The New Nation - Internet Edition

We, the Kings and the Heads of State and Government of member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) meeting on the occasion of our 11th Ordinary Conference in Dakar, capital of the Republic of Senegal, from 6 to 7 Rabiul Awwal 1429H (13 - 14 March 2008), Have taken stock of the Summit's historic importance in these early years of the third millennium, which is marked by major world developments at the ideological, political, economic, scientific and technological levels.

Furthermore, the 11th OIC Summit Conference is the first to be held since the 3rd Extraordinary Session was held in Makkah Al Mukarramah in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia from 5 to 6 Dhul Qa'ada 1426H (7 - 8 December 2005), which was a landmark and a source of pride for the Ummah as illustrated by the Ten-Year Programme of Action adopted on the occasion.

We have underscored, once again, the guidelines of the Programme in order to rise up to the challenges facing the Ummah in the 21st century in its bid to seize any opportunity to ensure sustainable development in peace, brotherhood for the sake Allah and solidarity. We are proud to proclaim, once again, to the entire world that the Ummah is fortunate, in the face of such challenges, to find in the Holy Quran's lofty teachings the right solutions to the problems currently besetting human societies. Islam, a religion of total devotion to Allah the Almighty, is also an irreplaceable vector of progress in this world in that its message of human salvation encompasses all walks of life.

In light of the foregoing, we believe that the 11th OIC Summit Conference (The Ummah's 21st Century Session) is a happy continuation of the Makkah Al Mukarramah Extraordinary Summit because it has helped to give impetus to our collective willingness to achieve gradually the Ummah's set objectives. In this vein, we believe that the Ummah's unity should remain, in our hearts and minds, an ultimate goal that dictates on our countries a conduct that prefers abnegation, values and common interests to division, hatred and confrontation.

The Leaders of Muslim countries hereby renew their pledge to preserve world peace and security, one of the OIC's objectives, and thus to fully adhere to the United Nations' key mission in this regard as well as international legality as a rule for all without any political double standards.

This is the reason why we proclaim, once again, our resolve to make sure that the Ummah's entire causes prevail in accordance with resolutions adopted in this regard by the Islamic Conference and the United Nations.

From this standpoint, in order to ensure just and lasting peace in the Middle East, we reaffirm solemnly the need to comply with all Security Council resolutions on Al Quds, an issue for which the OIC was established, and on the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people to establish an independent state within internationally guaranteed borders.

We reiterate our condemnation of Israel's pattern of refusal to fully comply with the resolutions in question, to allow the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with Al Quds Al Sharif as its capital without any territorial discontinuity, to pull out of the Golan Heights of Syria and to respect Lebanon's territorial integrity and sovereignty.

We reaffirm our respective countries' solidarity with the Palestinian people's heroic struggle and applaud their exemplary courage, which appears prominently on the most beautiful pages of the Ummah's history.

We proclaim, once again, our common position on the overall settlement of the Palestinian question in accordance with OIC and UN resolutions, the Arab Peace Initiative and the Road Map of the Quartet within the spirit of the OIC's constant commitment to the Middle East peace process.

Our faith in such a strategic option for the quest for peace in that part of the world, where had originated many spiritual messages that advocate love for one's fellow human being, illustrates our strict adherence to the values of Islam, a religion of peace that forbids all forms of exclusivity and extremism and that warrants the following quotation "You have been made a Prophet only to restore peace in the world", which is based on a verse from the Holy Quran. Based on this deep conviction, we the Kings and the Heads of State and Government of the OIC renew our pledge to work harder to make sure that Islam's true image is better projected the world over in line with the guidelines contained in the Ten-Year Programme of Action issued by the 3rd Extraordinary Summit of Makkah Al Mukarramah, which seek to combat an Islamophobia with designs to distort our religion.

Consequently, we continue to strongly condemn all forms of extremism and dogmatism, which are incompatible with Islam, a religion of moderation and peaceful coexistence. It is in this vein that we support the dialogue of civilizations, and we believe that it is important to plan along such lines a preparatory phase by organizing a major international gathering on Islamic - Christian dialogue that involves governments, among other players. Owing to such considerations based on our religious beliefs, we reiterate our condemnation of all forms of terrorism by referring to the Ten-Year Programme of Action adopted at our 3rd Extraordinary Summit and in which it is stated that terrorism is a ''global phenomenon that is not related to any religion, race, colour or country" and that the scourge should be distinguished from "legitimate resistance against foreign occupation that prevents one from shedding the blood of innocent civilians''. The adoption of an OIC convention on terrorism and other international initiatives by the Islamic geographical sphere to combat terrorism as well as the OIC's involvement in efforts to adopt an international code of conduct on how to fight against the heinous phenomenon are an indication of our total rejection of it.

