The Rohingya and the Myanmar Government

Gill Furniss Excerpts

Tuesday 17th October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Gill Furniss (Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough) (Lab)]

I join others in paying tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Rushanara Ali) for securing this important and impassioned debate. I pay tribute, too, to all those who have contributed to the debate, particularly those who visited the area recently and have given their accounts in graphic detail; that has greatly helped to ensure that the debate be taken more seriously.

The Rohingya Muslim population in Myanmar has faced persecution for decades. They have been marginalised and victimised, and have had their rights withdrawn by a Government who do not recognise their ethnicity, their language or their customs, and who have sought, through different ways and means, to oust them from land the Rohingya have occupied for centuries.

The disproportionate and overblown retaliation by the Myanmar military, which began on 25 August following the violence by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, which left 12 police officers dead, has now been publicly declared by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights as

“a textbook example of ethnic cleansing”,

and we have already heard some of the reasons why.

The Myanmar military and its civil Government led by the now disgraced Aung San Suu Kyi have refused to allow humanitarian agencies to enter the country to inspect the situation. If I may digress, I would like to point out that Sheffield has already taken steps to remove the freedom of the city award from Aung San Suu Kyi over her silence on the violence that has unfolded, and I hope that the Nobel Committee will also review and reconsider revoking her peace prize.

The reports of systematic human rights abuses are harrowing, and no doubt we have also seen the shocking images broadcast of the Rohingya fleeing their homes and livelihoods. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights reports that the Myanmar military forces, often accompanied by individual Rakhine Buddhist villagers, have surrounded entire Rohingya villages, firing indiscriminately at villagers, setting houses and land on fire, and threatening villagers nearby that if they do not flee the same will happen to them, with the effect of both expelling Rohingya from Myanmar and giving them no option of return. These actions were, as the report notes,

“executed in a well-organized, coordinated and systematic manner”.

The same report gives first-person accounts of young and teenage girls having suffered sexual violence, a tactic we see too often in war and conflict. In one account quoted by the report a 25-year-old woman recounts the moment she heard her sister being raped, saying that four men

“in uniform took my sister when we were hiding in the hills; they raped her in front of us as we were hiding behind the trees.”

Over 500,000 Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh, and they tell similar stories of destruction, killings and sexual violence. What we are witnessing, after proclaiming “Never again” so many times before, is surely

“a textbook example of ethnic cleansing”.

This is all happening in the view of all of us and the international community.

I urge the Government to explore what more they can do to support the efforts to tackle the humanitarian crisis and to continue to lead the international pressure to address the root causes of the crisis: the policies of the Myanmar Government and the actions of the Myanmar military.