Mood is a veteran of struggling Middle East truces and knows Syria well. The stern-looking 54-year-old general weighs his words carefully and listens attentively. He once warned against peacekeepers’ acting like “an elephant in a glass house“
His job may be doomed, given mistrust in Syria. But he may have the chance to achieve more than Sudanese general Mohammed Al-Dabi, who quit a failed Arab League mission in February, stymied by diplomatic slip-ups and his country’s own poor rights record.
“He (Mood) is a very firm and very clear in his statements, he’s very difficult to misunderstand, said Kjell Inge Bjerga, researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Defense Studies, who has worked with Mood.
“He has remarkable diplomatic skills, which is unusual for a general. He has the ability to speak the language of all the sides.”
While he was in Damascus negotiating the deployment of the advanced party of monitors with the government earlier this month, Mood received a text message from his sister.
“Lucky you grew up between an older sister and a younger sister, you turned out to be useful,” the message said
Mood has tested his skills with multinational forces in Kosovo, and he is part of a tradition of Norwegian involvement in Middle East peacekeeping. The country likes to see itself - and its generals - as above suspicion when it comes to diplomacy.
“Experience in the Balkans is very powerful experience given the complexity of that situation,” said Paul Rogers, professor of Peace Studies at Britain’s University of Bradford.
“And Norway has a reputation as a nation genuinely devoted to peace. So a Norwegian comes in with added credibility.”
As head of the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization from 2009-2011, which monitors Middle East cease-fires, Mood often visited Damascus and he is said to already have good contacts with Syrian military officers.
“I fell in love with Damascus in 2009. I have never been received with so much warmth,” he told Reuters in an interview shortly after he was appointed to his new post. He described how he could walk around the “dark alleys” of Damascus with his wife and son and feel welcome and safe.
The capital is less safe these days. Seven people were killed by a suicide bomber in the city center on Friday, Syria’s state-run news agency reported.
Mood told a Lebanese newspaper, The Daily Star, in 2009 that his philosophy then as a UN truce monitor was “you don’t come in like the elephant in the glass house and dictate to the people. That doesn’t work.”
But his new posting will severely test him. While 300 observers are planned, so far there are only a handful, unarmed and largely dependent on Syrian authorities for their safety.
With the violence continuing despite an ostensible cease-fire, fifteen more monitors out of a total advance team of 30 were expected to arrive in Syria by Monday. Despite efforts to speed up the deployment of the full mission, it is not expected to get up to strength for several weeks.
Opposition sources and residents say that shelling by government forces and retribution against local people increase once observers have left any place they visit.
“It will be a hugely challenging position,” said retired British Brig. Ben Barry, who is now land warfare fellow at London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies.
“It’s not clear from a Security Council resolution what responsibility there is on the Syrians to facilitate access for the monitors. We don’t know how much flexibility you will have.”
The failed Arab League mission quickly ran into trouble earlier in the year, despised by the Syrian opposition who said it was simply a device to buy more time for President Bashar Assad to try to crush demonstrators and armed rebels.
Things have not got any easier. An advance team for the present UN observer mission were mobbed last week by angry pro-Assad demonstrators who surrounded their vehicles as gunfire erupted close by.
Mood, from tiny Krageroe on Norway’s southern coast, joined the Norwegian army in 1979 and has served from 2005 to 2009 as the army’s Chief of Staff. He has degrees from Norwegian and US military colleges.
He told The Daily Star that he had also worked as a UN peace keeper in Lebanon during the 1980s, when the country immersed in civil war.
Bjerga called him a “pioneer” about peacekeeping in the Balkans, and others agree that experience was formative.
“He is a laconic, tough commander with a good background in the Balkans although his conventional warfighting experience will be limited,” said one European military officer who knows him.
“When it comes to negotiating with the Syrian authorities he will be no pushover. He will be robust, determined and pretty singleminded.”
When first called to Syria, Mood was skiing with his family in the mountains.
Like many Norwegians, he is keen on sailing and comes across as something of a renaissance man in interviews, managing to combine mentions of opera with talk about his work.
“A good opera is all about combining very different elements into a piece that eventually becomes very impressive,” he told Norwegian broadcaster NRK.
“It mirrors the team work we often carry out both in the military and in international work.”
Mood says when got the call asking him to lead the assessment team: “It was an easy choice to say yes.”
“It’s worth making the effort,” he said about his mission and international envoy Kofi Annan’s peace plan. “The Syrian people deserve to have an opportunity.”
It also carries immense risks.
“These conditions are more or less the most difficult you can expect ... It is quite a risky career move for Mood,” said Rogers.
