The day after Syrian President Bashar al-Assad spoke publicly for the first time in seven months, a member of the Arab League’s team of monitors said that the mission to see if Syria is following its pledge to end the violent crackdown on protesters is a “farce.” Anwar Malek, an Algerian member of the monitoring team, has resigned from the mission. According to Al Jazeera, he has said that what he saw in Syria was a “humanitarian disaster” and that security forces had not, as they claimed, withdrawn their tanks but hidden them and sent them back out after the monitors left; that “snipers are everywhere shooting at civilians”; that the regime has been deliberately steering the monitors towards “insignificant things.” Political prisoners shown on television were actually people who have been taken from the street, detained in poor conditions for some days and then released.
Malek had himself been a political prisoner and the New York Times quotes an activist from Homs, a center of unrest near the Lebanon border, who said that the sight of the disfigured body of a protester named Abdel Jarim Darwish, from the Baba Amr neighborhood, had especially affected Makel.
After he saw this body during his tour of Baba Amr, he could not leave his hotel room for two days…I think this was one the reasons behind his resignation..... more
thivest.com
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