Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh

Rushanara Ali Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd May 2023 Commons Chamber

[Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bedford (Mohammad Yasin) on securing this important debate and thank the Backbench Business Committee for allowing time for us to debate this issue. As he mentioned in his opening speech, in January this year we visited Cox’s Bazar and south-eastern parts of Bangladesh with the all-party parliamentary group on Bangladesh. I declare an interest, because the visit was funded by the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association and the parliamentary group is one that I chair, along with the APPGs on Burma and on the rights of the Rohingya.

The Cox’s Bazar area is a beautiful part of the world, with miles of sandy beaches, and has a reputation internally as a tourist destination, but now it is synonymous with the vast refugee camps that are home to 1 million Rohingya refugees. The Rohingya people are the most persecuted in the world, having had their citizenship rights stripped from them in the early 1980s by the Burmese military.

Before the January visit with colleagues, I had visited the camps a number of times, meeting with refugees and speaking to local and international agencies. I can tell the House that this is and remains an urgent and pressing humanitarian crisis. I also had the opportunity to visit Rakhine State on two occasions: once with Refugees International a few years after I was first elected, and then in 2017, before the attacks on the Rohingya population led to the forcing out of 750,000 people, who had to flee to Bangladesh.

Five years on, the situation has got worse, not better. The Burmese military, having perpetrated genocide and attacks on the Rohingya population and forced them out of Bangladesh, went on to carry out a military coup and oust the democratically elected Government two years ago. The impunity granted to the Burmese military over the genocide is a clear reason why it calculated that it could get away with a military coup in Myanmar.

[Imran Hussain]

I thank my hon. Friend for all her continued efforts for the Rohingyas and for that region, and I think Members across the House will agree. Does she agree that in autumn 2017, many of us stood in this Chamber and pleaded with the Government to take action when we saw the beginning of the ethnic cleansing and genocide, only to be told by Ministers that they would not interfere because of the fragile democracy in that region? As she says, what have we achieved by doing that? The Government’s inaction has emboldened the military there.

[Rushanara Ali]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to point out that, in the hope of securing a transition to democracy, the international community failed to see the dangers for minority groups in Burma. I think we can all recognise that that was a massive oversight, despite warnings from some of us in this House—not just in my party but in others—about the need to ease sanctions gradually rather than letting the Burmese military do as it pleased without any levers left for us to influence and curtal its behaviour. The reality is that it was not a full democracy: the Burmese military continued to control the police and the major security operations, and it used Aung San Suu Kyi as a human shield to defend its actions and the bloodshed and genocide that it committed. It is a great source of regret and disappointment that she then defended the military in the International Court of Justice case. That was completely unacceptable.

These are lessons that we all need to learn from rather than continuing in the same vein and allowing genocide to be perpetrated in other countries. In a number of countries—China in relation to the Uyghur Muslim population, for example—ethnic cleansing and human rights violations are increasingly being used by leaders as an acceptable policy tool. We have to do more to prevent ethnic cleansing and the persecution of minorities in a number of countries, and lessons need to be learned.

[Sarah Champion (Rotherham) (Lab)]

I celebrate my hon. Friend, who has campaigned and challenged on the Rohingya since the inception of this awful situation. Does she share my frustration that the Minister sat back when it came to declaring genocide and just waited for the international courts to do it? People are dying as a consequence of this situation.

[Rushanara Ali]

I am grateful for the support that I have had from colleagues across the board, particularly on the Labour side, on this important issue and on ensuring that our Government take action to support the cause for justice in the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. My hon. Friend is right that the UK, as the penholder in the UN Security Council in relation to Myanmar/Burma, has a unique and special responsibility.

We have had a failure of leadership by our Government. That is not a criticism of the relatively new Minister of State with responsibility for the Indo-Pacific, the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Anne-Marie Trevelyan), who recently visited the camps in Cox’s Bazar. I know that she is conscious of the need to seek justice. One of the ways in which we can protect the Rohingya people who remain in Burma is to ensure that the International Court of Justice case led by Gambia is properly supported. That case against the Burmese military is protecting people in Burma from being persecuted. I hope that the Minister will be able to address the point about the need for proper support. The UK Government announced last year that they would support that case, but we need to see that in concrete terms, with the UK joining the Netherlands, Canada and the other countries that were first out to support it. We should be leading the charge.

