Thank you for the question.
I'm glad to hear your view that I'm so close in proximity to the government. There are some days when I think that's true and other days when I'm not so sure. I'm not really worried about it.
What I always tell the government about—anyone who asks me—is this. I say you need to think about what the big risks are. What keeps you up at night? What do you worry about, in terms of the safety and security of people? For me, there are two big risks right now. One is the conditions in the camps in Bangladesh.
Again I say to members, imagine for a moment 700,000 people all of a sudden arriving in a very small territory, cutting down everything that's there so that they can build shelter for themselves. Even in the best of conditions, even if it were perfectly flat land and there was a perfectly mild temperature and everything was okay from all those points of view, it would still be horrendously difficult.
It's hilly land. It goes up and down. When the rain comes, every valley becomes a river. Every river is full of bacteria. Every river will be.... There are the most fundamental things. Talk to the people in the camps about what we have to worry about. We have to de-sludge latrines. We have teams of people, volunteers, who are doing the most basic kind of work to save lives, so that people don't get sick from drinking the water.
People get sick from drinking the water every day. We have a diphtheria outbreak. The world thought there would never more be diphtheria outbreaks. The World Health Organization thought that was something that was coming to a conclusion. It's terrible. There are attacks of measles. There's an expectation that there will be a cholera outbreak.
People ask, what do you think the big risk is? That's the big risk. It's going to get worse. With the weather deteriorating, it gets worse.
So there has to be a response, and I have talked to the government very directly and told them that every conceivable kind of response has to be imagined by the world community. It may be that just the traditional forms in which we deliver aid are not enough.
My second big fear is the continuing marginalization of the population in Rakhine State in northwestern Myanmar, where people are living in a very vulnerable condition. They're vulnerable in terms of health, in terms of their ability to learn, but most importantly, they're vulnerable because of the restrictions on their movement, restrictions on their ability to work, and on their ability to be themselves. That is worrisome, because we know that you can reach a tipping point in these situations at which conflicts suddenly go over the edge and hate speech takes over.
I'm sure you've seen the commentary by Mr. Zuckerberg admitting that Facebook has been used as a vehicle for hate speech in Myanmar. It has, very extensively, and it's a very worrisome thing.
I worry about that. I tell the government that we need to be aware, need to be alert, and need to be ready to respond. The thing that is frustrating—again, a little bit from the outside—is that government is sometimes a slow beast to move, and they have to be ready to respond quickly to the severity of the crisis.
I don't underestimate at all the importance of the impunity issue and the accountability issues, but I believe that those are going to take time and a lot of perseverance and patience in gathering the evidence. It's painstaking work. It took us over a decade to bring Milosevic to trial, and we shouldn't assume that just because we give a speech or say something or identify a person, this is going to be the instant response. We need to understand that these things are the product of a lot of work and effort. On that side of the ledger, then, this is going to take a lot of time to build up, and I think we should be building it up as effectively we can.
The immediate issue we face, however, is that people are going to die if we don't.... People are going to die in any event because of the extent of the illnesses that are prevalent, but we want to make sure that more people don't die, and that's what we have to deal with.
Just to give you a sense of it, Chair, when I was speaking to a meeting of aid workers in Cox's Bazar, which is the town closest to the camps, one of the people sitting in the room—I can remember it very vividly— looked at me, and she said, “Mr. Rae, you need to understand something.” She said, “It's not about whether people are going to die. It's about how many people are going to die.”
I'm reporting that to you, members, because I want you to be aware that this is not something that just comes out of the air; it's a real thing. It's halfway around the world, but it is happening, and we have to be able to respond to it.