The Rohingya and the Myanmar Government

Lord Swire Excerpts

Tuesday 17th October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Rushanara Ali]

I am grateful for that intervention and hope that other Governments will add their support to the humanitarian effort. The UN has stated that more than £440 million is required, but only a fraction of that has been raised. I hope that our Government will encourage other Governments, in the EU and the wider international community, to provide more assistance to the humanitarian effort in Rakhine, Bangladesh and other neighbouring states dealing with the more than 1 million refugees.

Much of the forced segregation stems from the Citizenship Law of 1982, which sets out that full citizenship in Myanmar is based on membership of one of the national races, a category awarded only to those considered to have settled in Myanmar prior to 1824, the date of the first occupation by the British. In Myanmar’s national census of 2014, the Muslim minority group was initially allowed to self-identify as Rohingya, but the Government later reversed this freedom and deemed that they could be identified only as Bengali, which they do not accept because they are not Bengali.

[Sir Hugo Swire (East Devon) (Con)]

The hon. Lady makes an extremely good point about nationality, except that the British Government have shown to the Government in Nay Pyi Taw evidence kept in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office referring to a Muslim population in that part of what is now Burma going back many hundreds of years.

[Rushanara Ali]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman and former Minister for that intervention, as it corrects the misconception that the Rohingya population have no right to be there and are somehow refugees from neighbouring Bangladesh.

Eight months before polling day, the President of Myanmar revoked all temporary registration cards, leaving many Rohingya Muslims without any form of identity and hence unable to cast their votes during the transition to democracy. Despite Aung San Suu Kyi’s election victory, her renowned endeavours as a human rights and pro-democracy campaigner and her own sacrifice and fight for democracy for her fellow countrymen and women, many have expressed grave disappointment at her failure to speak out and raise her voice on behalf of the persecuted minorities of her country, particularly the Rohingya. I share that sadness and disappointment, as someone who, like many in the House, grew up admiring her fight for democracy and courage, but alongside that disappointment we need to focus on the military Government, who hold the balance of power and control the military, defence, policing, local government, the civil service and many other aspects of power. While the media rightly focus attention on Aung San Suu Kyi, an important international figure, we should not let the military and the generals off the hook; let us both hold the civilian Government and particularly the military to account.

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[Mrs Main]

I thank my right hon. Friend for what she has said, but we cannot possibly say enough. The hon. Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Rushanara Ali) is absolutely right: the time to stop doing nothing is now. We must start doing things and start speaking up. Let me put in a plea for contributions to the appeal launched by the Disasters Emergency Committee, whose headquarters I visited with the hon. Lady and my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam. We have some good stories to tell. The DEC is ensuring that the aid goes to the right places, and the British Government have a lot to be proud of.

Let me go back to what we saw. We saw the most brutal attacks. We were taken to the border, and could locate the points where landmines—we saw pictures of them—had been laid. We saw the body of a man being dragged out of the flooded camps. The Bangladesh Government cannot be congratulated enough for how much they are doing, but the tide of misery is overwhelming.

[Sir Hugo Swire]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. She has talked of a tide of misery. Alas, the tide of misery does not just flow across the Bay of Bengal from Rakhine to Cox’s Bazar; it also flows from Rakhine down to Malaysia and other countries, where we have seen horrific evidence of the trafficking of the Rohingya people. People come down from the Bay of Bengal and pick them up in Rakhine—

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

Order. I know that the former Minister has a lot to add to this, but I want to get everyone in. Interventions must be very short. Do not take advantage of other Members, please.

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[Will Quince (Colchester) (Con)]

It is hard to put 600,000 people fleeing persecution into context until one has been to the camps and can visualise the thousands of desperate people. To try to put it into some context, however, the situation is roughly the same as if the population of Glasgow or Sheffield were all fleeing the most horrific persecution and violence. On arriving at the camps with my hon. Friends the Members for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Scully) and for St Albans (Mrs Main), we saw thousands of people—mainly women and children—thick mud, makeshift tents and shacks as far as the eye could see, terrible sanitary conditions, awful latrines, and makeshift schools. The scenes were horrific.

