HE the Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohamed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani has said that the most urgent matter to discuss is the fate of millions of families and communities living under oppression in the Middle East.
In a speech at a session of the 52nd Munich Security Conference under the title of “Growing Rifts, Power Shifts? The New Geopolitics of the Middle East”, the Foreign Minister said, considering the issue from population perspective more than 6% of the world’s population is living in the Middle East. This figure includes Muslims and Christians, Arabs and Kurds, adding that 57.6mn people are in need of humanitarian aid, including 17.7mn people are either internally displaced or refugees fleeing conflict and persecution.
Reiterating the importance of discussing the balance of power at a time of mounting tensions between regional actors, the Foreign Minister said understanding the new geopolitics of the Middle East requires raising a question as to how the Middle East and North Africa region changed from an era of possible political reform to an era of conflicts and disputes.  
HE Sheikh Mohamed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani added that the region is already reeling from the overwhelming impact of key factors for instability, namely the siege against the Palestinian people, the absence of a just solution and the loss of hope for any corrective step by the international community to end one of the last remaining occupations in the world.  
He explained that massive violations of human rights, chaos, and instability have created a favourable environment for all kinds of destructive interests.
In Syria, the regime’s unprecedented brutality and the failure of the international community to protect civilians from massive bombardment led to two issues, the first of which is the militarisation of the civil revolution, and the second is mounting influence of foreign groups that took advantage of the power vacuum and controlled lands in both Syria and Iraq, he said.  
HE Sheikh Mohamed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani added:  “The historic coexistence of different religions and ethnic groups enrich our culture and society, but the politicisation of sectarian differences is a recent phenomenon that has unfortunately been used and reproduced by regional and international powers and encouraged by the existing competition between countries”.