The narrative could not have
been simpler - Saudi Arabia has taken its cold war
with Iran, which is being fought on the beaches,
in the air and in the hills of the Middle East, to
the great arena of the Muslim ummah. And Iran has
badly lost in the tournament.
However, the
summit of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation
(OIC) in Mecca this week had a subtle subtext, and
anyone who knows Muslim politics would sense that
on such occasions the subtexts are invariably more
significant than the manifest narrative.
The narrative itself is that Syria has
been banished from the Sunni world and Iran could
do nothing to stop it from happening. It is posted
all over the Western media. Washington even expressed
satisfaction that a
"strong signal" had been delivered to Damascus.
Flawed decision But was Syria
indeed the core issue at the OIC summit? It seems
more like a case of the Syrian crisis providing
the peg on which certain subtexts could be hung
for all to see.
No one is mistaken that
the majority opinion within the OIC as reflected
in the decision to suspend Syria's membership is
going to decide that country's future. Arguably,
the summit sends a signal to Syria, but then,
Damascus has no dearth of signals these days from
far and near, and that is not the issue. All said,
the OIC as a regional organization is notoriously
ineffective. For decades it fulminated against
India on the Kashmir issue and even constituted a
Contact Group on the subject - with Turkey and
Saudi Arabia charioting it - but New Delhi chose
to ignore it and no one knows today whether or not
it is still around.
A tough regime like
the one in Damascus would know that the OIC is
toothless and that Saudi Arabia's wish has always
been a command for the organization. Ironically,
Syria used to counsel New Delhi not to lose sleep
over the ISI Contact Group.
The heart of
the matter is that the Syrian crisis has now
transcended the Saudi-Iranian paradigm and has
morphed into a first-rate wrestling match by
external powers over regional hegemony - and the
most powerful among them are not even Muslim
countries. It is not in the interests of the most
powerful protagonists - the United States, Europe,
Russia, China - to give the impression that their
security policy is to support the Sunnis or the
Shi'ites in the Middle East.
The Western
powers are reluctant to intervene in Syria while
the diplomatic track has tapered off; Russia and
China are moving on with their mundane life after
having thrice drawn the "red line" in the United
Nations Security Council; and the US and Turkey
have been left in solitude to grapple with the
difficult question of how to proceed to end the
violence against the backdrop of the failure of
diplomacy and the blunt refusal of the Bashar
al-Assad regime to give in despite all the body
blows given to it - this, in a nutshell, is the
current Syrian situation.
Simply put, the
OIC has no role here. In fact, if it had one, that
too was lost on Wednesday after the flawed
decision at Mecca to draw the bridges leading to
Damascus - whereas, with a little more
imagination, the OIC could have aspired to
position itself to play the role of a
facilitator-cum-mediator at an opportune moment in
future.
So why did Saudi Arabia think up
this untimely initiative to convene an
extraordinary summit of the OIC? The central
objective of the Saudi initiative was to present a
united front against sectarianism in the Muslim
world. Tehran understood this early enough, which
explains its considered decision to participate in
the summit in Mecca despite the near-certainty
that the conclave would end up censuring the
Syrian regime in one form or another.
In
turn, Iran also rose to the occasion by giving a
measured response at the level of the foreign
minister to the OIC's decision to suspend Syria's
membership.
Foreign Minister Ali Akbar
Salehi said in Mecca: "Syria should have been
invited to the summit to defend itself and also so
that the participants could have listened to its
official views." He explained that Tehran objected
to the OIC decision because "this is against the
very charter of the organization". Salehi added:
"In our opinion, cooperation is more logical [than
suspension and] ... we should seek a mechanism to
exit the Syrian crisis by way of the opposition
and the government engaging in talks to create
favorable conditions" to end the crisis.
Redrawing the rules of the game
Second, the developments in Syria are
steadily bringing religious sectarianism into the
open in a way that does not suit any of the major
regional protagonists - Saudi Arabia, Iran, Qatar
or Turkey - since almost all of them are as much
vulnerable to the fallouts from any deepening of
the sectarian fault line as Syria could be today.
Shi'ites constitute almost 20% of the
Saudi population, more than 35% in Kuwait and
almost 70% in Bahrain. Alawites are a restive
minority with long-standing grievances of
persecution, accounting for 20% of Turkey's
population (on top of the alienated Kurds, who
form another 20%). Indeed, Iran too has a
substantial Sunni minority.
Third, no
matter what happens on the ground, Sunnis are
going to play a much more influential role in
Syria's political life than before, which again
means that none of the regional protagonists
stands to benefit from pushing the envelope and
escalating religious tensions. Also, the fallouts
of religious tensions are certain to be very
serious. The signs are visible already that the
Shi'ite-dominated eastern provinces of Saudi
Arabia are on the boil. This constitutes a
formidable challenge to the royal family both in
geographic and economic terms.
On
Wednesday, even as the OIC began its deliberations
in Jeddah, ominous signs appeared in Lebanon, with
the Shi'ite Meqdad clan kidnapping more than 20
Syrians in retaliation for the abduction of one of
their kinsmen by the so-called Free Syrian Army.
The Meqdad clan has threatened that "the snowball
will grow" and that Saudi, Qatari and Turkish
nationals will be targeted.
Saudi Arabia
promptly issued an advisory to its nationals to
leave Lebanon immediately. The United Arab
Emirates and Qatar have taken similar steps. There
are reports of dozens of Syrians being kidnapped
in Beirut on Wednesday and of gunmen taking to the
streets in the Shi'ite suburb of Tiro in the
southern part of the city. That is to say,
while the OIC summit initiative may not have any
direct impact on the near-term trajectory of
developments in Syria itself, it has taken into
account the existential challenge posed by
religious tensions and has adopted a long-term
approach aimed at containing the several available
potentially inflammable political hot spots in the
region from assuming sectarian overtones.
In sum, the OIC summit's rebuke to Syria
adds up to little consequential beyond the
symbolic. The summit could not be expected to heal
the Saudi-Iranian rift, which stems from a clash
of national interests. But what the OIC summit
aimed at it may well be achieving, namely to
redraw the rules of the game in Syria and to
"secularize" the political differences and
conflicts.
How far the OIC's message will
travel among the diehard militants time only will
tell, but King Abdullah certainly made an
important conciliatory gesture to Iranian
President Mahmud Ahmadinejad by seating him at his
side to welcome the leaders attending the summit.
As Reuters reported: "Ahmadinejad, wearing
the dark suit and shirt without tie favored by
Iranian leaders, sat at the left hand of the king
in his traditional Arab robes. The two were shown
talking and sometimes laughing together."
This is where the "subtext" makes its
presence felt as the real narrative. By any
reckoning, the gesture to Ahmadinejad was an
overture by the Saudi king to the Iranian nation
that no matter what happens in Syria (or over
Syria) in the coming period, "we are both
Muslims".
Curiously, a summit that was
billed as a potentially big showdown between Saudi
Arabia and Iran ended by adopting King Abdullah's
proposal on the setting up of a center in Riyadh
for dialogue among different Muslim sects. It is
tempting to think that the OIC may have understood
finally its tryst with destiny.
Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a
career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. His
assignments included the Soviet Union, South
Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan,
Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.
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