The Bangladesh Government are absolutely trying their best and, to echo the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for St Albans, I do not think that they could be doing any more. Bangladesh is a relatively poor country with a population of 160 million people. A third of the country is underwater, yet they say, “If we can feed 160 million, we can feed another half a million.”

[Sir Hugo Swire]

As Bangladesh is a fellow Commonwealth country, does my hon. Friend agree that we should have some kind of Commonwealth response in the light of Bangladesh’s appalling amounts of additional work to feed and provide hospitality to these fleeing people?

[Will Quince]

My right hon. Friend makes a good suggestion that I hope the Minister takes on.

Bangladesh is doing a great job, but it is under considerable pressure. The movement of people, particularly within the past few months, is on an unimaginable scale—the figure was some 10,000 to 15,000 people just over the past weekend. What camp could cope with such numbers of people desperate for help?

We saw many people and discussed many different stories, most of them absolutely tragic. As my hon. Friend the Member for St Albans said, we picked the people to whom we spoke; we were not directed. Either this is the biggest conspiracy theory in history, or they are telling the truth, and I choose to believe they are telling the truth.

I want to tell the story of a lady whose house was burned, with her husband killed and son murdered before her eyes. She picked up her remaining children and what possessions she could carry, and walked for five days in the hope that things might be better somewhere else. She got to the camps. As I spoke to her, she held her eight-month-old baby, who looked around four months old because they were so malnourished. She was desperately trying to feed her baby as we spoke, but her malnourished body could not produce the milk to do so. As a father myself, it broke my heart. That story is not a one-off; it was the same with every person to whom we spoke, mostly women who had gone through such a horrific ordeal, and in some cases worse.

We visited a makeshift school in the camps and heard 30 or so children singing “We Will Overcome” in English, because hope is all they have left. I am incredibly proud, as we should all be, of the role that the Department for International Development and the United Kingdom are playing through UK aid. It fills me with pride to see UK aid from the British people used all over the camps. Can we do more? Of course we can.

This is my message to all those who sent me emails and Twitter messages after Prime Minister’s questions last Wednesday to say that we should not be sending UK aid: “You are wrong. This is exactly where we should be sending UK aid.” I am incredibly proud of what we are doing, as everyone in this country should be. Yes, we have to do more through diplomacy and work within the United Nations. I am grateful for the Prime Minister’s response, and I know the Minister has visited the region and is as passionate as me about addressing this issue.

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[Paul Scully (Sutton and Cheam) (Con)]

It is important to note the history behind this issue. As we heard earlier from the hon. Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Rushanara Ali), the Rohingya Muslims have been in that part of Myanmar for many hundreds of years. When the British were controlling Burma, they used people from what is now Bangladesh, moving across what was then a very permeable border, for employment and labour. That started to muddy the waters, because we did not register those people or acknowledge them as Bangladeshi. That has given the Myanmar Government the excuse to set a new year zero and to deny these people, who have been there and had roots there for so many years, the right to citizenship.

When I was in Burma in February 2016, at the time of the transition Government, I was really hopeful. Everyone was incredibly optimistic that, as the country came into the light, we would start to see the desperately needed end to the ethnic conflict throughout the country. I ask all Members present, including the Minister, to acknowledge when they condemn what is going on in Rakhine state that the Burmese people are largely behind it, as shocking as that may sound. There are demonstrations in Yangon at which people say, “We stand with the lady, we stand with the army and we stand with the Burmese people.”

Aung San Suu Kyi was speaking at the same time as we were at Cox’s Bazar airport. We have all said that she needs to be far more forthright in condemning the actions in Rakhine state, but we must concentrate on the man who could stop this tomorrow: Min Aung Hlaing, the commander-in-chief. If we whip this up into “the west against a nationalist uprising in Myanmar”, we run a risk, because this is a man who might fancy his chances of presidency in 2020. We might end up with the military getting back into control via the ballot box rather than the gun.

[Sir Hugo Swire]

My hon. Friend is making an extraordinarily powerful point. We should all be familiar with the point that during the transition, the military retained 25% of control in the Myanmar Parliament. The commander-in-chief is no fan of Aung San Suu Kyi, so she is in an extraordinarily difficult position. Yes, we would like her to speak out more, but we must also recognise that in the longer term the progress we have seen in Burma could easily go backwards, and that would endanger peace throughout the country, not only in Rakhine.