Syria's main opposition council was thrown into disarray on Thursday as its chairman Burhan Ghalioun announced his intention to resign and one of its most powerful factions threatened to withdraw.
Burhan Ghalioun has led the Syrian National Council by consensus rather than through election Photo: REUTERS
By Adrian Blomfield,
Middle East Correspondent
6:56PM BST 17 May 2012
Burhan Ghalioun's declaration that he no longer wished to head the Syrian National Council dealt a morale-sapping blow to the faltering and increasingly fragmented campaign to topple President Bashar al-Assad.
Mr Ghalioun said he had been left with no choice but to quit after divisions within the SNC reached a crescendo two days after the coalition voted to renew his mandate for another three months.
"I will not allow myself to be the candidate of division," he said. "I am not attached to the position, so I announce that I will step down after a new candidate has been chosen, either by consensus or through new elections."
His announcement came just hours after the Local Co-ordination Committees (LCC), which groups activists from opposition strongholds across Syria, threatened to pull out of the coalition after accusing its leadership of highhandedness.
Infighting within the SNC has long eroded its effectiveness, and a number of prominent dissidents have drifted away from the coalition in recent months.
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But the withdrawal of the LCC, which commands considerable respect from the protesters on Syria's streets, would leave the coalition vulnerable to accusations that it had become an Islamist rump, raising serious questions about its viability.
Mr Ghalioun has led the SNC since its formation last September, but his reign has always been a tormented one.
Disjointed, ill-tempered and riven along ideological and sectarian lines, the coalition has seemed incapable on agreeing even a basic strategy to confront President Assad, its competing factions unable to make common cause despite sharing a common foe.
Hopes for an end to the debilitating divisions were raised when Mr Ghalioun won re-election with two-thirds of the vote at an SNC meeting in Rome on Tuesday. He pledged to unify the coalition, announcing plans to take charge of the armed rebellion against Mr Assad and bring organisation to its inchoate ranks.
But it subsequently emerged that many activists, most of them secular and liberal, had stayed away from the vote, leaving Mr Ghalioun to rely on the Muslim Brotherhood for re-election.
A professor at the Sorbonne who has spent decades in exile, Mr Ghalioun has provided the SNC with an urbane and moderate face that has sat easily with the coalition's Western interlocutors.
But secular figures within the movement have accused him of being a frontman for Islamist interests within the opposition, saying he has allowed the Muslim Brotherhood, which holds the largest number of seats in the council, disproportionate influence.
Many activists within Syria also complain of a widening gulf with the SNC's leadership, saying they risk arrest, torture and death on a daily basis while Mr Ghalioun and his allies hold pointless conferences in foreign hotels.
"We have seen nothing in the past months except political incompetence in the SNC and a total lack of consensus between its vision and that of the revolutionaries," the LCC said in a statement.
By leaving his resignation open-ended, Mr Ghalioun's stated intention to resign may be insincere, with observers suggesting that he was bluffing in an attempt to rally the coalition behind him.
But his critics say a new head – perhaps George Sabra, a Christian dissident who challenged him in Tuesday's vote – could reunify the council, helping to convince the outside world that it was a genuinely viable alternative to the Assad regime.
Western and Arab powers have refrained from recognising the SNC as a government-in-exile because of its divisions.
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