The military council could be used as a front for intervention either by the
Arab League as a whole, which will receive a report from its observers’
mission on Thursday, or by individual members.
Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, the Emir of Qatar, which led the Arab
involvement in the Libyan conflict, said he now favoured sending troops “to
stop the killing”, the first Arab leader to say so publicly.
He won support from the former head of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, who said: “The
Arab League should begin to study this possibility and begin consultations
on this issue.”
Mr Moussa’s words have added weight as he is currently a candidate, and
favourite, in Egypt’s presidential elections due later this year.
Such calls for military intervention in an internal Arab conflict would have
been unthinkable until a year ago. But by sending a monitoring mission to
Syria, and seeing it publicly mocked by Mr Assad in his speech last week,
the Arab League has been forced into a position where it has to take action
or lose whatever credibility it has on the world stage.
The United Nations estimated that 400 people were killed in the first ten days
of the monitoring mission, while at least one of the monitors walked out in
protest at what he said was “people being killed, beaten up, and
arrested by police, soldiers and militiamen” in front of them.
The Emir’s proposal will meet fierce resistance, but his prime minister,
Sheikh Hamad bin Jassem al-Thani, heads the committee overseeing the
mission’s work and will be backing a forceful position when it meets on
Saturday prior to a full foreign ministers’ meeting the next day.
Any military intervention will most likely take the form of a buffer zone or
humanitarian corridor linking rebel-held areas in cities like Homs which
have come under government attack. But that would provide a safe haven for
the Free Syrian Army, who could now have a figurehead in Gen Sheikh, a
ground forces commander in northern Syria before he defected last month.
He estimates that 20,000 troops have changed sides, as against an army of some
280,000, indicating that, as in Libya, outside help would be needed to
balance the forces. On the other hand, opposition to Mr Assad is diffused
across the country, suggesting a long-drawn out civil war is in any case the
most likely outcome.
William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, downplayed the prospect of western
involvement. “There is no serious prospect certainly at the moment of
the United Nations Security Council agreeing any resolution, let alone
agreeing a resolution comparable to anything that happened in Libya,”
he said in an interview with Sky News.
Mr Assad’s offer of amnesty covers “crimes related to the laws on
peaceful demonstration, carrying or possessing unlicensed weapons and
ammunition and draft evasion”, according to the state news agency.
It may have been drafted to comply with the now discarded Arab League peace
deal under which the regime agreed to release prisoners. However, there is
no sign that most of the thousands of detainees said by human rights groups
to have been seized since March will be released any time soon.
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