BEIRUT - Arab League peace monitors will stay in Syria to check on the government's compliance with a promise to end 10 months of violence against pro-democracy protesters, Arab government sources said on Thursday, despite criticism from Qatar's prime minister that they had made "mistakes."
Syria, keen to show it is respecting an Arab League peace accord, said it had
released a further 552 people detained during the revolt against President Bashar Assad "whose hands were not stained with blood."
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The team of monitors arrived in Syria last week to verify whether the government was implementing the agreement to scale back its military presence in cities and free thousands of prisoners detained since the uprising last March.
The League's special committee on Syria is due to meet in Egypt on Sunday to debate the initial findings of the mission, which has been criticized by Syrian activists who question its ability to assess the violence on the ground.
The activists said the teams did not have enough access and were escorted by Syrian authorities, who were manipulating them and hiding prisoners in military facilities.
Qatar's Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, after meeting
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in New York, said this was the first
such experience.
"I said we must evaluate the types of mistakes
it made and without a shadow of a doubt I see mistakes, even though we
went in to observe, not to stop the violence," he said
Sheikh
Hamad, who chairs the Arab League committee on Syria, did not elaborate
on the mistakes but said he was seeking technical help from the United
Nations.
Syria said it provided the monitors with all the facilities they needed.
"What
we are looking for is objectivity and professionalism," Foreign
Ministry spokesman Jihad Makdesi told Lebanese Manar television.
State news agency SANA said some 4,000 detainees have been released since November.
Arab
League General Secretary Nabil Elaraby said on Monday the mission had
secured the release of about 3,500 prisoners. Campaign group Avaaz said
on Thursday 37,000 people detained since March were still being held.
Seeking an Arab solutionSheikh
Hamad said the League would soon hear the monitors' findings and assess
the mission's viability: "We are going to evaluate all sides of the
situation and we will look at the possibility of the delegation
continuing or not and how we can carry on this mission, but we need to
listen to the reports of those who were on the ground first".
On
the likelihood of Syria being referred to the United Nations Security
Council, Sheikh Hamad said: "We always try to create a solution to this
crisis within the Arab League, but that depends on the Syrian government
and the extent of its clarity with us in producing a solution to the
crisis."
If the Arab monitors were pulled out it could open the
door for foreign intervention, a scenario many Arab countries want to
avoid. Syria is a major player in the region and is strongly supported
by Iran and terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas.
The League
has suspended Syria's membership, citing Assad's failure to adhere to
its plan to stop a crackdown which the United Nations says has killed
more than 5,000 people since March.
The committee comprises the
foreign ministers of Egypt, Sudan, Qatar, Oman and Algeria but a source
in the League said other countries were invited to join on Sunday and
they could call for an urgent meeting of all Arab ministers the same
day.
Some officials at the League said countries such as Sudan,
Jordan, Egypt and Algeria were wary of ending the mission early, fearing
that declaring it a failure might provoke Western military intervention
in Syria.
"They are afraid this will become a pattern and could
happen later to their own countries," said one League official who asked
not to be identified.
Another
Arab government representative said the committee was likely to discuss
possible measures to help the monitors, such as providing them with
vehicles so they can travel around the country without the assistance of
Syrian authorities.
He said they would not discuss changing the
head of the monitoring mission, a Sudanese general whose selection was
criticized by international human rights groups because of his own
country's human rights record.