Human Rights in Myanmar

Imran Hussain Excerpts

Wednesday 19th April 2023 Westminster Hall

[Imran Hussain (Bradford East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward, in this important debate on human rights in Myanmar. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford West (Naz Shah) for bringing this important debate before the House.

Tragically, as we look around the world today, despite what we are told and led to believe, we see that human rights are not the universal, inalienable and inherent rights of all humanity that they are supposed to be. The fact is that so many across the globe continue to face persecution, abuse and injustice. Rights are nothing more than a myth—afforded to some but not others, unless of course it suits the needs of richer, more powerful nations.

In Myanmar, the Government and authorities are guilty of persecuting and oppressing countless different minorities. I echo the serious and important points made already, in particular by my hon. Friend, but I will keep my remarks in particular to the Rohingya, whose human rights and protections from abuses have been—I think we can all agree—non-existent. For decades now, the Rohingya have faced systemic discrimination at the hands of Myanmar’s Government. So despicable is their treatment, they are regarded as even less than second-class citizens in their own country, denied the right to citizenship, driven from public places and segregated from society.

For those with even a passing interest in the region, those human rights abuses faced by the Rohingya are not unknown—they are no secret. The Rohingya have been one of the most persecuted peoples for decades. The abuses are well documented, not just by numerous human rights organisations and the United Nations, but by the Rohingya who fled Burma for safer countries and even by the Rohingya diaspora living in the UK, including in my constituency, which I am proud to say is home to one of the largest Rohingya communities in the UK, if not the whole of Europe.

On that point, Bradford is a city of sanctuary from anywhere. We are a proud city of sanctuary, which welcomes people from across the world. Make no mistake: those fleeing persecution, oppression and injustice, wherever that may be in the world, will always be welcome in my city of Bradford. The Rohingya community has made a fabulous and fantastic difference to the diversity, culture and richness of our great city, and they will always be welcome there.

It is utterly inexcusable that the international community continues to stand by and do nothing, knowing full well that the Rohingya face such horrific human rights abuses in Myanmar. What is most unforgiveable is that the world did nothing when the Rohingya faced some of the gravest human rights abuses and worst crimes against humanity imaginable in 2017, when the Burmese military, joined and emboldened by armed thugs and militia groups, who had longed for the opportunity to wipe the Rohingya from the country, marched through countless Rohingya villages, razing them to the ground and savagely slaughtering innocent, defenceless men, women and children.

To be clear, I know full well that, as that grave act of ethnic cleansing was taking place, the UK Government did absolutely nothing. I remember all too clearly standing up in the Chamber of the House of Commons in autumn 2017—as well as speaking privately to Ministers—to implore the Foreign Office to act, only to be told time and again that it was not the UK’s place to get involved, and that they did not want to upset the fragile democracy in Myanmar.

After so many years of military dictatorship, of course we all wanted to see Myanmar become a full, vibrant democracy but, as I told the House, the road to democracy can never be built on persecution, paved with ethnic cleansing and genocide, or stained with the blood of innocent men, women and children. That is a price we should never be prepared to pay. Yet I was ignored by our Government, who continued with their refusal to act, fearful of undermining democracy in Myanmar.

Where did that approach end up? Barely more than three years after the Rohingya genocide, encouraged by the world’s reluctance to act and its willingness to turn a blind eye to war crimes, the Burmese military overthrew the Government anyway, just as we all expected. The inaction of the international community and its unwillingness to stand up for the Rohingya, who were chased out of their homes, tortured, raped, murdered in the street and driven from their country at the barrel of a gun, is clearly evident in the fact that, even now, nearly six years later, the Rohingya still do not have justice for what they faced.

The generals and commanders who ordered that brutal wave of violence against an unarmed, defenceless civilian population, and the soldiers and thugs who carried it out, have yet to face any accountability for their actions, besides a few limited and toothless sanctions for those who participated in the military coup. As each year passes, justice gets further and further away and out of reach for the Rohingya. Because the international community failed to act with sufficient speed or force when the Burmese military and its thugs were burning down homes and spilling Rohingya blood, those responsible will likely now never face the consequences of their actions. They will never be forced to answer before a court for grave and contemptible crimes against humanity.

I come here today, not just with a condemnation of the Burmese military and Government for their record on human rights abuses against the Rohingya and other minorities, and their deliberate, planned genocide, but with a condemnation of our own Government, whose callousness towards the human rights of the Rohingya meant that they were found wanting when the Rohingya needed them the most. Our Government’s ineffectiveness, indecision and inaction, even as the number and speed of Rohingya refugees fleeing eclipsed the horrific genocide in Darfur in the 1990s, cost the lives of thousands of Rohingya. Because neither the UK Government nor the international community stopped the genocide of the Rohingya even as it was taking place, more than 1 million Rohingya refugees now face a bleak and uncertain future in one of the largest refugee camps in the world—a point well made by my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford West—located inside one of the most dangerous and natural disaster-prone regions on the planet.

In the squalid conditions of the camp in Cox’s Bazar, where refugees face disease, dirty water, fires, monsoons and floods, the first generation of Rohingya children born outside Myanmar to parents who fled the genocide are now reaching school age. However, the chances of their getting a good education to succeed beyond the camp are slim, and the chances of ever seeing the country where their parents were born are even worse, with no real prospect of the Rohingya ever being safe if they return to Myanmar.

The international community does not care. Funding for refugees is drying up, with barely 50% of the funding target for 2022 set by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees met. It is clear that those children, their siblings and their parents have been forgotten and abandoned by much of the world, who have simply moved on to the next crisis.

The UK Government are not excluded from this charge of abandoning Rohingya refugees. Time and again I have told them about my constituents who have close relatives living in the refugee camps in Bangladesh who fled the genocide—close relatives who are eligible even under normal visas to come to the UK, but who are unable to do so because when they are confined to the camps they are unable to cut through the mountains of red tape that the Home Office puts in their way. Despite knowing those problems and the challenges they face, the Government refuse to make it any easier and deliberately prevent vulnerable Rohingya who should be able to come to the UK from doing so.

The Government tell us that they will stand up for human rights across the world, as of course they rightly should. But what they seem to forget is that they cannot pick and choose which human rights abuses they can act on, and which they can turn a blind eye to. Human rights are universal and the abuse of human lives must be acted upon, regardless of any other thing. They cannot single out some of the abuses that are taking place around the world and treat them with greater importance than others—not if human rights truly are universal, unalienable and inherent to all of humanity, as they rightly should be.