The slaughter of Muslims in Myanmar had barely evoked a response from Pakistan that reports came in of the slaughter of Muslims in Sri Lanka by Buddhists of the majority Sinhalese ethnicity. Though Myanmar is supposed to be tolerant, the slaughter of Rohingyas has meant that Buddhists have learnt to be violent, just like all other politically organised religions. This has demonstrated the link between the violence shown in Sri Lanka and that in Burma, even though they are not apparently related. It has also been shown that it is not just Christianity, Judaism or Hinduism have followers offering Muslims violence, but even a religion supposedly as nonviolent as Buddhism too. Pakistani President Asif Zardari has written to Myanmarese President U Thein Senn calling for better security to stop the killing of the Rohingyas, whose slaughter has a long history, and which recurred recently in the Yangon area. Pakistan was forced to take this step after the international organizations which should have acted, have maintained silence. Foremost would be the UN and the OIC. The OIC had set up a Contact Group after the massacres last year, but the UN had not taken even this action.
Even though other problems involving Muslims have not been solved, it seems that new ones are emerging, and joining them, refusing to be solved. The international community has failed to solve the Kashmir and Palestinian problems, even though both were brought to the notice of the UN back in 1948. These occupations of Muslim lands contrast with the way that East Timor and South Sudan were created. In both cases, new Christian states were created, and Muslim states lost territory.
One of the lessons driven home has been how ineffectual international organizations are, even those set up by Muslim states. Pakistan, if it could achieve any believable certainty in its own, could lead the charge in standing up for Muslims. Without a demonstration of the ability to defend Muslims, Muslim states will have to depend on the states in which they live to protect them. As events have shown, neither Myanmar nor Sri Lanka are particularly good at this task. It should not be ignored that the security forces of both countries have majorities of the Buddhist co-religionists of those committing the slaughter. The Muslim countries must be wary of the fate of Muslim minorities in other countries, not just because this might agitate their own peoples, but because they must protect their own minorities from such barbarous atrocities.