Who is General Muhammad Ahmad Mustafa al-Dabi and why was he chosen to lead the Arab League observer mission in Syria?

It was clear that the Arab League observer mission to Syria wasn’t going to be the beacon of shining hope that was going drag Syria out of the bloodbath of a mess it is becoming. They have been subjected to all sorts of criticism since they day of arrival. Most of the controversy has revolved around the appointment of General al-Dabi as the mission head, and statements that he has made to the press, which appear to deny the gravity of the situation.

Who is al-Dabi?

Unsurprisingly, his appointment led to a sudden mushrooming of information on the internet about his background and career. The most comprehensive summary in my opinion has to be the article written by David Kenner in Foreign Policy. I don’t think is much more one can add to that, but I found a few things that could fill in some missing gaps.

There is hardly any accessible information on Dabi’s early life, between his birth in the Northern Sudanese town of Berber and his attainment of the rank of lieutenant in the Sudanese Army in 1969, the same year Ja’far al-Nimeyri and his fellow Free Officers took power through a military coup known as the 25 May Revolution.

None of the reports on Dabi provide any details about his career before the 1989 coup, but if an account given on a Sudanese forum I came across can be relied on, it seems that he was sent to Egypt along with a number of other junior officers who participated in the coup, where he received training at the Cairo School for Military Intelligence. The 25 May Revolution was inspired by Nasser’s own military coup and ideology, and Nasser was keen to ensure the sympathy and support of the Sudanese military in a future war with Israel. It seems that a significant part of the training was related to understanding Israeli military capabilities. Al-Dabi might have also been part of a group of officers that were sent for training at the KGB headquarters in Moscow (this period was a golden age of Egyptian-Sudanese-Soviet relations).

With little additional information, one can assume that Dabi rose through the ranks of the Sudanese military during the Numeri and post-Nimeiri years, until he was offered the post of Chief of Military Intelligence following the successful June 1989 coup led by ‘Umar al-Bashir. He held this position until July 1995, then served as head of the external branch of Sudanese national security for more than a year until November 1996, after the failed assassination of Egyptian president Husni Mubarak led to a rift between Turabi and the military elements of the regime. Dabi was one several military men who took over top intelligence positions in the Interior Ministry from civilian politicos. Between November 1996 and  July 1999, he was deputy chief of staff for military operations in South Sudan. After his retirement from the military in 1999, the President appointed him as his own personal representative to Darfur, with control over security matters.

As the authors of Darfur: A New History of the Long War  have stated (see pp.62-63), accounts of the events during his tenure there differ sharply. The governor of Darfur at the time was sidelined by Dabi’s presence, and describes it as the beginning of military-Janjaweed attacks on villages. Dabi on the other hand, claims that he managed to bring a growing crisis under control, and that military intervention was necessary to make up for the provincial government’s failure in bringing quarreling sides to the negotiation table (see also a detailed discussion of this in Foreign Policy).

It might be no coincidence that Dabi was appointed as Sudan’s ambassador to Qatar in November 1999. Hasan al-Turabi was already involved in a power struggle with President Bashir that would eventually lead to a dissolution of the National Assembly and a dismissal of Turabi from the positions of Speaker of the Assembly and Secretary-General of the ruling party. Among other things, Turabi’s faction was linked to the resistance movement in Darfur and the circulation of a Black Book which criticised the disproportionate control Sudan’s predominantly Arab north had over the rest of the country. Turabi had significant relations with Qatar, and possessed significant clout there among Islamists as well as with the ruling family (Revolutionary Sudan: Hasan al-Turabi and the Islamist State 1989-2000, pp.78, 256). Funding for the Darfur resistance movement also came from an agent based in Qatar (Darfur: A New History of the Long War, pp.75-76), a fact that probably encouraged the suspicions of Bashir and his ruling circle. Al-Dabi’s assignment to Qatar was probably not only a means to regain regime control over its relations with Qatar, but also a way to preempt any attempt by Turabi or the Darfur resistance to use the country as a base for anti-regime operations.

