The Prime Minister and Foreign Minister H E Sheikh Hamad bin Jassem bin Jabor Al Thani at the Arab League meeting in Cairo, yesterday.
CAIRO: Arab League ministers decided yesterday to let member nations arm Syrian rebels fighting President Bashar Al Assad, and invited an opposition coalition to take the League seat formerly occupied by Damascus.
Previously the League had stressed that the Syrian political opposition and rebels should be supported by humanitarian and diplomatic means during the civil war, which has cost an estimated 70,000 lives.
However, a final statement issued at the end of a ministerial meeting in Cairo said they had “stressed the right of each state according to its wishes to offer all types of self defence, including military, to support the resilience of the Syrian people and the Free (Syrian) Army”. The decision was not unanimous. Lebanon, Iraq and Algeria refused to endorse the final statement’s sections on Syria.
Qatar blamed Assad for nearly two years of bloodshed in Syria. “The person who brought a sea of blood is Bashar because he did not commit to the Arab decisions and did not cooperate with us,” Qatar’s Prime Minister and Foreign Minister H E Sheikh Hamad bin Jassem bin Jabor Al Thani told the meeting.
The Prime Minister made the remarks during the opening session of the 139th Arab League ministerial council meeting. He was responding to comments by Lebanese Foreign Minister Adnan Mansour in which he said Arabs left Syria for an unknown fate waiting helplessly for others to solve the crisis, urging the Arab League to lift the suspension of Syria’s membership and bring it back to the pan-Arab organisation.
The Premier said Arabs did not go the West or any foreign parties to settle the crisis, noting that the Arab League has been trying, over two years, to settle the crisis but Syrian people are losers at the end.
Arab League Secretary-General Nabil El Arabi told a news conference that the ministers had invited the opposition Syrian National Coalition to occupy the Syrian seat at the League. This was held by Damascus until it was suspended from the organisation two years ago. The statement called on the coalition to choose a representative to attend a League meeting that will be held in the Qatari capital on March 26-27.
Walid Al Bunni, spokesman for the opposition coalition, welcomed the decision as “better late than never” and said the organisation now wanted UN representation. “We see this as a step towards asking for a seat in the United Nations and such important steps will eventually lead to the removal of Bashar Al Assad and put an end to his cruel regime,” he said. Damascus was suspended from the Cairo-based League in November 2011.
Moaz Alkhatib, a 52-year-old former preacher at the ancient Ommayad mosque in Damascus, was chosen in November to head the opposition coalition. He won modest pledges of support for the rebels from Western and Arab ministers in Rome late last month. Earlier, Lebanese Foreign Minister Adnan Mansour pushed in the opposite direction at the meeting, calling for the suspension of Damascus to be lifted to help find a political solution to the conflict. “Communication with Syria...is essential for a political solution,” Mansour told the meeting. He said later that Syria’s seat should not go to the opposition. “Syria is a state and a government and the idea that a state could be replaced by a group of opponents is very dangerous,” he said.
Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati’s government is dominated by a coalition including the militant group Hezbollah and its mainly Shia and Christian allies who support Assad. Mikati, who has sought to follow a policy of “dissociation” from the conflict in Lebanon’s dominant neighbour, has said his country would respect any League decisions about Syria. However, Mansour criticised the Cairo-based organisation’s steps against Damascus.