Since we share the international community's major concerns over terrorism, we would like to confirm that the OIC always seeks to make sure that it is not found wanting when it comes to joint actions designed to overcome the major challenges facing nations as a result of globalization. We therefore set great store by human rights and good governance so that our respective countries would uphold them continuously as essential factors of human progress and prosperity.

It is the same drive of enabling the OIC to play fully its role in handling problems brought about by globalization that we reaffirm our political will to take or support any initiative designed, among others, to combat natural disasters, overcome the environmental problems endengering mankind, eradicate poverty and take part fully in the global campaign to bridge the digital divide through voluntary contributions so as to address the blighting energy problem as a vital development factor and to promote women, the family and children as a major social requirement.

Since the OIC is keenly interested in helping to gradually overcome challenges currently facing the world, it cannot but work harder for its member states and Muslim minorities by taking inspiring from the precepts of Islam, especially the obligation to ensure Islamic solidarity.

Intra-Islamic cooperation in the areas of competence of the OIC's standing committees is a duty dictated by the foregoing lessons as well as the new development requirements, whose advantages our governments should make use of and identify their adverse effects, especially on our Islamic culture, so as to combat them effectively.

We the Kings and the Heads of State and Government of OIC member states, being fully aware of such a duty, which should always underpin Islamic solidarity, reaffirm the priority that we give to the implementation of such an exalting objective by mobilizing both governments and the private sector, whose pivotal role in achieving such a huge enterprise of intra-Islamic cooperation is quite obvious. On this score, Africa's situation, while the 11th Islamic Summit is taking place in Senegal, has drawn our attention because the problems of poverty besetting the continent should give rise to a solidarity drive among the other sections of the Ummah on account of the huge economic resources and potentials that Allah the Almighty has endowed them with to purposely address such livelihood difficulties and to bring their weight to bear on the international scene. In view of such a fact, we, the leaders of OIC member states, have given utmost importance to the need to urgently implement the provisions of the Ten-Year Programme of Action on "development assistance and the fight against poverty in Africa''. We have thus agreed to include among the priorities of the joint Islamic action bilateral and multilateral debt relief by donor member states in favour of low-income OIC African member countries in view of the fact that, under the Ten-Year Programme of Action, "special attention should be given to Africa, the region most plagued by poverty, disease, illiteracy, famine and debt". The debt relief should be conducted according proportions and deadlines taking into account the heavy debt burden on African economies.

It is in the same spirit of solidarity that we pledge that our Governments will do whatever it takes to make contributions amounting to US$ 10 billion, as soon as possible, to the Islamic Solidarity Fund for Development, established within the Islamic Development Bank (IDB). In this regard, we applaud the pledges made so far by some OIC donor countries. As part of our common desire to make the 11th Islamic Summit in Dakar a landmark in the embodiment of Islamic solidarity, we have shown great interest in the need to mobilize Zakaat funds in the OIC geographical area and allocate them rationally and efficiently to the needy so that such a pillar of Islam is made a vital aspect of Islamic solidarity.

The Islamic renewal we have sought to introduce since the 3rd Extraordinary Summit in Makkah Al Mukarramah should also materialize through a speedy human resource development process of high quality in OIC member states by giving special importance to science and technology, among other educational disciplines, outlined as priorities under our Ten-Year Programme of Action. Consequently, we urge OIC member states to strive for high-level training, good quality education designed to promote creativity, research, innovation and development as outlined under the Ten- Year Programme of Action, particularly with the IDB's support under its Scholarship Programme.

Within the same drive of Islamic renewal, we call on member states and their scholars to seek to unify the Islamic calendar and thus boost Islam's image in the world.

For all the foregoing aspirations to materialize progressively and resolutely, not only must OIC member states make a contribution but the OIC General Secretariat's capacity to take action must be boosted properly and its operational mechanisms improved continuously through a review of its charter. We have pledged to comply with its orientations so as to ensure that the OIC remains increasingly credible on the international scene.