[Tom Hunt (Ipswich) (Con)]

The hon. Member is making an informative and powerful speech. Does she agree that a number of major countries with huge clout should know better and should have done more and been stronger in their condemnation of the behaviour of the Myanmar regime? That has been disappointing.

[Rushanara Ali]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, who serves as a vice chair of the all-party group on Bangladesh and who is a powerful advocate for the Rohingya people, for working cross-party on this important issue. He is right that we could have done more and should do more, but we can rectify some of those mistakes by ensuring that we support the International Court of Justice case. I welcome the fact that the UK Government have agreed to support a referral to the International Criminal Court, but we need further clarity on what action will be taken to enable that to happen. I recognise the point made by the then Minister about the risk of the Chinese blocking a referral to the International Criminal Court, but we cannot use that as a justification for no action.

Despite the attacks on the Rohingya and other ethnic groups in Burma, the Rohingya are forgotten and face constant threats from the Burmese military in that country, along with other groups. We had a debate in Westminster Hall recently about the situation in Myanmar and the attacks and airstrikes by the Burmese military on their own people, which is causing the displacement of millions within the country and putting at risk their ability to survive because of the way in which the country has been devastated by the military coup and the actions of the Government there. Before, they were persecuting certain groups, in particular Rohingya refugees and other minorities. Now, the whole country is being persecuted by the Burmese military once again. They have seized control, and there seems to be no end in sight to their repression of the people of that country.

More than half the refugees in the camps in Cox’s Bazar are children. A generation of children growing up in refugee camps are being denied a decent education, denied opportunities to grow and develop their talents and abilities, and denied a future. That is not to say that the Bangladeshi authorities and Bangladeshi NGOs, working with international NGOs, have not made an enormous effort. In a context where many countries, including our own and other western countries, struggle to accommodate even a few thousand refugees, Bangladesh has accommodated 1 million refugees, and we commend it for that, but these areas need improvement with our support.

[Mrs Pauline Latham (Mid Derbyshire) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Bedford (Mohammad Yasin) on securing this important debate. The International Development Committee has long been concerned about the situation for Rohingya refugees, in particular those in Cox’s Bazar refugee camp, which we visited some time ago. We saw how important UK aid funding was in supporting refugees there, in terms of both preventing extreme hunger and protecting women and girls from violence. Does the hon. Lady agree that it is crucial for the Government to rethink their 80% cut to aid funding for Rohingya refugees since 2019-20?

[Rushanara Ali]

I am really grateful to the hon. Lady, and I commend her for the work she does on the Committee and her commitment to this agenda, including her work on UN Women. Given that she is in the ruling party, I hope that even if Ministers do not pay attention to what we say, they might pay attention to her and her colleagues, who are making very important points with us. There is cross-party agreement on the need to support those who are struggling, not least because half of them are children and the majority are women.

This is a broader point, but if we are serious about addressing these issues and making sure that refugee crises around the world do not put people in a position where they have to risk their lives and find clandestine mechanisms to get to our shores at the hands of criminals and gangs who try to exploit them, we need to ensure that there is proper support in countries that are hosting the largest number of refugees. That is ultimately the only way in which we are going to be able to address these issues.

Therefore, it is in our self-interest to ensure that those who are in refugee camps in these countries get the appropriate support and protection that they need, so that they are not exploited, and also so that we do not need to use those resources in this country—resources that could go a long way. At the moment, the UK Government are spending £6 million of the overseas development aid budget per day on housing those who have got here, in order to keep them in shelter. If that continues because not enough action is being taken to address the source of the issues, the aid budget will diminish further, which cannot be right. We will have even less scope to help millions of people in other countries and get more value for our money in our aid efforts. These are interconnected issues, and I really hope that they are taken seriously, rather than politicised—which, sadly, has happened on the domestic front while people continue to suffer.

