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Southeast Asia

Ummah stands divided
By Phar Kim Beng

HONG KONG - At the ministerial preparatory meeting held this week in Putrayjaya, Kuala Lumpur, the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) tried to appear upbeat despite the many problems confronting the Islamic world.

It sought to show unity by calling for the eviction of United States forces from Iraq. However, Turkey's decision to provide troops to Iraq, which is represented in the conference by the US-sanctioned interim Iraqi Governing Council, triggered divisions within the organization.

Seeking to divert divisions, outgoing Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who was chairing the conference, spoke about the need for Muslim countries to increase their trade with each other.

Mahathir, whose combative rhetoric has often put him at loggerheads with the West, has been deemed the future secretary general of the OIC. Although Mahathir has himself quietly turned down the offer, word has it that he has secretly nominated another Malaysian, one with the necessary foreign policy expertise, to take over.

Aware that the OIC's problems were beyond the resolution of anyone, Syed Hamid Albar, the foreign minister of Malaysia, has affirmed that the OIC needs to come up with "practical measures of cooperation" first. To which he also added that he has begun to harbor fears that there would be a lot of expectations on Malaysia's chairmanship of the OIC.

"We hope OIC members will make decisions on the basis of common will, rather than look at their vested bilateral interests. Malaysia alone cannot change the OIC," he pointed out.

Although the OIC serves to represent the ummah (the Islamic community), James Piscatori, a professor in international relations at Oxford University, has long argued that the Islamic world rallies more to causes that resonate with national interests than pan-Islamic ones. Events dating back to 1969, the year when OIC was first conceived, has shown his insights to be prescient.

In his book Islam and the Nation-State, he showed that the foreign policy of some of the most Islamic countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran, were each driven by their parochial national interest rather than Islamic ones.

Thus, while the OIC's aspirational goals include promoting the collective welfare of the Islamic world, caught as it is by the hegemony of the United States, the OIC's decisions cannot be aversed to member states' national prerogative too. In fact, the latter always dominate. Hence, the track record of the OIC has always been filled with inconsistency.

Although the OIC has risen up to the challenge to speak of the plight of Muslims, as marked by its effort in highlighting ethnic cleansing in Bosnia in 1992, its performance has always been uneven. During the Bosnian conflict, while the OIC tried to be actively involved, its role was marginal at best. Clamped by the US and the European Union (EU), the OIC found itself immobilized in Bosnia on many fronts.

The arms embargo on Bosnia was not lifted during the first two years of the conflict, resulting in Bosnians' wide-scale massacre at the hands of the marauding Serbian forces. In the end, members of the OIC had to illegally ship a cache of arms into Bosnia, in defiance of a UN resolution barring such arms transfer.

In March, the OIC held an extraordinary summit in Qatar in which it "totally rejected" the then-anticipated US-led invasion of Iraq. But OIC members such as Kuwait and Qatar allowed the use of their territory by US troops in the buildup to the war. Only a handful of Islamic heads of state or government turned up at that one-day meeting too.

Lately, even the admissions standards of the OIC have become unclear. In the current meeting, Russia, a predominantly Christian country with 20 million Muslims, has been accepted as an observer of the impending OIC summit on Thursday and Friday.

While Syed Hamid Akbar, the foreign minister of Malaysia, claimed that this is "procedurally correct" in that President Vladimir Putin was making an official visit to Malaysia anyway, hence making him the official guest of the country, Russia's future inclusion in the OIC has not been ruled out.

Talks have been rife that if Gabon, a non-Muslim country, can be accepted as an OIC member, granted that it did not satisfy the rule of having one-quarter of its population as Muslims, then Russia could enjoy the same membership treatment.

Aside from Putin, Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo will also be present as an observer. Both are there because of their governments' respective struggles with Muslim insurgency movements in Chechnya and Mindanao.

Due to the OIC's dismal record, some have severely criticized its inept performance, alluding to the OIC as an irrelevant multilateral Islamic organization whose deliberations, some insiders confided, often include very colorful exchanges, with one Arab minister calling another leader by expletives and names.

Nor has the OIC taken a clear stance against terrorism. When the attacks of September 11, 2001, occurred, it took the OIC two months to protest the actions perpetrated by the radical Muslims. Nor has the OIC, to the chagrin of many, opposed "suicide attacks" yet, a military tactic clearly banned in Islam.

In its April 2002 meeting, again in Kuala Lumpur, the OIC's 13-member ministerial committee did not agree on the definition of "terrorism". Instead, the committee sought to convene a UN conference to consider the issue. But OIC delegates admitted privately that they doubted the US and other permanent members of the UN Security Council would support the idea of such a conference.

This is because such a debate would invariably be enlarged to criticize the iron-fist tactics of Israel, an ally of the US, one of the contributing causes of the suicidal attacks. In the latest meeting in Putrajaya, suicide terrorism was once again not on the agenda of the OIC.

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Oct 16, 2003

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