In these early years of the 3rd millennium, we stretch our arms to other leaders of the world and to inter-governmental organizations pursuing the OIC's same goals of peace and cooperation so that, in a collective drive, we would build a humanity that is in harmony with itself by promoting values shared by peoples and fostering their interdependence through fruitful cooperation while respecting religious and cultural idiosyncrasies.

This is the true meaning of the dialogue of civilizations that took the shape of a declaration at the 8th Islamic Summit in Tehran; a noble idea that the United Nations endorsed by adopting an international convention for a code of conduct on mutual knowledge and closer ties between the peoples of our planet.

Axel Brot

(From previous issue)

Sharia, nor putsch" (trying to taint the AKP with the fundamentalist brush), to the the collusion between acting President Ahmet Necdet Sezer and the Constitutional Court (sworn to uphold the military prerogatives) in provoking a constitutional crisis to block the election of the popular Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul to the presidency.

Since Turkey's main Western allies are decidedly unhappy with the successes of reform and the growing self-confidence of the government of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Merkel and her cohorts are engaged in a rather vicious game of delegitimizing Turkish aspirations through veiled threats and humiliations. It is not only the moving goal posts game that Turkey has to negotiate.

It is the kind of cued European discussion that says in effect, "We will make sure to prevent the EU membership of Turkey" (whatever the domestic repercussions in the several million strong Turkish community in Germany), that is designed to coerce the AKP into giving up. There is also the tidy side-payment to consider, namely, the domestic delegitimization of the AKP and the reempowerment of the deep state, now represented by the Nationalist Movement (MHP) party and Turkey's oldest political party, the Turkish Republican Party (CHP) that has served Western geopolitics oh-so-well.

Tying the Turkish government into knots, the US government and many of the European media are lauding the constitutional vocation of the Turkish military to protect the secular state (implying again that the AKP is intent on turning Turkey into a sharia state) while, at the same time, European politicians raise the specter of the threat of military intervention in Turkish politics as proof that Turkey is not EU material. In the same fashion, "high European officials" do background briefings on how a military campaign against the PKK in Iraq would strain NATO and end Turkey's accession negotiations because it would be proof that the Turkish government - which is against intervention - cannot control its military. It is a perfidious set-up because the US and Israel (with German support) are doing everything to strengthen and use the Iranian PKK network for its proxy campaign against Tehran.

But why are these forces fighting so hard to terminate Turkey's EU prospects?

The answer lies not in the new conservative/right-wing obsession with occidental identity politics or with the enlargement blues. The US was denied the use of Turkish territory for attacking Iraq from the north; Turkey insisted, instead, on its Montreux Treaty prerogative of refusing a permanent American naval squadron in the Black Sea. It has rather relaxed political, and high-growth economic relations with its neighbors, Syria and Iran. It has been accused of dragging its feet on the Nabucco gas pipeline, designed to bring Central Asian gas to Europe and to circumvent the Russian pipeline system.

It has, in fact, excellent political and economic relations with Russia while having gone out of the 1990s business of subverting the Central Asian republics. Furthermore, it angered Israel with its discreet contacts with Hamas and by cooling down the political scope of the military and intelligence relationship (as well as its attendant business opportunties). And it hurt powerful interests with a more serious engagement with Interpol.

In other words, the AKP government is striving to scale down the use of Turkey as a strategic platform for all sorts of mayhem, focusing instead quite successfully on regional trade and investment opportunities to maintain Turkey's economic growth - thus stabilizing a growing middle class of "black Turks". This approach, though, crimps US efforts to expand the strategic threat against Iran. Even more importantly, it limits American access to the Caucasus and Central Asia and hampers its plans for pulling the Ukraine, Georgia and Azerbaijan into a permanent and much more extensive military relationship.

In sum: though prudent enough to have accomodated the Turkish military's usual level of cooperation with Western (US, Israeli, and German) operations against its neighbors, it still disregarded the demands of the Western grand strategy. Its policies did nothing to help in the "great game" of turning the Caucasus and Central Asia into a lever to be used against Russia and China. Neither did the Turkish government do enough for the shorter-term payoff, ie, gaining control over Central Asian oil and gas. All of this did not win the Turkish government friends in the right places. It set itself up, instead, for some variant of a regime-change operation in which the campaign against Turkey's EU aspirations will play a pivotal role.

