Syria’s Assad Fails to Halt Violence Against Civilians

03 January 2012

Arab League foreign ministers will review the Syrian monitoring mission on January 7.

The Syrian government has fallen far short of honoring its commitments to the Arab League, including ending violent attacks against peaceful demonstrators and releasing its political prisoners, State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland told reporters.

Nuland said January 3 that there are now approximately 100 monitors from the Arab League inside Syria as part of a deal that Bashar al-Assad’s regime made with the organization after months of political protests that have now killed at least 5,000 Syrian civilians.

Despite the presence of the monitors since late December, “the violence hasn’t stopped — far from it,” Nuland said. “We’ve had reports from independent observers of some 49 new deaths in Syria since the 31st of December,” the vast majority of which have been at the hands of Syrian security forces, snipers and others loyal to the Assad regime. Nuland added that in some places, “the military is donning police uniforms in order to hide what they’re up to.”

The Syrian government had promised the full release of political prisoners, “including a release of the most high-level political prisoners,” she said, but it has only released a limited number thus far and has denied Arab League monitors access to some prisons and to other parts of the country.

“The Assad regime is far from meeting the standards that it agreed to,” Nuland said. “The violence continues and … most of the violence is at the hands of the regime.”

According to press reports, Arab League foreign ministers will meet in Cairo January 7 to discuss a preliminary report from the monitoring team, and will decide whether to continue the mission. Nuland said the Obama administration is sending Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman to meet with Arab diplomats in advance of the Arab League discussions.

“We support their efforts to ensure that this mission is credible, is effective if it’s going to continue to go forward. And … we are in close touch with them,” she said.

Nuland said some Syrians have been able to take advantage of their relative safety in the presence of Arab League monitors to come out into the streets to express their views and to demonstrate to the Assad regime “that they want change.”

But she also expressed serious concerns that in some cases “the regime is actually putting out its own false reports that monitors are on the way, demonstrators come into the streets, and then they fire on them.”