After a gap of 15 years since it last met in Pakistan, the OIC Council of Foreign Ministers (CFM) will hold its 48th Session on 22-23 March 2022 in Islamabad. This is an important meeting for many reasons. The theme ‘Partnering for Unity, Justice and Development’ is a pertinent one since it can be arguedthat this is precisely where the Islamic world needs to improve.
The CFM, coming quickly on the heels of the recent Extraordinary OIC meeting on Afghanistan in Islamabad, is an important affirmation of Pakistan’s centrality in the Islamic world. The coming year affords Pakistan the opportunity to address, as a founding member of the OIC, the importance of this body as a global voice in a vastly changedworld where in some places just to acknowledge being Muslim is to invite vilification and discrimination.
The Session is also being held at a time of unprecedented globaltensions with renewed pressures to take sides. Taking sides has rarelyserved anyone barring the self-righteous, whereas meeting in themiddle ground requires patience and sacrifice to achieve durablesolutions. At the OIC, Pakistan has always sought consensus andagreement, where compromise does not imply dilution of purpose but means unity and peaceful resolution of disputes. Pakistan has a principled traditionof not taking sides which is sometimes overlooked – from playing abridging, mediatory role in the painfully long Iraq-Iran War in the1980s to the current tragic conflict in Yemen. Pakistan even helpedheal the deep divisions in the Arab world following the Camp DavidAccords and secured the ostracized Egypt’s return to the OIC in 1984.
In the spirit of compromise and securing tangible solutions, Pakistan led the negotiations for the first ever OIC-EU Joint Resolution in 2018 in Geneva. Pakistan has a respectable history of leadership credentials at the OIC. In addition to exerting diplomatic efforts to galvanize resolve in many areas (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Libya, Myanmar, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan), it has had a vital role in establishing the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB), the Independent Permanent Human Rights Commission (IPHRC) and the Observatory on Islamophobia, institutions and mechanisms that are now taken for granted. But these did not appear out of thin air. It took vision and determination to set them up. The IsDB is now the key partner in the Afghanistan Humanitarian Trust Fund to assist the beleaguered Afghan population. Had the IsDB not been established, where would the Islamic world have gone for such expert help and resources? The usual donors and their strings? It has become all too often that the OIC is casually dismissed as a body that only talks and delivers little. That myopic view discounts the possibility where the Ummah would otherwise lie today: disunited, with individual countries fending for themselves in far more precarious positions. If there were no OIC, then what do these critics propose in its place?
In countries like India and Myanmar, Muslims are killed for simply being Muslim. The upcoming Session will spotlight this and add pressure on those countries who have a penchant for preaching to others.
The same argument applies to the critics who continually harp on about their belief in the ineffectiveness of the UN. And if the OIC is so irrelevant then why has India been trying over the years to sneak into the organization? New Delhi has been constantly complaining, claiming and campaigning for a place in the OIC community given that it insists that its Muslim population is larger than that of most Member States. This disingenuous claim now lies bare, contradicted by the horrific treatment of Indian Muslims. The challenges facing the OIC are many: the plight of the Kashmiris, the Palestinians and the Rohingyas. Add to this the drastic effects of Climate Change underway, with African members likely to be the hardest hit; the slow burn ‘small’ wars such as in Yemen; the challenges of Human Development given the shrinking fiscal space and population growth; emerging from the COVID pandemic in an environment of vaccine apartheid and Big Pharma’s greed not to share knowledge and patents; the consequent likelihood of many of the SDGs remaining only on paper; and the degradation of the very core concepts of Human Dignity as freedoms are eroded by these multiple factors.
As identitarian politics have gained currency in the 21st Century, Muslims living in apparently secular societies have suddenly been forced to assert their identity. With Islamophobia and racism mainstreamed, these communities need a global platform to voice their problems. Institutionalized discrimination such as direct assaults on what one can legally wear in public and the misguided interpretation that freedom of speech means the freedom to insult another religion at will, have added fuel to an unnecessary fire. In countries like India and Myanmar, Muslims are killed for simply being Muslim. The upcoming Session will spotlight this and add pressure on those countries who have a penchant for preaching to others. The OIC is an important platform to give the Kashmir dispute a global voice and visibility. Pakistan should ably utilize the CFM for this on-going crisis. It is also an opportunity for the Kashmiris themselves to highlight their suffering. The respected and impartial voice of the IPHRC would add verifiable, independent substance. Without the OIC, vital information and briefing for fellow Muslim countries would just not be possible in this focused way and the ground would be ceded to the Indian propaganda armada. Eyes will now be on what emerges from the Session. The OIC has to formulate tangible and implementable strategies. It has to prove that its critics are ultimately wrong. Therefore, it must be beyond the routine, beyond easily forgotten declarations. It must reignite the spirit of the original purpose. Pakistan cannot achieve this alone. It can only be done in partnership.