Returning to the way in which the Burmese military have acted, as I mentioned, we are seeing them continuing to act with impunity. That is why, in past debates, we have spoken out about the need for the UK Government to ensure that sanctions are placed on the Burmese military. I welcome some of those that have been introduced, but there is a lot more we can do to make sure the Burmese military do not continue to carry out airstrikes against their own people, because that is forcing more of their citizens to seek refuge elsewhere in other countries.

I pay tribute to our Government and aid agencies, as well as to the Government of Bangladesh and other authorities, for doing incredible work over the past five years to support those who need help—people who face a desperate situation, who have been traumatised and have lost family members. On top of all of that—on top of seeing members of their families brutally killed, women being raped and sons being killed in front of their fathers, which is what I was told on previous visits by men in the camps—they have since faced a global pandemic. They are in a country that is climate-vulnerable and susceptible to floods, and which has its own challenges with high levels of deprivation. For years and years we have seen people with no hope—no hope of being able to return to their homes and build a life with some sense of hope for the future.

That is why it is so disheartening that our Government have responded, not by ensuring that there is appropriate support on an ongoing basis, but by cutting the Rohingya refugee budget by more than 80%. I hope that the messages that have already been provided by colleagues across the House will be heeded, and that the Minister will do all she can to persuade her colleagues not to maintain that cut. According to Burma Campaign UK, what was £112 million in 2019-20 will be £20.26 million in the 2022-23 Budget. The interventions in the early years of the crisis were very welcome: they were significant interventions that saved lives, and of course, I commend the Government for what they did in those early years. All I ask is that Ministers do not continue with the cuts and that they look at restoring the support, for the reasons that have been made clear in the interventions and in the speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Bedford.

The need for aid and compassion is greater, not less. This is not about altruism; it is absolutely in our self-interest to act and make sure that we deal with the issues at source. The United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in Burma, Tom Andrews, reported that 45% of Rohingya families are living on insufficient diets; half of the children are anaemic; four in 10 pregnant and breastfeeding women are anaemic; and four in 10 children have their growth stunted because of poor diets. Imagine what will happen when the budgets go down further. In a letter to United Nations member states in response to what could be a series of further cuts to World Food Programme food rations for the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, he said:

“These cuts will be devastating for a traumatised population that is already suffering from widespread malnutrition”.

As has already been said, when the cross-party delegation that I was a part of visited the camps in Cox’s Bazar in January 2023, people highlighted just how challenging the circumstances were. When I first visited the camps in 2018, a year after the exodus when all those 750,000 people fled to Cox’s Bazar, the men and women, but particularly the women were relieved, although the camps’ conditions were not good, to be in a place where they were not going to be killed. That is how they saw it. They were just relieved that they could sleep without being taken away and raped. They felt that they had found refuge, and they were incredibly grateful to have that. The problem is that years and years on, they cannot see any signs of hope, and it is a true sign of desperation when some of those people say that they would consider going back, even though going back is not an option and the dangers are even greater.

Given how the Rohingya are feeling and where they are in terms of a lack of hope— for reasons that we can understand—we cannot have a situation where we make matters worse by reducing food rations and putting them in a position where there is no hope, and where their survival is in danger. We heard from refugees about that despair and hopelessness, while the people responsible for genocide are still in power with no justice for the Rohingyas. They told us that they had no conception that five years on, they would still be living in refugee camps with little chance of safe return home.

Our lasting impression is that the plight of the Rohingya remains a stain on the conscience of the world. Every humanitarian, diplomatic and Government effort needs to be focused on securing justice for the Rohingya people. That must include safe return to their homes and the legal prosecution of those responsible for the genocide. Women in Cox’s Bazar told us that they wanted more autonomy within the camps. They raised concerns about their safety and that of girls, especially after dark, when the aid workers are absent and there is a lack of security and little light. Notwithstanding the heroic efforts of the aid agencies within Bangladesh, as well as the international agencies and the major NGOs, the Rohingya are living on the brink of what feels like a constant state of humanitarian crisis that will only get worse, not better, if we do not play our part. There is a massive and vital role for international aid, and budgets should be increased as soon as possible to avert disaster.

