BEIRUT, Lebanon — The Arab League observer mission charged with helping bring about an end to the violence in Syria claimed several accomplishments on Monday, noting that the government has withdrawn tanks and artillery from cities, and has released nearly 3,500 prisoners.
But as the killings have continued, the mission has been mired in controversy, much of it focused on its leader: a Sudanese general who, rights activists say, presided over the same kind of deadly and heavyhanded tactics in Sudan that the Arab League mission is seeking to curb in Syria.
The observer mission, which arrived in Syria on Dec. 26 to oversee Syria’s agreement to withdraw troops from its cities and stop killing political protesters, have been criticized by Syrian activists for being weak, understaffed and easily manipulated by the government.
While the observers have traveled to turbulent cities, and listened to the pleas of distraught citizens and the explanations of Syrian officials, they have been powerless to stop the bloodshed.
Syrian activists say more than 150 people have been killed since the monitors arrived. On Sunday, an Arab League advisory body, the 88-member Arab Parliament, called for the group to be withdrawn because the government has continued to kill its opponents.
The accusations and concerns about the mission have found a physical embodiment in the group’s leader, Lt. Gen. Muhammad Ahmed al-Dabi of Sudan, whose history and recent statements have only deepened the criticism.
Last week, the general spoke dismissively about the damage in Homs, a rebellious city that was shelled by government tanks. “Some places looked a bit of a mess, but there was nothing frightening,” he told Reuters.
On Sunday, he publicly contradicted an Arab League observer who told residents in the city of Dara’a that he had seen government snipers and would tell Syrian officials to remove them.
“But he didn’t see,” General Dabi told the BBC in an interview, asserting that the observer was referring to a hypothetical case.
On Monday, the Arab League came to his defense. At a news conference in Cairo, the league’s director, Nabil al-Araby, called General Dabi a “capable military man with a clean reputation,” The Associated Press reported.
Several attempts to reach General Dabi on his cellphone or through the observer delegation’s office in Damascus were unsuccessful.
In interviews, several people who have dealt with the general called him personally likable and an efficient administrator, and some said it was conceivable that he could run the observer mission with fairness.
Others, though, called him exactly the wrong kind of person to head such a mission: a career enforcer for an authoritarian government who had shown a harsh hand in dealing with opponents.
“I don’t know if they looked into his background,” said Faisal Mohammed Salih, a columnist with Al Akhbar, a newspaper in Sudan. “This is a human rights mission. They should have chosen someone who is sensitive to human rights issues. Military men in the Arab world should be the last choice for such missions.”
Originally from the town of Berber in northern Sudan, General Dabi, 63, graduated from military college in Sudan in 1969, according to a résumé he provided to journalists soon after his selection.
For decades, he played a forceful if quiet role in the government of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, a member of a trusted inner circle who rose to power immediately after the 1989 coup that brought Mr. Bashir to power. Time and again, the president picked General Dabi for important security posts, often overseeing counterinsurgency campaigns or clampdowns on dissidents.
His first post in the Bashir government was as head of military intelligence. His name was rarely in the news, but reports by Amnesty International from the early 1990s document the role military intelligence agents played in executions, torture and disappearances as the government fought insurgents in southern Sudan. The rebels were also accused of atrocities, including executions and indiscriminate shelling of cities.
Erwin van der Borght, the director of the Africa Program for Amnesty International, said General Dabi never investigated the “widespread” allegations of atrocities.
After serving as the head of the external security agency and then deputy chief of staff in the armed forces, he was assigned by Mr. Bashir to curb a bloody civil conflict in the Darfur region.
The general arrived in Darfur with “two helicopter gunships and a company of 120 soldiers,” according to “Darfur: A Short History of a Long War,” by Alex de Waal and Julie Flint, making clear to warring Masalit and Arab tribesmen that their refusal to comply with a cease-fire would be dealt with harshly.
“He ordered the gunship pilots to put on a display of firepower in front of tribal leaders — ‘to show what the helicopters could do,’ ” the book said.
Some activists from Darfur say that General Dabi’s four-month tenure in western Darfur was a precursor to the government’s brutal counterinsurgency campaign in the region several years later.
Mr. de Waal, who interviewed General Dabi for the book, said in an e-mail: “He took the line that the problems needed a very firm hand, a show of force to demonstrate who was in charge. The Masalit see his months there as a time of repression. Al-Dabi insists he was evenhanded and effective.
“Either way,” Mr. de Waal added, “he was a controversial figure and an exemplar of a military style of conducting political business.”
Several years ago, when the Sudanese government needed someone to defend its repeated violations of an arms embargo in Darfur to United Nations experts, the president again turned to General Dabi.
As members of a United Nations panel tried to pry information from Sudanese officials about the violations in Darfur, including bombings, General Dabi repeatedly obstructed their investigation, curbing their travel and making sure no one spoke to them without his approval, two members of the panel said. One of the members called him the “bottleneck.”
“Al-Dabi is not about the truth, or facts,” said another member, Enrico Carisch, who was the panel’s coordinator in 2008. “He is about fitting the facts and the truth to the policies. There was never any confusion.”
The Arab League has not said publicly why it chose General Dabi to head the Syria mission, though Mr. Salih, the Sudanese columnist, and others have speculated that because of Sudan’s friendly relations with Syria he was more likely to be accepted by Damascus.
There is also speculation that he was Qatar’s favored choice. The general has served as Sudan’s ambassador to Qatar, a League member that helped drive the action against Syria and has ties with Sudan.
General Dabi is not the only liability in an observer mission that analysts say suffers from deep flaws. While its members include some respected human rights workers, others are said to be diplomats and functionaries sent by Arab League governments with their own woeful records of human rights. The Arab League has not released a list of the observers.
When they arrived in Syria last week, after a few hours of training, critics quickly pointed out that the 60-member team was hardly sufficient to monitor a conflict spread across the country of 20 million people. Even so, the protesters, emboldened by the observers, took to the streets in larger numbers, culminating with massive marches in cities across Syria on Friday.
Government attacks on civilians have continued, but there have also been reports of battles between armed gunmen and government forces. On Monday, despite promises by an opposition militia to halt attacks on the government, armed gunmen stormed several military checkpoints in the northern province of Idlib, killing an unknown number of government soldiers and kidnapping dozens of others, Reuters reported.
Mr. Araby said that it was often hard for the observers to tell who was shooting at whom.
Source: nytimes.com
Felipe 
El abogado Alberto Richieri, defensor de Susana Freidoz, la esposa del fallecido gobernador rionegrino Carlos Soria, aseguró hoy que los cuatro hijos del matrimonio «apoyan» a la madre y que «no hay una relación de enemistad o de reproche» tras el episodio.
Chiara 
