The Rohingya and the Myanmar Government

Sarah Champion Excerpts

Tuesday 17th October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Champion (Rotherham) (Lab)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Rushanara Ali) and the hon. Member for St Albans (Mrs Main) for securing this necessary debate. I also thank my hon. Friend for the vital work that she has done in raising awareness of the persecution of the Rohingya. Sadly this abuse is not new. In 1992, a cross-party early-day motion criticised the “systematic extermination” of the Rohingya in Burma. Some 25 years later, the extermination continues.

The most recent UN report contains witness statements detailing shocking acts of violence and humiliation: children and elderly people burned in their homes; mass use of gang-rape, including soldiers gang-raping girls as young as five; victims, including children, forced to watch relatives and loved ones tortured and killed; and a pregnant woman raped, her stomach cut open, her unborn baby killed, and her nipples cut off.

Since August, more than 540,000 Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh, taking the total now in Bangladesh to more than 800,000. Sickeningly, Amnesty International and some of our colleagues have said that there are clear indications that the Burmese authorities have been deliberately targeting the Rohingya as they flee, placing landmines at border crossings.

[Paul Scully]

Does the hon. Lady agree that landmines are terrible not just for those in the present, but in 10 or 20 years’ time when, hopefully, this has been solved and children are out playing?

[Sarah Champion]

That is the perversity of the situation, and we have our eyes wide open.

The Secretary of State for International Development has said that children are at risk of “sexual violence and trafficking”. The International Rescue Committee said that there are

“reports of girls in Rohingya camps being raped or abused when going to the toilet or collecting firewood.”

There are those who suggest that there are two sides to this story, and that paramilitary attacks mean that the Rohingya are to blame for the violence. Nothing can ever justify the horrors that innocent Rohingya are suffering. The UN report contains a witness statement of a 12-year-old Rohingya girl. She told the UN team:

“They surrounded our house and started to shoot. It was a situation of panic—they shot my sister in front of me, she was only seven years old. She cried and told me to run. I tried to protect her and care for her, but we had no medical assistance on the hillside and she was bleeding so much that after one day she died. I buried her myself.”

That was a 12-year-old girl. If a proportional response existed, that could never be it. The UN also said that

“security forces targeted teachers, the cultural and religious leadership, and other people of influence of the Rohingya community in an effort to diminish Rohingya history, culture and knowledge.”

This is planned and co-ordinated ethnic cleansing. I am pleased and relieved that the Secretary of State has echoed the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in describing it in that way, but we need not only strong language, but strong action. The director of International State Crime Initiative has called ethnic cleansing a “euphemism for genocide”. She adds that genocide is a process that takes place over many years. In 2015, the organisation described the violence towards the Rohingya as

“highly organised and genocidal in intent.”

The Bangladeshi Government have already called this genocide so I ask the Minister, if the UN finds that genocide or other violations of international law have been committed, will the British Government support a referral to the International Criminal Court?

[The Minister for Asia and the Pacific (Mark Field)]

It goes without saying that genocide is a legal term at the UN. If the UN goes down that path, of course the UK Government will be the first to be supportive of taking these matters to the International Criminal Court.

[Sarah Champion]

I am hugely grateful for that intervention.

Yesterday, the Foreign Secretary had the opportunity to lead on this in a meeting of the EU’s Foreign Affairs Council. Sadly, the Foreign Secretary’s eagerness to lead at home is not matched by an eagerness to lead abroad. The only action from that meeting was the suspension of invitations to senior Burmese military officials to visit the EU. I agree with Burma Campaign UK that this is absolutely pathetic.

We must do everything in our power to protect the Rohingya and pressure the Burmese Government to immediately cease military operations. We must ensure the implementation of the recommendations in the Annan commission, particularly on the matter of citizenship rights. We must listen to aid agencies and ensure that resources are available to distribute food, reduce the threat of disease and help establish protection services for women and children. We have to remove the red tape so that that can happen. We must pressure the Burmese authorities to allow immediate unimpeded humanitarian access to Rakhine state. Fundamentally, we must no longer turn a blind eye. I urge this House to act now, before it is too late.