Though the Turkish military is always good for a coup d'etat, it may be difficult to do it this time without an inopportune level of violence ("Chileanization") since the AKP won the elections resoundingly. There are other options available that might teach the forces of Turkish reform lessons about red lines and overreaching. A short walk down memory lane might illustrate what is possible.

One of the most successful - and "blackest" - of US-British "black operation" against a Western, albeit neutral, country was carried out in first half of the 1980s. In 2000, none other than Reagan's secretary of defense, Caspar Weinberger, declassified it in an interview with Swedish TV in the context of an investigation into the affair of the "Soviet submarines".

Then Swedish prime minister Olaf Palme was a real thorn in Western flesh. Apart from his backing for the African National Congress and the Palestine Liberation Organization, he was very vocal in his criticism of the increasingly dangerous American confrontation policies towards the Soviet Union. His stance enjoyed widespread support within the Swedish population. This changed rather dramatically with the worldwide frenzy about "the Soviet aggression of neutral Sweden", when Swedish territorial waters were repeatedly "violated by Soviet submarines" and by landings of "Soviet special forces" on the Swedish coast. These "incursions" stopped with the still unresolved murder of Palme in 1986, despite two unsuccessful attempts to convict a man named Christer Pettersson for the crime.

With a pleased smirk, Weinberger confirmed that there was nothing Soviet in the violation of Swedish territorial waters (the Soviets "didn't have the capabilities"). There were, instead, routine exercises, "between the Swedish navy and the American and British navies and since they were routine, the Swedish admiral responsible saw obviously no need to inform his superiors or his subordinates about the nature of the "enemy".

It was, in fact, not quite a "regime change", but a joint US-UK operation together with the top brass of the Swedish navy and Swedish intelligence, conducted against the foreign policy of the Swedish government. Since then Sweden has been rather careful not to challenge American policies - with the exception perhaps of the very popular Foreign Minister Anna Lindh, in line to become the next prime minister. She was stabbed to death in 2003 by a mentally disturbed young immigrant.

At the time, such operations brought the world close to the brink of nuclear war. The Soviets understandably saw this as a crucial

indicator that the US was preparing its allies, and battling with a powerful peace movement, for nuclear preemption against the "increasingly aggressive" and "brazen" Soviet Union.

A variant of such an operation today, though sure to have its own blowbacks, would certainly not involve that kind of risk. It would also take into account that the Turkish military and intelligence are not as monolithic as they once were: there is kind of nationalist reaction to the easy contempt with which they are taken for granted. But it would change Turkey's political horizon for good: a policy subjected to a permanent "strategy of tension", countering democratic aspirations with the power of the deep state. And from a certain perspective, this is an eminently desirable outcome. It would make Turkey the grateful recipient of Sarkozy's idea of a Mediterranean community and Merkel's notion of a special relationship.

Gloomy old hands There might have been room, of course, for a debate in good faith about Turkey's implementation of the EU's acquis communautaire. This is what the "open-ended" negotiating process was all about. It is being poisoned, however, by the bad faith characterizing Merkel's and Sarkozy's approach towards Turkey.

The decay of responsible diplomacy towards an ally and the rise of culturalist demagoguery is the symptom of something one might call a "proto-totalitarian transition" taking place under the guise of the "war on terror". It is led by the decay of responsibility and predictability in the conduct of American foreign policy. Thus, for not a few senior German diplomats - those whose career took off under former chancellor Helmut Schmidt or under foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, and those military planners who still remember the war scare of the first half of the 1980s - there is no light at the end of the tunnel.

The American inability to secure a more stable international environment, the combination of militancy and overreaching, provide the terms of reference for the gloominess of these senior perennials. They are certainly not peace-at-any-price bleeding hearts nor closet dissidents. They have an ingrained propensity to look at the world as the stage of "them versus us".

They come from families of civil servants, academics, and military officers who can well sort out the difference between the "upstairs" and "downstairs" - worlds of international politics. In other words, they are as solidly "Western" or "Atlanticist" as one could wish. And they are also the first generation of senior German bureaucrats who have been deeply comfortable with the absence of great power ambitions and with the German role as a civilian power.

