Subcommittee on International Human Rights Committee on May 4th, 2016

[John Sifton]

Remember that back then, the NLD had only a handful of seats it had won in the by-elections and there was actually.... Well, I won't get into it. It's all very internal local politics, but suffice to say, NLD was a minority already and the Muslims were an even smaller minority of a minority—almost negligible. It wasn't as if they were able to use their parliamentary seats to do much at all.

[The Chair, Liberal, Michael Levitt]

Ms. Hardcastle.

[Cheryl Hardcastle, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

I would like to ask a little bit more about the constitutional issues that were described to us and the idea that there could be constitutional change. At the crux of that, I'm hearing about this so-called military bloc.

Is there any political will, is there any movement, any talk that you know of from within? Is it like an elephant in the room that everyone is sort of moving toward a consensus on? What's your feeling on that?

[John Sifton]

You have identified the core issue. It is the elephant in the room.

The 2008 constitution, which was passed by a so-called referendum, which was neither free nor fair and which you cannot really call it a referendum, as it was more of a theatrical event, is a deeply flawed document. Aung San Suu Kyi recently called it “silly” and that's actually quite an apt descriptor. It essentially, through a number of different provisions, gives the military a trump card of de facto control over civilian governance, which they used for many years but have now relinquished to a supposedly civilian government. They can dismiss parliament. They can declare a state of emergency and dismiss parliament. They continue to have the right to appoint key security force personnel officials, including the Home Minister, who can in turn enforce the problematic laws that are on the books in Burma. As a result, you do have the creation of a sort of two-headed government where, yes, you can have elections—and they did—to allow a new prime minister who is not a military leader, but you still have, because of the constitution, a military that has all of these powers over civilian governance. That is the core problem that will continue to bedevil Burma for a long time.

Now the political situation is as Aung San Suu Kyi has said, that the constitution needs to change. A lot of people get hung up on the particular provision in it that disallows her from being president. It's provision 59(f) of the constitution that bars people who are foreigners and people who have spouses or relatives who are foreigners from being president, which was put there precisely to keep her from ever being the president. That's an issue that needs to be addressed, but that is not constitutional reform in and of itself.

The real constitutional reform is eliminating all of the provisions that gave the military all the powers I just noted. To do that you need 75% of the parliament plus one. Since the military holds 25% of the seats through the constitution, you have to have at least one of those 25% vote to amend the constitution. That's the de facto veto they have, the de jure veto they have, over amending the constitution. This means that any amendment that ever takes place or repeal or, God forbid, decision to have a constitutional convention that rewrites the thing from scratch, has to be a political event not a democratic one.

Since it has to be a deal of some sort, Aung San Suu Kyi has to figure that out somehow: basically a deal with the military whereby they allow the constitution to be changed.

The only other methodology for changing it would essentially be a political crisis, an uprising that forces the military to relinquish the power because they don't want the country to devolve into crisis.

There's one last way you can nudge the door open on constitutional reform, and it's a little bit complicated, and we haven't been talking about it. As you're probably aware, there is a state of armed conflict in several other states in the north and the east of the country, in Kachin, Shan, and Karen states. In the efforts to have peace agreements with the different insurgencies—and Burma has more insurgencies than pretty much any government in the world—the peace agreement that would have to be created, if there ever were to be peace with all those insurgencies, would by definition require amending the constitution, because, after all, that's what all those insurgencies want. They want the constitution to be amended so they can have more autonomy and a lot of other things. That's another avenue for amending the constitution, the diplomatic necessity that there be amendments to the constitution in order for there to be a peace deal.

However, knowing what I know and probably what a lot of you know about the peace negotiations, I wouldn't hold out any hope for that happening any time soon.

[Cheryl Hardcastle, NDP, Windsor—Tecumseh, ON]

Just talking about some of the diplomatic tactics or diplomatic necessities, for this subcommittee's purposes, we want to look at what should Canada's approach be. In your opinion should we be retaining sanctions against individuals and entities that are associated with the former military regime?

