“The fact is that Myanmar’s Muslims should not be forgotten because their problem is still unresolved,” Ayatollah Makarem Shirazi said in a meeting with a number of officials of the Iranian Red Crescent Society in the central city of Qom on Sunday.
The Rohingya Muslims are facing life-threatening problems inside Myanmar and have been seeking refuge outside of the country, he noted.
“…We, as Muslims, should join hands (to save the Rohingya) since they are our religious brothers and we have a responsibility (to help them),” the cleric went on to say.
The Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar have long faced severe discrimination and have been the targets of intensified violence since 2012.
Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslim refugees have fled recent violence in Myanmar since August this year when the military started a crackdown on the Muslim minority.
The UN top human rights official has 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 in September 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.