Their outlook and their reflection of Germany's collective experience makes them value stability; at least insofar as any blowback resulting from the use of force should be less than the threat countered. This, of course, can be liberally interpreted and does not offer much for dealing with unpredictability. But prudence, skepticism, and an ironclad sense of self-limitation provided the habits for navigating in the wake of US and Israeli policies.

These old hands don't write papers, they do not share their concerns in staff meetings, they may not even communicate them in more formal settings. Nevertheless, the unease is palpable and it is the retirees who are voicing it, with different emphases and different degrees of bluntness. These are men such as Schmidt, with his reputation as a no-nonsense Atlanticist; the conservative former minister of defense, Volker Ruhe; the retired head of the planning staff under Ruhe, Vice-Admiral Ulrich Weisser; the former foreign policy speaker of the conservatives' parliamentary caucus, Karl Lamers. They are well acquainted with the new crop of their American counterparts who prepare, control or execute American policies with brittle arrogance and with the crisis- and confrontation-prone default setting of American foreign policy formation.

For quite a few of them, however, the most worrying indication that the United States is irrevocably set on dragging the world into a nightmare of continuous and chaotic violence, is twofold: the flight or dismissal of senior, conservative professionals from the executive branch of the government and the unrestrained, strangely exhibitionist glorying of many American politicians at the ability to inflict unrestrained violence.

One might add a third one, relevant especially to diplomats who had been posted in the Middle East, or to the classicists: the wholesale looting and the destruction of 5,000 years of Mesopotamian antiquities, judged on par with the Spanish eradication of the complete written record of the Mesoamerican civilizations as well as the cultural heritage of all Indian cultures that they could lay their hands on; and one that also ranks with the British burning of 3,000 years' worth of Chinese books, historical records, and documents during the Second Opium War. This barbaric lack of respect for one of the most important heritages of mankind speaks volumes about the mindset this war has exposed.

There is the realization that institutional blocks have been disabled and with it their career premium on a healthy sense of the need to employ US power carefully - to acknowledge its executive, legal, and political limitations. But since the 1970s, patient, alliance-building ideologue-adventurers, think-tankers and journalists, have crept up through the institutions, using and being used, joining the fantasies of redemption, revenge, plunder, and control over the world, into an action program for employing American power.

The style betrays the character. Since the ambitions of these ideologues are much larger than their education, they flatter themselves into believing they are the New Romans, that they write history on a even greater scale than Titus Livius; and their vanity expects awe, not reason. But they are acting out the grand guignol version of empire whose points of reference might be Sallust, Petronius or Procopius, those who castigated or ridiculed or despaired at the corruption and the pretentions of its personnel.

It is the remarkable lack of decorum, the intentional staging of bullying language, rich in threats and insults, the resentful hypocrisy, the slightly unhinged display of bad faith when diplomacy and suasion are the order of the day, that has convinced even some of the "just-a-bad-patch" hopefuls that the bad times are here to stay.

The fear beneath much of the uneasiness has to do, of course, with memories of what happens when the resentments and dreams of omnipotence of a political class are hijacked by those who promise to give them satisfaction on a historic scale.

During the Cold War, there was always a mad, though well-connected, fringe that gravitated towards American strategic policies: eg, Edward Teller with his notion of rescuing the very small, "valuable" part of humanity in the depths of mines in order to reseed the earth after nuclear war; Sidney Hook with his conviction that Western belief in the transcendent gave it the crucial nuclear-war edge over the communists who only believed in the here and now; the psychopaths within the CIA, like Sidney Gottlieb who headed the agency's MKULTRA mind control program, or counter-intelligence chief James Jesus Angleton; and the many secular and religious milleniarists in the White House, the military, in Congress, and in think-tanks, who were intent on an apocalyptic resolution to the seemingly endless uncertainties of the Cold War. But to the end, wiser heads prevailed - if only just.

It did not last. The American political class seems to have drawn all the wrong conclusions from the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union. Its leisurely stroll towards permanent global hegemony just did not happen. Thus, frustration and the craving for revenge have become main drivers of US policies. The events of September 11 focused their common dysfunctionality, but they are not its root cause.

(Source: Asia Times Online Ltd. Axel Brot is the pen name for a German defense analyst and former intelligence office.)