The situation is worsening, with around 350 people having died at sea trying to escape. That highlights the desperation of the situation. Hostility towards the Rohingya population is increasing in Bangladesh. There was a huge welcome in the beginning and people were helping all over the country, but years have gone by and they have their own pressures, and some of the hostilities are growing. The US Institute of Peace suggests that nearly 70% of Bangladeshi people say that the Rohingya should be sent back to Myanmar immediately, despite the obvious and apparent dangers. Even within the camps, children are denied access to education, and no permanent homes are to be constructed. Refugees are being denied proper sanitation, water and electricity.

There is also the ever-present danger of epidemics. The World Health Organisation reported in March 2023:

“Beyond COVID-19, persistent threats in Cox’s Bazar include diseases such as dengue, diphtheria, and cholera, as well as environmental health challenges like cyclones, floods, and landslides.”

There is evidence of criminal gangs preying on vulnerable people. A report published by the London School of Economics in February stated:

“All the 34 extremely congested camps in…Cox’s Bazaar…have become hubs of organised crime of Rohingya militant groups like the ARSA”—

the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army—

“and other criminal gangs. These groups control everything from drug trafficking to extortion”.

There is also an increased danger of fires. In March this year, a terrible fire ripped through camp 11 in Cox’s Bazar, leaving 12,000 people homeless for a second time. So we need to recognise that the situation is not sustainable, and we have to be active partners and provide the resources needed to make sure the situation does not get worse.

There is much that still needs to be done. Repatriation of Rohingya people is currently impossible, as has been stated. The British Government should make it clear to international partners that there can be no forced repatriation of Rohingya people back to Myanmar. The Rohingya can only return when their citizenship rights are reinstated, and when their full human rights are respected and protected. The UK Government, who have of course slashed these budgets, need to make sure that that support is reinstated. Aid cuts to the Rohingya refugees need to be reversed. The cut in humanitarian aid is now working as a push factor, forcing more people to risk their lives to find a better life, and dying, as I have pointed out. The 50% cut in the UK aid budget to Burma since the coup needs to be reversed if we are not to see a further deterioration in people’s conditions within that country.

As I have said, we welcome the British Government support in principle for a referral to the International Criminal Court and their support for the International Court of Justice referral, and I hope we will get more information from the Minister on what that will mean. It is clear from the continuous reporting that these measures are not being implemented and the Burmese military is still getting away with genocide. So we urge the British Government to support any other justice initiatives taking place, including universal jurisdiction cases, and to reconsider British laws in relation to making universal jurisdiction cases possible in this country.

We must increase the aviation fuel sanctions on Burma, because the military is increasingly using its air power to target civilians across the country. The British Government should speed up sanctioning, and cut off all sources of revenue and arms to the military. This includes sanctioning Myanma Oil and Gas Enterprise and the natural gas industry. The British Government should also increase pressure on India and Pakistan to stop supplying arms and equipment to the Burmese military.

We need to improve in practical ways the support we provide so that conditions are not deteriorating further for the people in Cox’s Bazar. We need to make sure that the Bangladesh Government have the support and encouragement so desperately needed to ensure that education and training are provided to half a million children in that country. We need to allow for proper utilities to be provided, including clean water, electricity, lighting, and drains and sewage, or the situation will just continue to get worse. Action and support are required to make sure that criminal gangs do not prey on the most vulnerable people in the world, which is what is happening at the moment.

I am grateful to the Minister for the visit she made recently, and I hope she will recognise the strength of feeling in this House. Over 100 MPs and peers have supported the campaigns we have run over the years for support in the camps for the most persecuted refugee population in the world. It is not a competition, and we need to support refugees wherever they are—notably, of course, with what is happening in Sudan and Ukraine—but we need to make sure that support is not diverted away from one group to another, because that is not right and it is not going to serve our national interests either.

