been freed, he added.
Syrian officials say they are fighting "terrorism" by subversives armed from abroad, not a broad-based revolt against more than four decades of Assad family rule. The authorities say their foes have killed 2,000 security force members. Arab League officials said the future of the monitoring mission, due to make a full report on January 19, depended on the Syrian government's commitment to ending the daily bloodshed.
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