Arab leaders shun summit in Iraq
Crisis in Syria is epicentre of division
BAGHDAD— Fewer than half the leaders of the Arab world showed up at an Arab summit in Baghdad on Thursday, a snub to the Iraqi government.
Sunni Muslim rulers largely shunned the summit hosted by Shiite-led Iraq, illustrating how powerfully the sectarian split and the rivalry with Iran define Middle Eastern politics.
The crisis in Syria is the epicentre of those divisions. The one-day summit closed with a joint call on Syrian President Bashar Assad to stop the crackdown on an uprising seeking his ouster. But the final statement barely papered over the differences among the Arab nations over how to deal with the longestrunning regional revolt.
“What disturbs the breeze of our Arab Spring and fills our hearts with sadness is the scenes of slaughter and torture committed by the Syrian regime against our brothers and sisters in Syria,” said Mustafa Abdul-jalil, leader of Libya’s National Transitional Council.
In a snub to Iraq, only 10 heads of state from the Arab League’s 22 members attended, with the rest sending lower-level officials. Especially notable were the absences of the rulers of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and most other Gulf countries — all headed by Sunni monarchs who distrust the close ties between Shiite-led Baghdad and their top regional rival, Iran.
BEIRUT— Syria’s President Bashar Assad said Thursday he will spare no effort to make UN envoy Kofi Annan’s peace plan a success, but demanded that armed opponents battling his regime commit to halting violence.
In brazen attacks, gunmen kidnapped a high-ranking military pilot outside the capital and assassinated two army colonels in the country’s business hub, in what appeared to be part of a stepped-up campaign by the battered opposition against the symbols of Assad’s power.
The violence Thursday underlined the Syrian government’s predicament: Accepting and implementing the UN plan, which calls for a full ceasefire, risks spelling the end of an autocratic regime that has relied largely on brute force to stay in power over the past four decades.
Assad’s condition of an express promise from the opposition to stop attacks could complicate Annan’s attempts to bring an end to more than a year of violence that the UN says has killed more than 9,000 people.
The opposition has cautiously welcomed Annan’s six-point plan, but it is also deeply skeptical Assad will carry it out, believing he has accepted it just to win time while his forces continue their bloody campaign to crush the uprising. Armed rebels are unlikely to stop fighting unless offensives by security forces halt.
Last year, Assad agreed to an Arab League-brokered peace plan similar to Annan’s, pledging to work with observers who travelled to Syria. But the regime failed to pull its tanks from towns and cities, saying the country was under attack from the armed groups, and the bloodshed has escalated sharply since the League halted its observer mission on Jan. 28.
It is also difficult for rebel forces to uniformly stop fighting because there is no central command structure. But on Thursday, Syria’s armed opposition announced a local command structure that aims to bring together the disparate rebel groups under the command of de- fected officers exiled in neighbouring Turkey. “We declare the formation of the joint command of the Free Syrian Army in Syria to be coordinated with the leadership of the Free Syrian Army outside (the country),” a Paris-based spokesman for the Supreme Rebel Military Council, Fahad al-masri, said in a statement. The move names five colonels in the flashpoint provinces of Homs, Hama, Idlib, Deir al-zor and Damascus. Also on Thursday, Western diplomats said the UN peacekeeping de- partment will send a team to Damascus soon to begin contingency planning for a possible observer mission to monitor any eventual ceasefire in the country. The envoys, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the planning for an observer mission in Syria was at a very early stage, and it was unclear whether such a mission would ever be deployed as the conflict shows no signs of abating. “We are very far from a peace to keep,” a senior Western diplomat said. With files from Reuters News Agency