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.
Sarah Champion
I really appreciate the Minister, because I know she genuinely understands this. This is a spoiler alert to the Chamber, but the International Development Committee will shortly be publishing a report on long-term refugees. When we think about the Palestinian refugees, we are talking about nearly 75 years. As the hon. Member for Peterborough (Paul Bristow) said, everybody wants to be at home and everybody wants to go home. So rather than dealing with the consequences of usually politically unstable and fragile states, what are the Government going to do to try to make sure that people can go home? That is the lasting solution that everybody wants, not keeping on paying taxpayers’ money to deal with the problem. They want to go home.
Anne-Marie Trevelyan
I think we all look forward to reading the hon. Lady’s report, which will, as ever, be insightful and full of opportunities for all of us to consider what some of those long-term solutions might be. As we work on responses that work towards future resilience, we will also be exploring alternative funding options and promoting the positive role that development finance can play in the wider context, because of course the self -sufficiency of the Rohingya is vital to create a sustainable response to this crisis. Access to substantial livelihood opportunities would contribute towards that and help enormously to mitigate the worsening security situation in the camps. This was an area of discussion I had with all those I met on my March visit, including the Prime Minister. We will continue to advocate for progress in those areas with the Government of Bangladesh, but these actions alone will not of course bring an end to the crisis. So we must continue to use all the levers we have to improve conditions in Myanmar, exactly as the hon. Lady says, because people want to go home.
The Myanmar military of course continues its brutal attack on its population, and many of the attacks bear the same hallmarks of atrocities committed against the Rohingya in 2016 and 2017. We now see 17 million people in need across the country, and more than five years on from the crisis, the regime is yet to be held fully accountable. Of course, accountability is crucial to ending that cycle of violence and the misery faced by the Rohingya people. That is why, last August, we announced our intention to intervene in the ICC case brought by the Gambia regarding Myanmar’s obligations under the genocide convention. It is a case we have supported since its inception, and one that I know colleagues will be pleased to hear we are working closely on with other intervening states to ensure a co-ordinated approach.
We also support the securing of criminal accountability and attempts to bring these issues before the International Criminal Court. Within the international sphere, the UK uses our penholder role in the UN Security Council to keep the spotlight on the crisis. Between 2017 and 2021 we have convened the Security Council 19 times to discuss the situation in Myanmar. Last year we passed resolution 2669 on Myanmar, holding the regime to account for its atrocities and urging an end to all violence. This resolution was the first of its kind in over 74 years. We will continue to use our role at the UNSC and in other international spaces to press for justice and accountability and to ensure the crisis is not forgotten. Domestically, we will continue to use our sanctions regime to maintain pressure on the Myanmar armed forces.
Tom Hunt
I really do see all that the Government have done and I really do think it is right to focus on the Rohingya going home safely; however, a colleague mentioned a child spending five years growing up there and knowing nothing else but that camp, but what happens when that becomes eight or nine years? Does my right hon. Friend agree that there may come a point where we have to think about something that ends this horror but that may not, sadly, involve them going home safely?
Anne-Marie Trevelyan
My hon. Friend raises an issue that we are cognisant of, but in the shorter term we are seeing whether the international community can work together to make going home a possibility, so we are continuing to use our sanctions in co-ordination with the US, Canada, the EU and Australia, among some of our key international partners. We have so far sanctioned 20 individuals and 29 entities, and as sanctions Minister I will be continuing to work on further sanctions that we might be able to deliver to target the junta’s access to revenue, arms and equipment. Just a few weeks ago we sanctioned four individuals and two entities selling arms and aviation fuel to the Myanmar military; we will continue to find ways to reduce its ability to deliver its appalling violence to its citizens.
Sarah Champion
I am grateful for those sanctions on the junta, but is the right hon. Lady also aware of the influence of both China and Russia in Myanmar, and is she doing more to get them around the table to try to come up with a solution?
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.