*Disclaimer-This is another AS-IS editorial without any modification by UPSCTREE Team, The writer/speaker is retired Lieutenant General Syed Ata Hasnain and the editorial is excerpt of his speech in inter-faith dialogue forum.
India’s 180 million Muslims have almost completely remained aloof from the shenanigans of violent extremism which plagues its neighbour and so many other nations.
You cannot hold this great faith of a billion people ransom to the rabid views of a few who want it pegged to where it was 14 centuries ago.
This is an adaptation of a speech made by the author at a recent inter faith event.
When we have esteemed guests from Islamic and other countries visiting India one of the major responsibilities of Indian Muslims is to make them aware of the existence of Islam in India and its rich, inclusive nature in terms of its contribution to India’s cultural scene. Also, it is necessary to make them aware of how much Islam enriched itself through its interactive existence with other major faiths of India and what it absorbed from the harmonious environment of the subcontinent. Through the turbulent times since Islam has been challenged from within, by a minority which wishes for it not to progress but rather regress, India’s Muslims have shown a beacon to the followers of the faith.
India’s 180 million Muslims have almost completely remained aloof from the shenanigans of violent extremism which plagues its neighbour and so many other nations. I am one in this congregation who comes from a profession perceived by society to be associated with violence. I have been a soldier for 40 years and have had hundreds of thousands of fellow soldiers under me, executing my directions and orders. So for me to be speaking about the message of peace may appear a bit awkward and a bit paradoxical. But let me clarify right here that the choice of using my knowledge and skills as a leader and a soldier was always based upon justice, fairness and minimalistic approach; something I imbibed in the Indian army.
I am a human, a proud Indian and a Muslim. I am aware how my faith is perceived worldwide today as a faith devoted to intolerance and the employment of violence as a means to achieve the ends of what is misperceived as the aim of Islam, i.e. the spread of the faith by means foul and fair and the domination of the world. I consider those within my faith who act and project such a perception as enemies of the faith and enemies of humanity, and I shall justify my belief.
Faith is no doubt based upon belief, implicit belief, but it is also based upon rationale and the power of intellect and human choice brought on by the capability to reason, apply and absorb.
Islam, in reality, is founded upon equanimity, balance, moderation, and facilitation. As Tawfik Hamid, author of Inside Jihad , writes, “Islam rejects extremism, radicalism and fanaticism—just as all noble, heavenly religions reject them—considering them as recalcitrant ways and forms of injustice”.
Furthermore, extremism is an aberration that has been experienced by all nations, races, and religions. The singling out of Islam and its followers in the current times is only because of the contextual situation where enemies of Islam, many within the faith have employed practices which are alien to its values and beliefs and civilised societies in general. The human race was created to progress not regress, to discover the undiscovered, in science and arts, in nature and space.
You cannot hold this great faith of a billion people ransom to the rabid views of a few who want it pegged to where it was 14 centuries ago. Islam, like all great faiths is progressive, tolerant and transparent, with respect for all other faiths.
It is only appropriate to outline and recall how I developed respect for different faiths even while following the tenets of Islam, which is my faith. My parents followed Islam and set for me examples of how to be a good Muslim. I was educated in a Christian school where I read the Bible almost like a textbook and attended chapel, singing hymns and psalms in praise of the same God to whom we all pray. During long school holidays, I continued Islamic practices at home thus imbibing a dual faith Catholicism.
On joining the Indian Army, I willingly became a part of my father’s regiment, comprising only Hindus, whose culture and best practices as a faith I imbibed. My subordinate soldiers fully respected my sentiments, and I respected theirs. They invited me to lead prayers at the unit temple even as I educated them on the tenets of Islam to which they listened with rapt attention. It is I who insisted that the unit temple flag with the huge embossed ‘Om’ on it would always be atop the leading vehicle of our convoy when we moved en masse for training or operations.
Take it from me; there is nothing like the power of conversation and discussion between followers of different faiths who consider their faiths as alternative ways to reach Him, the one and only master of this world, the maker of us all.
In the conflict zone of Jammu and Kashmir, where I had the good fortune to serve many years, I attempted to bring interfaith contact and interaction as a means of resolving mistrust and misperception. Many of my troops that were non-Muslim invited local maulvis and elders to their camps with the intent that they wished to learn more about Islam. For a few weeks the maulvis and elders were only too happy to part with information on the meaning and practices of Islam, but after that they were curious to know more about the faith of their hosts and the hosts did not disappoint them. The best interfaith harmony emerged in all these areas where this practice was adopted.
While serving the United Nations and attending knowledge programs across the world, I have attended multi-faith ceremonies with practised ease with people questioning me and many of my colleagues from the Indian Army as to how we were so comfortable, with different faiths. It is with pride that we would inform them of the nature of India’s composite society.
In a world beset with aberrations in perception, where science and technology should be acting as connectors and facilitators of dialogue across faiths, we find the spread of abhorrent ideas. Why have the younger segments of society (even from other faiths) picked up the mistaken tenets of Islam, from the wrong people and done all the wrong acts? It is because the right people are all quiet, the right ideas and values of the faith have never been brought before those who are hungry for knowledge and debate.
Correctness needs courage. Morality needs courage. Kindness needs courage and courage is something which has never been missing in Islam. The courage we need here is the one to deeply study the faith and convey the true meaning and understanding so that societies the world over will respect the followers of Islam for their wisdom, their progress for mankind and the pursuance of peace.
It is unfortunate that the pull of geopolitics on faith is being harnessed for power and not for peace. Islam is about a way of life, about being good human beings bearing a respectful value system and not for the pursuance of power to harness resources for just a few. Islam is about equality and not about subjugation.
Quoting from the Royal Court of Jordan’s Amman Message, a message from all the learned leaders within Islam –“ On religious and moral grounds, we denounce the contemporary concept of terrorism that is associated with wrongful practices, whatever their source and form may be. Such acts are represented by aggression against human life in an oppressive form that transgresses the rulings of God, frightening those who are secure, violating peaceful civilians, finishing off the wounded, and killing prisoners; and they employ unethical means, such as destroying buildings and ransacking cities”.
It is God who brings life to this world; only He has the power and right to take it away, and He has not delegated that power to humans, unless in the pursuit of true justice.
For us in India, where the largest Muslim minority in the world exists, we wish to be model citizens; pursuing the tenets of our faith and respecting the tenets of all other faiths and love for the nation. We are one of the few in this world who have the privilege and pleasure to share our school benches with those of other faiths, visit their homes, respect their beliefs and partake in the joys of each other’s festivals.
We are from the land of Gautam Buddha, Guru Nanak, Gandhi and Tagore, a land of sages and spirituality. We need to count our blessings and spread the message of this land to the world.
As Indians, it is our prime duty to ensure that every foreign visitor who steps on our soil, must return to his land in amazement; wondering how 1250 million people of such diversity and wide beliefs exist in this space as a single nation with a single commitment.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.