Waltz with Bashar

Jérémie Lebel
[Published in Impact Campus, 24 January]



The Arab League Observation Mission in Syria has just been extended for a month, while the repression and killings are still going on strong. Civil war has begun de facto.

In a meeting in Cairo on January 22, the Arab League’s member countries convened to give an extra month to their observation mission, which was to end on January 29. The mission is headed by Mohamed Al-Dabi, a Sudanese general accused of having created the janjaweed militias responsible of war crimes in Darfur. On January 11, one of the observers, Anwar Malek, from Algeria, resigned saying the mission was a “farce” and that the Syrian army barely bothered to hide its actions.

According to the American ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, Syria has downright stepped up the pace of its crackdown since the arrival of the Arab League’s observers. The total toll now rises at some 5000 dead, most of them civilians, since the first troubles in March of last year, according to UN statistics. Syria is now subject to economic sanctions imposed by the European Union and several Western countries, but Russian and Chinese opposition impedes the UN Security Council from taking any resolutions condemning the murders.

The emir of Qatar recently advocated for an armed Arab intervention in Syria to put an end to the violence. This scenario is highly unlikely, given the negligible impact of the observation mission and the extreme political sensitivity of such an intervention. Moreover, a Libyan-like aerial campaign is impossible, as most fighting occurs in densely populated urban areas. The info coming from the ground all but says a civil war has already broken out, and that sectarian fighting is a frightening but very possible outcome. Bashar Al-Assad’s fall seems inevitable; what remains to be seen is when and, above all, how, it will come to happen.