Myanmar: Rohingya Minority

Chris Law Excerpts

Monday 16th April 2018 Westminster Hall

[Chris Law (Dundee West) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, as ever, Mr Hanson. I begin by thanking those who initiated and signed the petitions that have brought this hugely important issue to Parliament today, and thanking the hon. Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones) for her eloquent and informative speech. From what I have heard today, all of us in this Chamber feel very moved, and we are passionate about continuing to campaign on the plight of the Rohingyas in Myanmar and, now, in Bangladesh.

As I stand here, nearly 1 million Rohingya refugees have fled across the border from Myanmar into Bangladesh, and 700,000 of them have done so since August—in a period of only eight months. Those people have arrived with virtually nothing, and they have fled unspeakable levels of violence. They continue to arrive. What they have witnessed is truly horrific. We have already heard about Government soldiers stabbing babies and throwing them into fires in the middle of villages, and gang-raping girls. We have heard about infants being beaten to death with spades, and about soldiers burning entire families to death in their homes and rounding up dozens of unarmed male villagers and summarily executing them. We have also heard that those fortunate enough to flee the villages face landmines at the border, as they seek to get away from what they have experienced and to reach Bangladesh.

The UN branded the Burmese Government’s actions “textbook” ethnic cleansing, but that was polite, to say the least. Many of us, in the Chamber and outside it, are beginning to see it clearly as genocide. Five hundred people a week are still fleeing and making the journey to Bangladesh. Almost eight months on from the start of the Rohingya crisis, Min Aung Hlaing, the head of the military—the commander in chief—has still paid no price for overseeing the atrocities that are taking place.

If we look at the history, there is growing evidence that the Burmese army did not simply respond, as it claimed, to the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army’s attacks in August 2017, but that it had been preparing for a brutal and disproportionate assault on the Rohingya during the months beforehand—for example, by mobilising and arming local Buddhist vigilante groups. That comes as no surprise to many, because for decades successive regimes and Governments in Burma have pursued a twin-track policy of impoverishment and human rights violations to attempt to wipe out the Rohingya community from Arakan state. Stripped of their Burmese citizenship in 1982 and subjected to shockingly discriminatory laws and practices, the minority Muslim Rohingya community in Burma has been described by the United Nations as one of the most persecuted minorities in the world. Under the Government of President Thein Sein from 2011 to 2016, human rights violations against the Rohingya sharply escalated, as he attempted to use Buddhist nationalism and anti-Muslim prejudice in the country to win public support.

The current Government of Burma, led by Aung San Suu Kyi, continue to implement laws and policies that discriminate against the Rohingya and are designed to drive them out of the country, including starvation, harassment, and intimidation. Aung San Suu Kyi has repeatedly failed to condemn the violence against the Rohingya Muslims. In fact she can barely bring the word “Rohingya” to her lips. I welcome the news that the military has taken some action against some for their role in the massacre. Seven soldiers have, as we heard earlier, been sentenced to

“10 years in prison with hard labour in a remote area”

for participating in a massacre of 10 Rohingya Muslim men. However, journalists are being prosecuted for investigating actions with longer sentences. Two Reuters journalists investigating the massacre were arrested in December and are behind bars awaiting trial. In January there were also clashes between the security forces and Buddhist Rakhine protesters opposed to improving Rohingya rights. Allegations of human rights abuses continue and the situation in Rakhine state remains highly volatile. To date, the Burmese authorities have refused to co-operate with UN human rights officials trying to conduct investigations, refusing them permission to enter the country.

In Bangladesh, the crisis is on an enormous scale. The speed and number of refugee arrivals—the fastest refugee displacement since Rwanda—would test the capacity of any nation. Bangladesh has shown generosity in opening its borders to the Rohingya and its response to the crisis should be commended. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees warned that conditions in Myanmar’s northern Rakhine state

“are not in place to enable safe and sustainable returns”

of refugees, and many Rohingya refugees worry that if they are repatriated from Bangladesh, they will be held in the camps with no rights or citizenship, and under constant threat of renewed military attack. In the camps the misery continues—not directly from the Burmese military but from malnutrition, cholera and other diseases.

The need for collective action is made even more acute by the impending monsoon season, without which the situation has the potential to spiral out of control. When I say it is impending, I mean in the next few weeks. I and some colleagues from the International Development Committee visited Cox’s Bazar six weeks ago and saw the conditions in which Rohingya refugees live. Despite the best efforts of NGOs and the Government of Bangladesh, refugees still live in makeshift shelters built only of bamboo and tarpaulins. Many of the shelters are precariously positioned on land carved into sandy, deforested hillsides. Basic services including clean water, sanitation and healthcare remain inadequate.

As outlined in the Committee’s latest report, before the monsoon season the conditions were dangerous. Now they provide the ingredients for a potential catastrophe. Rain will produce mudslides and flooding in the camps in Cox’s Bazar. An estimated 100,000 people are at risk—more than the total population of my constituency —and those people need to be relocated to safer ground. Efforts are under way to move some people to higher ground, but currently they are inadequate. Basic services are also at risk. A third of health facilities and nutrition centres could be lost, which will increase outbreaks of disease, and particularly water-borne diseases: cholera, typhoid, malaria and gastroenteritis, to name a few. It will put the lives of the 60,000 women reported to be pregnant, and their babies, at risk. We must ensure that emergency action is taken to prevent a further humanitarian disaster during the monsoon season, otherwise many people will die.

The UK has been and continues to be a leading figure in the response in Bangladesh, having given £59 million to the global response. All of us in this Chamber welcome that, but money alone will not solve the immediate crisis. The UK should urge the Government of Burma to allow unhindered access to all parts of Rakhine state, as well as Kachin and Shan states, for international humanitarian aid, human rights monitors and media, and to co-operate fully with the fact-finding mission established by the Human Rights Council, allowing its investigators unrestricted access to all areas in the country.

It is imperative that the UK Government exercise every means available to stop the persecution of Rohingya by the Myanmar military and Government. The decisions by the United Kingdom to suspend training programmes for the military, and by the EU to suspend visits by senior military personnel from Burma to Europe, are welcome. The UK should now put pressure on the UN Security Council to explore all avenues to bring the perpetrators of heinous crimes under international law to justice, and to seek a resolution imposing a global arms embargo on the Burmese army, with targeted sanctions against Senior General Min Aung Hlaing—particularly a global arms embargo. Carefully targeted sanctions against the military will send a powerful message.

The UK Government must act alongside the wider international community and continue to call on the Government of Myanmar to stop the violence immediately and to take robust action against hate speech, discrimination and incitement. There must be a clear message to all stakeholders—civil society, ethnic nationalities, religious communities and the military—to come together, put aside past hatreds, seek political dialogue, recognise and defend the basic human rights and dignity of all, and seek genuine peace with justice.