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?