Rohingya: Monsoon Season

Debate between Jo Stevens and Anne Main

Tuesday 8th May 2018 Westminster Hall

[Jo Stevens]

I could not have put it better myself. What was most shocking about Kutupalong was the number of children there. I have never seen anything like it, and I hope never to again.

It is now nearly nine months since the August 2017 slaughter and rape by the Burmese military. One shocking statistic is that an estimated 60,000 Rohingya women are pregnant in Kutupalong and other refugee camps along the southern Bangladeshi border. Many of those women are victims of brutal sexual violence, used by Burmese soldiers as a weapon of genocide. Pramila Patten, the UN envoy on sexual violence, has described it as

“a calculated tool of terror aimed at the extermination and removal of the Rohingya as a group”.

Aid agencies are preparing for a surge of births and abandoned babies at the camps, and it is reported that Bangladeshi social services have already taken in many refugee children whose parents have been murdered, have got lost or disappeared among the hundreds of thousands of people in the camps, or are unable to care for and support their children, having lost everything they owned in the flight from Burma. There is deep concern that many more children will be abandoned in the coming weeks by mothers who are victims of rape and cannot bear to keep their babies.

[Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)]

Does the hon. Lady share my concern that in the memorandum of understanding there was a discussion about the status of those children, who will potentially be taken in by the Bangladeshi Government and not given any recognition of their vulnerability?

[Jo Stevens]

The hon. Lady is right. Not only do the Rohingya have no citizenship from where they came; they are now in a sort of no man’s land in Bangladesh, and children are obviously particularly vulnerable.

A new generation of victims of this terrible and evolving crisis is about to develop, and these desperate people now face a further tragedy as the monsoon season hits and threatens to wipe out even more lives. We know that Bangladesh can be hit by some of the most severe monsoons in the world, with 80% of Bangladesh’s annual rainfall occurring between May and September. Severe cyclones have killed thousands of people there within living memory, and those victims were not living in flimsy shelters in refugee camps.

In Kutupalong, we saw the shelters that people were living in, some of which consisted of just a piece of tarpaulin tied to a tree or wall and pegged to the dry, dirty ground. Others consisted of a few bamboo sticks and a bit of plastic sheeting on steep hillsides. They were crammed next to each other, with little space for people to live. In Cox’s Bazar, more than 102,000 people are in areas at risk of being directly affected by flooding and landslides in the event of heavy rain.