Paper Tiger
Part 129 is very much a paper tiger where it concerns effective oversight of an operator with an AOC from a country that will not or can not provide proper oversight over its carriers operations, maintenance practices and regulatory compliance . Europe has its blacklist and the americans have a category rating sytem that looks at the level of oversight as one of the more important elements in determining access to their respective nations.
IOSA audits are indeed a far better yardstick against which to measure the "quality" of a carrier. Many carriers in this part of the world haven't gone through these audits yet though.