Senior Iranian cleric Ayatollah Nasser Makarem Shirazi decried the United Nations’ inaction in the face of the recent mass killings of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar and said some Western countries’ interests are the reason for the inaction.
“The UN only condemns (the killings) and does not act because of the interests of some Western countries in this massacre,” Ayatollah Makarem Shirazi said in a speech on Wednesday.
The cleric further questioned some Muslim countries’ silence on the issue and said, “Aren’t these (Rohingya) our Muslim brothers?”
He called on Islamic countries’ foreign ministers to hold a meeting to work out a quick solution to the crisis.
Ayatollah Makarem Shirazi also suggested that a delegation of Muslim clerics could be sent to Myanmar to hold dialogue with the Southeast Asian country’s government on the issue.
The Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar have long faced severe discrimination and have been the targets of intensified violence since 2012.
On September 12, the UN refugee agency said the number of Rohingya Muslim refugees that have fled recent violence in Myanmar has spiked to about 370,000.
Earlier, the UN top human rights official accused Myanmar of carrying out “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing” against Rohingya Muslims.
Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the UN high commissioner for human rights, said the military’s “brutal” security campaign was in clear violation of international law, and cited what he called refugees’ consistent accounts of widespread extrajudicial killings, rape and other atrocities.
(TNA)
