Arab states may ask the U.N. Security Council to endorse their peace plan aimed at ending a Syrian crackdown on protests against President Bashar al-Assad, Qatar’s foreign minister said after talks with Arab League ministers on Saturday.
Expressing frustration that Syria had not implemented the plan, six weeks after it was first agreed, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani said the window for an Arab solution to the crisis was closing.
“If this matter is not solved in the weeks ahead, or couple of months, it will no longer be in Arab control,” Sheikh Hamad told journalists after an Arab ministerial committee meeting in Qatar. “That is what we told the Syrians from the beginning”.
Syria has conditionally approved a plan to send monitors to oversee implementation of the Nov. 2 Arab League initiative, which calls on Assad to withdraw the army from urban areas, release political prisoners and hold talks with opponents.
But Arab League Secretary-General Nabil Elaraby said Damascus was objecting to the League’s call for protection of Syrian civilians, saying members of the security forces were also being killed in the turmoil.
The United Nations says Assad’s crackdown on the protests, inspired by uprisings across the Arab world this year, has killed more than 5,000 people. Authorities blame gunmen for the violence and say 1,100 soldiers and police have been killed.
The Arab League suspended Syria and declared economic sanctions against Damascus over its failure to implement the initiative. The United States, European Union and neighbouring Turkey have also imposed sanctions.
Long-time Syrian ally Russia took a step closer to the Western position on Thursday when it presented a surprise draft resolution at the United Nations which stepped up its criticism of the bloodshed in Syria.
Sheikh Hamad said that, in response to Moscow’s move, the Arab League would meet on Wednesday to decide whether “to ask the Security Council to adopt the Arab initiative and Arab resolutions instead of resolutions from other states”.
“We are not talking about military action but we will ask the Security Council to adopt the Arab initiative,” he added.
Any referral of the Arab plan to the United Nations would be likely to anger Damascus, which has accused unnamed Arab countries of trying to set the stage for foreign intervention.
The unrest is the most serious challenge to the 11-year rule of Assad, 46, whose family is from the minority Alawite sect and has ruled majority Sunni Muslim Syria since 1970.
An armed insurgency has begun to eclipse civilian protests, raising fears Syria could descend into civil war.
Two days ago army deserters killed 27 soldiers and security personnel in the southern province of Deraa, an activist group said. On Friday, activists said security forces shot dead at least 19 people during protests by hundreds of thousands.
Shi’ite-led Iraq, which opposed the Arab League sanctions on its neighbour and fears that unrest in Syria will spill across the frontier and upset its own delicate sectarian balance, sent a delegation to Damascus on Saturday.
Assad met the Iraqi delegation that included National Security Adviser Faleh al-Fayad and “affirmed that Syria dealt positively with all proposals submitted to it”, the official news agency SANA report.
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s media adviser Ali al-Moussawi said the delegation would meet government officials and representatives of the Syrian opposition in Syria. “And we ready to meet members of the opposition outside Syria,” he said.
The main exile opposition Syrian National Council was meeting in Tunisia on the first anniversary of the self-immolation of a jobless Tunisian graduate Mohamed Bouazizi, the incident that set off a wave of revolts around the Arab world.
Syrian protesters have expressed growing frustration that the Arab League, which surprised many when it suspended Syria and subsequently announced sanctions against Damascus, has since then extended the deadline for Syrian compliance several times.
Hundreds of thousands demonstrated on Friday, according to the opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, under the slogan of “The Arab League is killing us”.
The British-based Observatory said 19 people were killed by security forces on Friday, but the state news agency SANA said there were no fatalities, despite what it said were several attacks by “armed terrorist groups” against security forces.
It also reported that security forces defused several explosives in Damascus and Hama provinces on Friday.
