Daily Star Editorial

The build up to the Arab League’s meeting in Cairo to discuss the alarming situation in Syria was littered with calls from regional rights campaigners for decisive action. A coalition of 121 rights groups urged representatives to move swiftly and decisively to avert what the United Nations and many other informed observers fear is the real possibility of a Syrian civil war.
They needn’t have wasted their breath.

The Arab League was formed almost 70 years ago to, in its own words, “draw closer the relations between member states.” Seven decades of discussions, statements and negotiations have achieved precisely nothing. The Arab League has met countless times during times of regional crisis. It’s only distinguishable faculty appears to be an ability to remove context and meanings from words in its myriad statements.

The outcome of its meeting Sunday, as any veteran politician or informed observer could realize, was never going to be anything other than meaningless, devoid of action plans and replete with vague and anodyne condemnation.

The summit was held at the behest of the GCC, with a view to prodding Syrian President Bashar Assad into implementing long-promised reform and refrain from the continued killing of unarmed protesters asking for little more than their basic human rights. Given that global organizations such as the U.N. and the European Union have tried – and failed – to persuade the Syrian leader to adopt some clemency, it is hard to see how the GCC could have seen the merit in arranging discussions among a far less potent organization.

Even before the meeting, it was an obvious given that authorities and state media in Damascus would either pour scorn on any Arab League statement or ignore it entirely.
What happens in Syria in the meantime? The killing continues. The lives of people that the Arab League claims to want to save are still being ended, brutally and unlawfully.

Amid the impotence of regional powers and the apparent tentativeness of international players, the last thing the people of Syria need right now is another statement. There have been enough to constitute a life’s worth of wasted reading. Trying to cajole President Assad to change his ways through words is an exemplary practice in wind chasing.

What protesters do need is an end to the bloodshed. Be that through dialogue or intervention, actions are required now, not words. Delegates sent along to Cairo will return to their capitals with the irresponsible assumption that by issuing a harsh written rebuke to Damascus, they have done their duty. Such thinking has allowed Syrian authorities to sustain their crackdown since March. It is not helpful.
The Arab League, that bloated exercise of bureaucracy, claims to wish to stop the killing in Syria. A step toward achieving this would be for it itself to die.