Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh

Brendan O'Hara Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd May 2023 Commons Chamber

[Brendan O’Hara (Argyll and Bute) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to be called in this hugely important debate on support for the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. I thank the hon. Member for Bedford (Mohammad Yasin) for securing this debate and the hon. Members for Loughborough (Jane Hunt), for Bethnal Green and Bow (Rushanara Ali), for Ipswich (Tom Hunt), for Rotherham (Sarah Champion), for Birmingham, Erdington (Mrs Hamilton) and for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) for their contributions to it.

In particular, I single out the contribution by the hon. Member for Rotherham, the Chair of the International Development Committee, highlighting the stark reality of what is happening to a group of people who are widely recognised as being the most persecuted minority in the world. When the United Kingdom Government slash their foreign aid budget overnight, she also highlighted just what happens when people are left without hope.

As we have heard many times in this debate, the Rohingya people are not in Bangladesh because they want to be. They are there, suffering some of the worst living conditions on the planet, because they are fleeing what the United Nations has described as an “ongoing genocide” at the hands of the Myanmar military. They are there because the dire humanitarian conditions, the squalor, the constant risk of fire and the incredible overcrowding of those camps are still better than that from which they are fleeing.

Right now, those refugee camps are also safer than what the Rohingya would face had they to return. The threat of displacement, gender-based sexual violence and murder is every bit as real now as it was in 2017, when up to 1 million fled to the relative safety of Bangladesh. I remember five years ago that the journalist and documentary filmmaker Simon Reeve, who visited one of the camps, said it was,

“like nothing I have seen anywhere on Planet Earth. This speaks of a Biblical exodus of an entire people terrorised into fleeing.”

As colleagues from both sides of the House have testified all too often this evening, he was sadly correct.

What we witnessed in 2017 was the deliberate attempt at religious and ethnic cleansing on behalf of the Myanmar military. It had been building for 60-odd years, as the Bamar-dominated military launched successive efforts to Burmanise the country. They began with excluding ethnic minorities from the political process, limiting social and economic development among ethnic minority groups and curtailing their cultural and religious freedoms. Burmanisation says that the only true Myanmar citizen is someone who is both Burman and Buddhist.

That is what is behind the build-up over the decades and the appalling treatment we have seen, because the Rohingya people are non-Bamar and, of course, they are Muslim. Sadly, that mindset has not changed one iota, as we can see by the continued persecution of the Rohingya by the Burmese military. In 2019, the United Nations described sexual-based gender violence as “a hallmark” of the Burmese military’s operations in the country.

That is why, no matter how much they may want to escape the hell of the refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, any Rohingya daring to return to Myanmar right now would be in the gravest danger. Anyone remotely suggesting a forced return over the border is advocating for sending refugees back to Myanmar at a time of increased military activity, authoritarianism, violence and ethnic persecution. That would be an act devoid of any humanity and indeed of any common sense. I agree wholeheartedly with colleagues, and indeed those at Human Rights Watch, who have said that voluntary safe and dignified return is not possible while the military is carrying out massacres around the country. The Rohingya will be able to return only when rights-respecting rule is re-established. Unfortunately, that seems a long way off.

I join colleagues in paying tribute to what the Bangladeshis have done since 2017 in opening their doors and borders to the Rohingya people fleeing that genocide. They have provided an invaluable and crucial lifeline, and I shudder to think what would have happened had they not done so. Of course, we also recognise the pressure that the Bangladeshi Government are under. Theirs is one of the poorest nations in the world, facing its own serious economic problems, widespread poverty and, as we have heard, the climate crisis. Having to deal with a mass influx of 1 million impoverished refugees fleeing genocide adds to that crisis. As the hon. Member for Bedford said, it is little wonder that there is an increasing host fatigue when there appears to be no end in sight as the world turns its attention elsewhere.

That said, we are extremely concerned about the Bangladeshi Government’s joint response plan for this humanitarian crisis. It hints strongly at repatriation efforts, which, at the moment, are voluntary. How long that continues to be a voluntary arrangement remains to be seen. Let us be clear and unequivocal: no one can return to Myanmar until all ethnic minorities are safe from the threat of persecution. Right now, that is a long way off. As the hon. Members for Bethnal Green and Bow and for Congleton said, Bangladesh needs to be supported in what it is doing for its own people and for the Rohingya. That is why it beggars belief that with all the economic challenges currently facing Bangladesh, the UK Government decided to slash overseas aid to that country by 62%.

Just how could the Government think it appropriate, justified or humane to pull two thirds of that funding from a poor nation that is caught up in alleviating a humanitarian disaster on its doorstep by providing shelter to 1 million people fleeing genocide? Did no one around the Cabinet table suggest that cutting foreign aid to Bangladesh—one of the poorest countries in the world, as we have heard—was, in these circumstances, a terrible idea that would only hasten further humanitarian crisis? Was no impact assessment done on what would happen to Bangladesh, and on the knock-on effect for the Rohingya refugees, if that money was taken out? Did no one ask what would happen to that strategic partnership, and what it would mean for the 360,000 girls who relied on it for education or the 12 million infants who benefited from nutritional support? Did no one ever stop to ask about the knock-on effect that taking away that amount of money would have on the 1 million impoverished refugees?

The hon. Member for Birmingham, Erdington was right to say that the UK and the wider international community cannot allow the Rohingya refugees to be forced back into the hands of an oppressive state military whose hallmark is human rights abuses, sexual violence, torture and killings. We cannot allow that to happen because we simply did not support the host nation and allowed it to do all the heavy lifting and pick up the cost. That is why the UK must, at the very least, restore the original ODA funding to Bangladesh. As the hon. Member for Bedford said, not to do so would be short-sighted at best. We and the international community have to deliver, because this is not a Rohingya problem or a Bangladeshi problem but a global problem. We all have a responsibility for putting it right.