The tragedy of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar has got much attention from the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, which has convened this week for an emergency summit in Mecca.
The OIC and its leaders routinely express concern about Muslim minorities around the world, but the latest summit has been called by Saudi Arabia to address the urgent agenda of the deepening divisions within and between Muslim majority states.
King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who is also the guardian of the two holy mosques in Mecca and Medina, ordered $50 million of assistance to the Rohingyas. The Saudi state media, which announced the news earlier this week, was careful in avoiding direct criticism of the Myanmar government while condemning the violence against the Rohingya Muslims.
Emine Erdogan, the wife of Turkey Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, travelled to Myanmar to meet the Rohingya victims of recent riots in the Rakhine state in Myanmar. She and her daughter accompanied a delegation led by Turkey Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu to Myanmar and offered humanitarian assistance.
Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation and a leader of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, has sought to promote a constructive engagement between the OIC and Myanmar, which is a member of the ASEAN, on the Rohingya problem.
The government of Myanmar, which denies that the violence in the Rakhine state has anything to do with race or religion, has avoided a political confrontation with the OIC and other leading Islamic nations. Departing from its traditional position that it will accept international assistance only through the United Nations, it appears to be making an exception in the current situation. President Thein Sein has also invited a delegation of the OIC to take a look at the factual situation on the ground.
Minority rights
Despite its call for action on protecting the rights of the Rohingyas in Myanmar, the OIC is having trouble securing the rights of Muslim minorities and even majorities within its own member states.
Saudi Arabia has seen much restiveness in its eastern provinces where the minority Shia population lives in large numbers. While Saudi Arabia denies that its sectarian minority faces discrimination, the Shias complain about the lack of access to government jobs and full religious freedoms. Riyadh has accused Tehran of fomenting the trouble and cracked down hard on the Shia protestors.
In Sunni majority Turkey, the Alevi and Alawaite minorities, who are closer to the Shia faith, have long complained about discrimination. The Alevi are of Turkic ethnicity and the Alawites are of Arab descent. In Iraq, the American intervention and occupation has empowered the Shia majority. Now it is the turn of the Sunni minority in Iraq to complain about Shia dominance.
The Shia-Sunni conflict has also come to frame current tensions in Syria and Bahrain. In both cases, the problem is not about minority rights but of minority oppression. The Sunni majority is challenging the political dominance by the Alawites in Syria and in Bahrain the Shia majority has had enough of the Sunni monarchy.
The Shia-Sunni divide has put Saudi Arabia and Iran on opposite sides of the internal conflicts in Syria, Bahrain, Iraq and Lebanon. Riyadh and Tehran accuse each other of supporting their own sectarian interests in these conflicts.
Saudi-Iran Détente?
Opening the Mecca Summit on Tuesday, King Abdullah underlined the importance of "solidarity, tolerance, moderation" in ending the current strife in the Muslim world. King Abdullah has made a special outreach to the Iranian leadership, personally inviting President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to attend the summit.
At the opening session of the summit, King Abdullah seated the Iranian president by his side. Iran too has signalled its willingness to engage in a dialogue with Saudi Arabia on the situation in Syria and Bahrain.
That Saudi Arabia and Iran are poised to hurt each other badly is not in doubt. Reconciliation between the two is indeed central to the effective management of current crises in the Middle East.
But there is no betting that such a rapprochement is on the cards. A previous attempt to resolve religious and political differences between Riyadh and Tehran a decade ago did not go very far.
The decision by the OIC ministers to recommend the expulsion of Syria from the organisation against the objections of Tehran underlines the difficulties of reconciling the contending interests of Saudi Arabia and Iran.
(The writer is a Distinguished Fellow at Observer Research Foundation, Delhi)
Courtesy:
The Indian Express, August 16, 2012,
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