In 2004, as things began to flare up dramatically in Darfur, and the resistance made its opposition to the regime official, Dabi returned to Darfur as assistant to the special presidential representative, General Abd al-Rahim Muhammad Hussein. After UN Security Council resolution 1591 was passed in 2005, Dabi headed a national campaign dedicated to opposing and refuting claims that the government was committing war crimes in Darfur. In 2007, he was placed in charge of security arrangements in Darfur.

Although it is hard to find any direct evidence tying Dabi to any clear human rights abuses in Darfur, his consistent record of being the regime’s strongman on the issue of Darfur makes his innocence hard to digest. Even if his connection to war crimes can’t be proven, it is reflective of his character that a UN panel investigating the war crimes allegations in Darfur were so annoyed by his constant attempts to block them that he was nicknamed ‘the bottleneck’.

Why on Earth did the Arab League think it was reasonable to appoint the Bottleneck to lead such a sensitive mission?

None of the reports I have looked at (both in English and Arabic media) have  been able to provide an answer to this question that is based on anything more than speculation. Mainly there are murmurs that somehow, because al-Dabi was an ambassador to Qatar, Qatar might have something to do with the appointment. This might be the case, but one has to bear in mind that Qatar’s relations with the Sudanese regime are not as clear cut as one would think. al-Dabi might be a ‘known factor’ by virtue of his presence in Doha as an ambassador, but this was during a time in which the Qatar government also maintained close relations with Hasan al-Turabi, by then a vocal opponent of Omar al-Bashir’s regime.

However, just because one can’t prove that al-Dabi has good connections to Qatar, that doesn’t cancel out the possibility that Qatar was behind the appointment. In other words, he might not have been their favored candidate, but he might have been the only realistic option they had. The Arab League was under pressure to do something (no resort to the UN would have been acceptable without first attempting all the possible Arab options), but no observer mission would have been able to enter safely without approval from the Assad regime. Such a mission would have to be led by someone the Syrians would have felt comfortable with. That would exclude representatives from a whole host of member countries: Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan (neighbours with possible agendas; Saudi and other Gulf countries (too keen to see downfall of the Iranian-Syrian axis; Yemen (unstable); Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Morocco (recently undergone significant government reforms or regime change brought about by the Arab Spring).

This basically left the Arab League with the option of sending someone from Algeria, Sudan, or one of the small lesser known members like Djibouti, Mauritania or the Comoros Islands. I’m not quite sure why some unknown figure from the Comoros Islands wasn’t chosen, but I’m sure the Arab League or Syria had reasons (or maybe they needed a representative from a more ‘weightier’ Arab country). Someone from Algeria would have raised the same kind of controversy that has surrounded al-Dabi. One also has to take into consideration that the Arab League has been fairly supportive of the Sudanese regime throughout their whole ordeal with the UN and the International Criminal Court. No doubt, many of the old politicos in Cairo might have felt that the whole Darfur issue was just another attempt by the US to further its own agenda, and that the reports of genocide and war crimes have been exaggerated.

Amidst the excitement brought about by the recent Arab Spring events, its easy to forget that most people who call the shots in the Arab League and its member governments are still men (and they are mostly men) of the Old Guard, veterans of the Cold-War who have worked with military rule in one form or other. If you put on the same classic pre-Arab Spring rose-tinted shades they were wearing, you too would think al-Dabi wasn’t such a bad fellow after all. The Syrian opposition are right to point out the large number of figures in the Arab world with a more exemplary record working for the defense of human rights, but most of these people have been opposition, and are not the sort of person any of the Old Guard politicos (least of all, those running the Syrian regime) are likely to trust.

There is another possible explanation for al-Dabi’s appointment: that he was chosen for the mission to fail on purpose. This can only open up the discussion to speculation too complex and shady to be entertained here, although a milder version of this explanation is that the Arab League are just trying to look like they tried doing everything before handing over responsibility to the UN. I am more inclined to believe that this the failure of this mission had less to do with the lack of a genuine desire to resolve the conflict, but a reflection of the limitations and increasing irrelevance of the Arab League model as defined by the worldview of the Old Guard. Perhaps, the Arab Parliament (a newer body connected to the League) and its call on the observer mission to give up and leave (and hence contradiction of the League’s adamant defense of the mission) is an indication that the breeze of the Arab Spring ‘khamsin‘ is about to turn up at the headquarters of the Arab League itself.