Madani to the Security Council: OIC takes a four-prong approach to addressing the challenges in MENA region

Date: 01/10/2015

In his statement to the Security Council in the open debate on “Settlement of conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa and countering terrorist threat in the region,” in connection with the agenda item “Maintenance of international peace and security”, the Secretary General of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), Iyad Ameen Madani, stressed that as a committed and strategic partner of the UN system and of the international community, the OIC exerts every possible effort to bring remedies to these intertwined and daunting challenges the MENA region is witnessing. However, the Secretary General urged that while assuming responsibility as the international community to provide solutions and remedies, that it should be honest and properly diagnose the historical backgrounds and root causes and the dynamics which have brought about all the disasters and failures that need to be dealt with now. “We must also analyze whether the international and regional peace and security mechanisms are capable of meeting today’s hurdles,” said Madani. He added: The paralysis in the region, the absence of a paradigm of a peaceful region and an intellectual malaise that took over a Muslim world intent on regurgitating, instead of reinvigorating its traditions, cultural expressions and intellectual discourse; coupled with the absence of an international collective political will to tackle the conflicts in the Middle East, and what seems to be chronic divisions within this Council, have allowed such menaces in the region to continue and reach the proportions we are here to contemplate today. Therefore, the Secretary General said that the multifaceted dimension of the region’s conflicts must be addressed. Within this context, the OIC initiates specific projects that focus on understanding and addressing: i) the political and socio-economic contexts that bring forth conditions conducive to the spread of terrorism and violent extremism; ii) the need to counter all types of radical extremist discourse in order to delegitimize the violent and manipulative acts committed in the name of religion, ideology or claims of cultural superiority; iii) the underlying causes of sectarian violence; the attempts to politicize the sectarian differences, the emphasis on sects as the essence of identity, and iv) the potential of external actors penetrating terrorist and extremist groups for the purpose of serving their own political agenda, and the threat of non-Arab and non-Muslim foreign fighters.

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