The Rohingya are the most persecuted minority in the world, and their persecution is not a recent phenomenon; it is of long standing. People are being rendered stateless in their own land. If they are not being beaten, murdered or raped, they are being starved, literally, because of the closure of food markets in Rakhine state.
The scale of what the Rohingya face is unimaginable, and we have heard many moving examples from Members from across the Chamber. This is a textbook example of ethnic cleansing—let there be no doubt about that—with all the horror that that entails. We have heard about the
more than 500,000 refugees who have fled in recent months to Bangladesh, and about the more than 200,000 who were already there, having fled violence previously.
I have been reflecting on the fact that we have had so many debates in this House about whether we should take a few thousand unaccompanied child refugees into our nation—one of the most prosperous on earth—from the ravaged land that is Syria, while Bangladesh, one of the poorest nations on earth, is housing 800,000 refugees. I do not know that we would be so generous if we faced the situation that the Bangladeshis face. As other Members have said, not only must we offer every assistance to the Bangladeshi Government—I welcome the efforts that have been made already—but we must strain every sinew to provide humanitarian assistance and use our particular expertise to support the Bangladeshi Government as fully as we possibly can, and we must implore the rest of the world to do the same.