ARAB LEAGUE SHAM IN SYRIA

Tainted Sudanese general puts Arab League mission in disrepute

Apiece of political street theatre was recently enacted in the embattled Syrian city of Homs. In a parody of an Arab League observer, an actor was seen writing a report saying that all was well and releasing a dove. He then addressed a crowd by saying: “There is nothing to be frightened of in Homs.”

The scene was staged to mock the week-old Arab League observer mission, which has been criticized as weak, ineffective, and sometimes wilfully blind to evidence that the regime of Bashar al-assad is failing to comply with a deal to end Syria’s crackdown on protesters.

Considering the choice of the man heading the mission, the tainted Sudanese Lieutenant-general Mustafa a l - Dabi, the skepticism is not unfounded.

Dabi’s first comments on the situation in Syria, made to Reuters on Dec. 27, were telling. “Some places looked a bit of a mess, but there was nothing frightening,” Dabi said as observers toured Homs, the epicentre of Syria’s uprising, where hundreds of protesters and civilians have been killed, many of them children.

Four days later, he publicly disputed comments made by a member of his team in the city of Daraa, who told al Jazeera: “I saw snipers in the town. I saw them with my own eyes.” Dabi claimed the clip had not been properly translated and that the observer had been speaking hypothetically, but the translation was later veri- fied as accurate.

Sudanese expert Eric Reeves, a professor at Smith College in Massachusetts, said the choice of the Sudanese general is a sign the Arab League might not want its monitors to produce findings that would force it to take stronger action.

“There is a broader question of why you would pick someone to lead this investigation . . . when he is part of an army that is guilty of precisely the sort of crimes that are being investigated in Syria,” Reeves said. “It doesn’t make any sense unless you want to shape the finding. They want it shaped in ways that will minimize the obligation to do more than they already have.”

Dabi is a former intelligence head with the regime of Sudan’s Omar al-bashir, who has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity in the Darfur region, where Dabi was sent to restore order and where the United Nations estimates 300,000 were killed. Dabi does not face any charges. But as Bashir’s military intelligence chief, critics say he would have been responsible for establishing the Sudanese government’s feared janjaweed militias.

Omer Ismail, a senior policy adviser for the Enough Project, a Washington-based program at the Center for American Progress, perhaps said it best. “The Arab League must have known his history,” he said. “If they knew, that is shameful. If they didn’t know, that is doubly shameful.”

Dabi would have been responsible for establishing the Sudanese government’s janjaweed militias