That the plight of Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims who are being hounded and killed by the Buddhist majority in the Rakhine state of the country and are running from pillar to post to find refuge is, indeed, grave testimony in the current inefficacy of the Organisation of Islamic Conference. The OIC stirring from its deep slumber, has decided to send a fact-finding mission to the spot. It was so decided, perhaps after the literal weeping of a local Muslim leader, Waqar-uddin, at the OIC executive committee meeting at Jeddah on Sunday, who bemoaned the massacre of his people and called for help by the OIC. The murderous riots have been acknowledged by the government itself. This admission at least gives a lie to those sources denying that any violence had taken place and that the photographs of brutalities against the Muslims being circulated by the social media and the press were, in fact, of a time long past. It is noteworthy that the government figure of death toll of 80 of ‘both Buddhists and Muslims’ has been termed as “grossly underestimated” by the US-based Human Rights Watch.
OIC Secretary-General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu told the meeting that the organisation would try to persuade the government in Yangon to accept the fact-finding mission so that it could establish the truth of the stories that have been making the rounds for quite some time. He expressed dissatisfaction at the “failure of the international community to take action to stop the massacre, violations, oppression and ethnic cleansing perpetrated by the government of Myanmar against the Rohingya Muslims.” The OIC has also directed its mission at New York to urge the UN Security Council to look into their sufferings.
It is a great pity that the OIC, the body claimant of representing the Muslim world, should have waited for so long to react to the slaughter of its own community. The organisation needs a thorough overhaul. Conceived with the high-sounding ideals of promoting Muslim causes, it has utterly failed to deliver. Gone are the days when it planned to galvanise Muslims around the globe to constitute a formidable force in the international arena. The situation has progressively gone from bad to worse. Except for an occasional word of sympathy for the beleaguered Palestinians and Kashmiris, one hardly hears any protest against what the population went through and is still undergoing in Afghanistan, Iraq and other trouble spots where they are invariably the target. The Rohingya massacre is a clarion call for the organisation to activate itself and energetically work to stem the injustices against the Muslim communities across the world.