My plea to the Minister is that I hope she will find the resources needed urgently to stabilise the situation in the camps. I am grateful to colleagues across the House for their support for our campaigns. Ministers have changed regularly, but I believe that it is because of the campaigns from colleagues across the House and in both houses that we have managed to get the referrals and the support for the referrals on the international justice side. I hope the Minister will recognise the strength of feeling about the need to restore the aid budget for those who need it in the camps.

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[The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Anne-Marie Trevelyan)]

I am grateful to the hon. Member for Bedford (Mohammad Yasin) for securing this debate. I pay tribute to his work as vice-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Bangladesh. I am also grateful for the passionate, informed contributions from so many hon. and right hon. Members today. I will do my best to respond to the points raised, although some, particularly those from the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Preet Kaur Gill), are ones that the Minister for Development, my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), will need to answer in more detail. I will make sure that his officials pick up the questions from Hansard as quickly as possible.

This subject absolutely needs to be spoken about, and doing so here today will have an important impact. We should never forget how much the voices of Parliament are heard, listened to and respected not only within our own borders, but across the world. I thank all colleagues for taking the time to spend this evening here sharing their expertise.

The Rohingya, one of the largest stateless populations in the world, have endured, as colleagues have said, decades of systematic marginalisation, discrimination and persecution. During my visit to Cox’s Bazar refugee camps in Bangladesh in March, I saw first-hand the difficulties the Rohingya face and the immense challenges confronting the humanitarian response. My visit afforded me the opportunity to meet NGOs delivering food aid, education and healthcare alongside a number of Government officials working to find solutions both short and longer term.

I had the opportunity to meet groups of Rohingya mothers who described fleeing the brutal violence of the Myanmar military. They told me about their fears for their children’s future. I met them alongside new mums whose children will only know Cox’s Bazar for now and teenage girls empowered to teach new skills throughout their generation of young women. They were an impressive group of young women who gave me hope that they are neither going to give up nor give way to the depression that could otherwise come. They are a really empowering group.

There are close to 1 million Rohingya refugees living in Bangladesh, the majority of whom, as we have heard from colleagues, fled Myanmar and the military-led ethnic cleansing of their people in 2017. I say this when I am talking to people in my constituency to help get our heads around the size of these camps, but Newcastle upon Tyne metro area, which is my nearest big city, is about 800,000 people over a very large area. The million people in those camps are in a very cramped area. That is an enormous number of people, and it is important to stop and think about what that looks like. Each of us, whether MPs in a city or who have a nearby city, should just contemplate for a moment what we are talking about when we try to understand the challenges that we face in trying to help tackle this situation.

As many colleagues have said—it is lovely to have the high commissioner here with us for the debate—we all genuinely want to thank and commend the Bangladeshi Government and all those who live in and around Cox’s Bazar for their generosity in hosting the Rohingya for more than five years in these huge camps. We continue to be steadfast in our support to the Rohingya population and the Government of Bangladesh. It was an honour for me to spend an hour with Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina discussing not only the generosity, but the resilient and patient care that the Bangladeshi Government provide the Rohingya refugees. We will continue to support that response until conditions are right for the safe, voluntary and dignified return of the Rohingya to their homeland.

The UK has provided £350 million to the response in Bangladesh since 2017. That funding has paid for life-saving food, water, sanitation, healthcare and shelter, and it also supports protection work for those vulnerable women and girls. We continue to be a major global donor to the UN’s humanitarian agencies and the Central Emergency Response Fund, providing £160 million this year supporting it in responding to this crisis. The UK Government’s portfolio of support makes us overall the second largest bilateral humanitarian donor to the Rohingya response since 2017. To maintain the much-needed delivery, we are ensuring our aid is used strategically and deploying our combined development, humanitarian and diplomatic expertise on the response. With humanitarian need across the world increasing all the time, global funding is under unprecedented strain and this, sadly, is unlikely to change in the short term.

