There have been many remarkable moments in the year of the Arab Spring, but the grainy videos of Syrian protesters in serried ranks pleading for help from the former security boss of another pariah regime must be among them.
Many critics, and most of the opposition, spurned the Arab League's efforts, predicting that it was likely to spend a long time coming up with unclear conclusions Photo: REUTERS
By Richard Spencer, Middle East Correspondent
7:36PM GMT 27 Dec 2011
The tens of thousands of people who came out of the shadows and the rubble of their city to make their voices heard knew that for once it was safe to do so.
In their desperation, they called on the outside world to intervene and save them from the Syrian army. But it was Lt Gen Mohammed al-Dabi, head of the Arab League monitoring mission and a former intelligence adviser to President Omar Bashir of Sudan, wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court, who was their real target.
He uttered the bland words common to all such men on all such missions. His visit to Homs had been a "good one". He would return for more meetings, more visits, more information.
But now perhaps none of that matters, for the facts must already have been clear long in advance. The only question is what the various sides of this complex and violent argument will do next.
Will the protesters stay on the streets? If not, President Bashar al-Assad will have won a significant victory, but if they do, they will confirm his worst fears that the Arab League delegation was a Trojan Horse which would only encourage the opposition to his authority.
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He would then be forced to confront his own dilemma – whether to redouble the force he has already employed to drive them back into their alleyways, or to allow their movement to grow and be copied around the country, until the true strength of feeling against him is made clear.
Either spells disaster: the use of violence now would destroy whatever credibility he retains in the Arab League. More importantly, now it would put pressure on Russia, on whose support he relies in the United Nations but which is already showing signs of weakening, to allow some form of international action against him. Talk of a "buffer zone" to allow "humanitarian aid" into cities such as Homs is already growing apace.
The conflict in Syria has spread slowly. It would be hard to find in it a turning point equivalent to the fall of Benghazi to the rebels in Libya, or the withdrawal of support from Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak by the Obama administration. Today's encounter in Homs could prove to be the moment for which the world has been waiting.
Many critics, and most of the opposition, spurned the Arab League's efforts, predicting that it was likely to spend a long time coming up with unclear conclusions. They were probably right. But this uprising has developed its own momentum, and by the time the mission makes its report, what it has to say may have already become irrelevant.
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