Persecution against Rohingya has ancient roots: Egypt’s amb.

CAIRO – 18 September 2017: The unfortunate persecution of Rohingya Muslims on the hands of Buddhist in Myanmar has ancient roots, said Egypt's ambassador to Myanmar, Khalid Abdel Rahman.

Myanmar has been the scene of several ethnic violent conflicts during the last years, but the Muslim community is suffering the most, said Abdel Rahman during a meeting of the religious committee in the House of Representatives on Sunday.

According to media reports, more than a million people of the Rohingya Muslim community in Myanmar, previously known as Burma, are facing state-sponsored genocide and has been systematically persecuted and expunged from the national narrative — often at the behest of powerful extremist groups from the country’s majority Buddhist population and even government authorities.

He added that the Rohingya have undergone decades of discrimination and disenfranchisement, stressing that this crisis should be seen in isolation from other domestic problems.

The Burmese government's official position is that the Rohingya are interlopers from neighboring Bangladesh, despite many having lived in the country for generations, and it refuses to acknowledge their collective name, claiming that the Rohingya are illegal Bengali immigrants.

"I met with the Foreign Minister of Myanmar before I came to Cairo. He told me that we do not have the so-called Rohingya,” said Abdel Rahman.

The Rohingya community is located in the Rakhine State in the western part of the country, making up one-third of the population. Ethnic discrimination has prohibited the Rohingya from several public services such as education, health care and employment. More than 140,000 Rohingya people live in inadequate camps where they barred from travelling outside their villages without permission.

Media reports documented the systematic deterioration of the Rohingya's situation since communal violence broke out in June 2012 in Burma’s Rakhine State.

Earlier this month, the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Ahmed al-Tayyeb, delivered a televised speech on the Rohingya crisis and called on the international community to deliver an act of justice to the Muslim victims who suffer ethnic violence, describing it as “a war crime”.