Egyptian Baha'is Demand Their Rights Again

Another article was published in the daily independent newspaper "Nahdat Misr" (Rise & Renaissance of Egypt) on 21 September 2006, entitled "We want nothing more than the religious section [on ID cards]." The subtitle was "They said that it is incomprehensible that a five-year-old child remains without a birth certificate just because he is a Baha'i."

The article states: "the last few months were not the beginning of Egypt's era for the Baha'i [Faith], the repeated flow of information confirms that the age of the Baha'i [Faith] in Egypt exceeds the period of a century...." It goes on to say, "we have not heard a single voice from the Baha'is in Egypt since the dissolution of the Baha'i Assemblies by the late president Gamal Abd el-Nasser in the fifties [1960]...."

Later on after reporting on the usual false accusations that the "Baha'is are linked to the United States and Israel," he reported statements made by Dr. Basma Moussa, an Egyptian Baha'i and a surgeon at Cairo University, that "the recent movement by the Baha'is should be looked at in the context of implementing their citizenship rights after being cornered [left with no options], and all their livelihood affairs came to a halt as a result of the government's actions preventing them from obtaining official ID documents...."



He then reported her statement that "it is not comprehensible that a five-year-old child remains without a birth certificate just because he is a Baha'i." and that "the recent movement has nothing to do with foreign influences, proven by the fact that the Egyptian Baha'is did not resort to taking their case to the world community, but rather pursued the legal avenues within Egypt's court system in order to obtain their rights...." She later clearly objected to the baseless and false accusations that have been circulating in the Egyptian media and the misinformation campaign propagated against the Baha'is in Egypt.