BEIRUT - Syria on Monday rebuffed as a “conspiracy” an Arab League call for President Bashar al-Assad to step down in favour of a unity government to calm a 10-month-old revolt in which thousands of Syrians have been killed.
Lebanese Foreign Minister Adnan Mansour criticised the League’s move, saying its ministers had taken an “unbalanced” approach to the crisis by disregarding violence perpetrated by Assad’s opponents.
Damascus has not rejected the League’s decision to keep Arab observers in Syria one month longer, Mansour said, even though critics say their presence has not stemmed the bloodshed and only bought more time for Assad to crush his opponents.
Many Syrians remain defiant, however. Tens of thousands turned out in the Damascus suburb of Douma on Monday under the protection of rebel Free Syrian Army fighters to mourn 11 people killed by the security forces, activists and a resident said. Security forces, apparently keen to avoid a confrontation, stayed outside the area, where fighting had erupted overnight.
The Sudanese general who heads the monitoring mission said violence had dipped in the past month, contradicting accounts by Syrian activists who say 600 people were killed. “After the arrival of the mission, the intensity of violence began to decrease,” Mohammed al-Dabi told a news conference at the Cairo-based Arab League, saying the monitors had logged only 136 deaths on both sides since they began work.
Saudi Arabia, an adversary of Syria’s ally Iran, undermined the mission’s credibility when it withdrew its own monitors on Sunday, accusing Damascus of defying an earlier Arab peace plan. Responding to the new League plan unveiled in Cairo on Sunday, an official Syrian source told the state news agency SANA that the initiative, which told Assad to hand power to a deputy pending elections, was a “conspiracy against Syria.”
“The fact that Arab countries would propose such a clear intervention and essentially order him to step aside and give him a mechanism to do so is quite a dramatic sign of how much credibility and legitimacy he has lost in the region,” he said.
EU foreign ministers tightened sanctions against Syria on Monday, adding 22 people and eight entities to a list of banned people and groups, and said Assad’s repression was unacceptable. “The message from the European Union is clear,” said the EU’s foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton. “The crackdown must stop immediately.”
Splits among the League’s 22 members have complicated its diplomacy on Syria, but in the end only Lebanon refused to approve the latest proposal, although Algeria objected to taking the plan to the UNSC.
Meanwhile, funerals in Douma near the Syrian capital drew more than 150,000 people on Monday, marking the largest expression of mourning in the protest hub since a pro-democracy uprising began in March, activists said. The processions accompanied the bodies of 12 people killed in the past three days, including three who died in detention, and gathered the “largest number of mourners in Douma since the start of the uprising,” the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Mourners chanted slogans in support of the Free Syrian Army, a group of defectors whose leadership is based in Turkey, according to a video posted on YouTube, one of the main channel’s used by local activists to report on events.
Activists say that forces loyal to the regime of President Bashar al-Assad are only deployed at the entrances of this rebellious town, located just 20 kilometres (12 miles), from the capital.