CAIRO: Following a committee meeting of the Arab Parliament on Tuesday, the head of the committee has called for the suspension of Syria and Yemen from the Arab League (AL). Last week, similar calls for “immediate change” in Syria came from an AL meeting in Cairo, demanding that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad step down. The move is an attempt from the AL to put pressure on both countries to yield to popular demands for reforms. According to official statistics released by the United Nations' Human Rights office security forces have killed 2,700 protesters since the uprising began in March, although some human rights organisations within Syria has estimated the real number to be exceeding 5,000. According to the Syrian government, the protests are led by armed gangs. In Yemen, clashes between the supporters and opponents of Yemen's President Ali Abdullah Saleh has left at least 68 people dead since Sunday. The clashes arose from frustration at Saleh's refusal to accept a power transfer plan which was mediated by Gulf Arab states. “We call on the Arab states to freeze the membership of Damascus in the AL and urge the Arab leaders to take more active stands in that regard if the Syrian leadership did not… stop violence and withdraw its security forces and army… and form a national unity government from all political powers,” said Tawfik Abdallah of the Arab Parliamentarians Political Affairs and National Security Committee. Abdallah added: “We call on the Yemeni leadership to respond to the Yemeni people and accept the Gulf States initiative … or we call on the AL to suspend the membership of Yemen in the AL and all its organisations.” Recently, AL officials have said that they have not made any decisions on the crisis in Yemen, as the Gulf Cooperation Council had already been dealing with the issue. So far, roughly 176 Arab and international rights groups have approached the AL in a bid to suspend Syria's membership from the AL. According to the Secretary General of the Arab League, Nabil el-Araby, the decision to suspend Syria's membership must be taken by the Arab States, not the AL's administration. El-Araby visited Syria earlier this month. According to him, he had discussed with Assad the idea of sending a fact finding mission to Damascus. Assad was responsive, as el-Araby put it, but the AL would only be prepared to send a delegation once the crackdown of Syrian protesters ceased. BM
