Thank you very much.
Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. I want to thank you, on behalf of my colleagues and I, for inviting us to this hallowed place, to appear before the Subcommittee on International Human Rights of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development, often described as the conscience of Parliament.
My name is Raïss Tinmaung, and I am Rohingya. My parents are from Zolda Khana and Amla Phara. The small villages around Akyab no longer exist, having been burned to the ground during the 2012 massacre.
I want to thank you, as parliamentarians, and the federal government for last week's statement expressing concern over the forced repatriation of my people.
I would also like to thank all the members of Parliament for adopting a unanimous motion declaring the violence against the Rohingya a genocide, shortly after the Rohingya Human Rights Network organized rallies in 10 cities across the country and sent the Prime Minister a strongly worded letter signed by more than 125 Canadian academics and recognized activists. If you wish to see it, I have it here.
Finally, I would like to thank all the members of Parliament for unanimously voting to revoke the honorary citizenship bestowed on Aung San Suu Kyi, further to our petition signed by more than 65,000 people.
Canada has pledged a generous $300 million in humanitarian aid. Let us make sure this money is well utilized to programs that help my sisters and brothers—my sisters specifically, at the camps, in getting the post-rape trauma treatment they deserve—and that it is used to fund programs that help them become capable of earning a living by themselves and feeding their children with dignity and pride, as any mother would want to do. Let us make sure that the funds are used to curb the sex trafficking and drug trafficking that are rampant in the camps, and that the situation in the camps does not foster the creation of a new extremist group in Southeast Asia.
Canada has recognized the situation in Myanmar as a genocide. This is a legal term with legal implications, and the next step in such a recognition is invoking the 1948 genocide convention, following World War II and the Holocaust, to which both Canada and Myanmar are signatories.
Through invoking the genocide convention, Myanmar can be taken to the International Court of Justice as a state, where its government as a whole would be held responsible for reparations for the consequences of genocide, to give back the land to the people who had to flee, give them the citizenship rights that they inherently deserve and re-enact laws that will grant them their fundamental human rights.
Canada does not need to invoke the convention by itself. It can do so with like-minded allied nations that have also taken a strong stance against Myanmar for its appalling record of human rights violations.
This has been advocated by well-known Canadian human rights think tanks, including Professor John Packer from the University of Ottawa's Human Rights Research and Education Centre, as well as experts at the Raoul Wallenberg Centre, led by the Honourable Irwin Cotler, former chair of the SDIR, this very prestigious subcommittee.
I would like to conclude by saying as a proud Canadian that, while our country's stance on addressing the human rights situation in Myanmar so far is highly commendable, we must realize that we are still very far from reaching the desired end state. Canada and the international community are yet to take concrete measures that will see changes on the ground in Myanmar, a country that continues to target ethnic minorities by bombing Kachin, Karen, Shan and Chin villages; continues to keep 127,000 Rohingyas in concentration camps; and insists on making more camps during its proposed repatriation plans, because the Rohingya villages have not just been burned to the ground but also bulldozed flat, as per Human Rights Watch satellite images.
It does not only deny them access to humanitarian aid and human rights investigators, but also convicts and sentences journalists for reporting the openly known massacre of civilians.
This is why the UN fact-finding mission to Myanmar said, last month, “It is an ongoing genocide that is taking place at the moment.”