[Rushanara Ali]

I am grateful for the visit the Minister has done, because she has been able to see the need herself at first hand. The International Organisation for Migration provides Rohingya refugees with materials and services to build and repair their shelters. In the absence of this support, close to half a million refugees will be exposed to the adverse effects of flooding, monsoon and cyclone, as well as of landslides and fire; this country has these occurrences regularly. That will leave them without safe shelter, so the cuts will have a direct effect on the good work that has been done by the Government of Bangladesh and agencies. How can she possibly not address that issue? These agencies are telling us that there is a major issue with this funding cut.

[Anne-Marie Trevelyan]

The hon. Lady continues to raise—with deep eloquence, experience and expertise—some of the many challenges we face. That is why I will continue to work with donors, both traditional and other, to both raise more international funding and ensure that, as many colleagues have said, this is not a forgotten situation. We need to ensure that the NGOs delivering food, energy and multiple aid for healthcare, education and safety, day in and day out, for those living in these camps can be resourced for the medium term. So we are going to continue working very closely with other donors and partners to help move towards a response that is less reliant only on humanitarian aid and thinking about more resilience for the future. There is a number of areas there that I would be very happy to pick up with colleagues offline.

--- Later in debate ---

[Anne-Marie Trevelyan]

The hon. Lady will be aware that we do not discuss future sanctions, but we raise these issues regularly in our role as the penholder and in international forums where we meet other countries—perhaps not Russia at the moment, as it is not participating in any international discussions, but more widely other countries including neighbours of Myanmar.

I shall conclude by saying that the Rohingya people have shown the most extraordinary courage and resilience in the face of incredible hardship that no one should have to suffer. I am genuinely in awe of the spirit they continue to display day by day as they struggle in the camps, with an unbroken spirit, hoping and believing that a better life lies ahead. The UK is committed to continued support for the Rohingya in Bangladesh alongside the 600,000 who remain in Myanmar.

[Rushanara Ali]

I have two points to make. First, the right hon. Lady mentioned that she is working with international partners: can she say a bit more about when her Government will convene a meeting of the UNSC to discuss how the Burmese military are ignoring the provisional measures ordered to prevent the ongoing genocide?

Closer to home, the right hon. Lady mentioned sanctions, and I welcome the sanctions already introduced. She could look at a step related to aviation fuel raised in a recent Westminster Hall debate. Some UK insurance companies are insuring vessels that provide aviation fuel, and the Burmese military are then using the aviation to attack their own people. Some of our companies are literally complicit in providing the fuel and fuelling the airstrikes; will the right hon. Lady look at that, to build on the sanctions introduced already?

[Anne-Marie Trevelyan]

As the hon. Lady and others who work closely with us on this will know, we welcome all evidence, and the sanctions team will always be pleased to look at it and discuss these issues. We do not ever discuss in anticipation where we might impose sanctions, as that might reduce their effectiveness, but I would be pleased to sit down with the hon. Lady or her sources to continue working on where we can use our sanctions powers, with our international partners, to have an impactful effect on reducing the junta’s ability to deliver violence against its own people.

Humanitarian aid will of course continue to play a large role in the short term. As colleagues highlighted, we can see no immediate solution to the crisis, but ultimately the solution is a political one of refugees being able to have a safe return to Myanmar or to find resettlement in other countries. I note that a number of colleagues raised constituency family asks, and I will ensure that those are picked up in due course, with relevant parts of Government working together on them.

We will continue to advocate for better conditions for the Rohingyas in Bangladesh in the short term, and for them to have the important opportunity to work and develop skills and greater self-sufficiency. We will also continue to use all available tools across our international networks to help improve conditions in Rakhine state so that the Rohingya people have a chance to return home voluntarily, safely and with documented rights, which, as colleagues have expressed so eloquently, is the outcome that these refugees hope for.

I hope that colleagues know how important this part of my portfolio is to me. I often say jokingly that I have dozens of countries in my portfolio, and I obviously have no favourites, but, if I am allowed to have areas on which I intend to—and do—spend a lot of my time, I will continue to use all the tools in the FCDO armoury to make progress so that every young woman and child in Cox’s Bazar knows that we are fighting alongside them. I promised the young women I met who called me mama that I would do all that I could, and I thank all colleagues for helping us to do that.