Canada's foreign minister has announced funding that will provided to enhance democratic institutions in the Government of Myanmar. Should we be mentoring? In your opinion where is our most effective place to maximize our efforts and the resources that we can bring to it acceptably?

[John Sifton]

Being an effective donor in coordination with other donors to promote groups that are working on the issues, as you said, is, of course, a must. Coordinating with other governments on sanctions to keep the sanction regimes that still exist in place, is a must. Our biggest beef, our biggest complaint with the United States government and the European Union, is that they relaxed and eased the sanctions regime too quickly and without getting enough from the Government of Burma.

Because of the complexity of what I have said about the government not being monolithic, it gets a little bit more complicated when you talk about sanctions on the Government of Burma today. You now have to talk about sanctions on the military and military structures, and people identified by the U.S. Department of Treasury and other entities as people who stand in the way of the promotion of human rights and all that. You need to talk about sanctions in a much more targeted way now than ever before, because now you have two sides of the government. You don't want the sanctions to hurt Aung San Suu Kyi and NLD in their efforts to fix the country, but you do want the sanctions to remain a stick hanging over the head of the military, so it still has an incentive to allow reforms to continue.

[The Chair, Liberal, Michael Levitt]

That concludes the first round of questioning.

We'll now move onto the second round. MP Khalid, could you lead off?

[Iqra Khalid, Liberal, Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON]

Thank you very much for your submission today. It is very much appreciated. You've really shed a light on a very important issue and we really appreciate that.

First, to really stress the importance of the issue, what would happen if nobody really did anything internationally or nationally within Myanmar? With respect to the Rohingya Muslims, what would happen if nothing were done?

[John Sifton]

That's sort of what's going on right now. A little bit is happening: the aid is still going in as the aid groups are helping, and the UN is helping the local Rakhine government. Everything is in a state of suspended ghettoization. There are these ghettos that just kind of stumble through. Money comes from Rohingya in Malaysia, and other places. People depend on handouts from charity groups. People somehow piece together an existence, or don't. People die. Women die in childbirth because they can't go to the hospital because they are Rohingya. It is a state of nothing happening and the ghettoization is simply slowly killing people and making their lives miserable and making them want to leave. That is the situation in Arakan today.

There are small steps being taken to look at the longer-term solutions, and that's promising. But unless there continues to be pressure on the government, on the NLD and local officials, to come up with long-term solutions, the small efforts that are being made going to flag. This is why we always tell visiting officials that they should raise the longer-term issues of the Rohingya Muslims.

It is not only a humanitarian crisis; it's also this legal human rights crisis. There is also that business of Naypyidaw changing the underlying law, the 1982 law that deprived all these people of their citizenship in the first place.

[Iqra Khalid, Liberal, Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON]

We understand that any international help that can be provided has to be with the acceptance and support of the Myanmar government as well. It has to be a collaborative effort, in my opinion. Do you think that government is open and ready to receive help, not only with the human rights aspect but also as a new government, in establishing legislative procedures and receiving mentorship on forming a good democratic government? Do you think the government is open to receiving that help?

[John Sifton]

I think the NLD members of the government are, yes. Sometimes you will find members of the military party who are really interested in learning more about parliamentary procedure and how laws work, but at the end of the day, they have to fall in line and do what the military says.

Yes, I do think they are receptive to efforts. Both the officials in Naypyidaw, and the local government officials in places like Arakan State are open to learning more about governing, policing, or health care. I think there is a sense that Burma has turned a corner and we have to build a new government structure, a new society. For too long, this country has been basically run by the military. The very bureaucracy of the state got corrupted by the military.

I will give you an example. There is something called the GAD. It sounds like “god.” It is basically an administrative civil service institution superimposed over all the different ministries and parts of the government, and it is military-led. That general military-led agency has been the instrument whereby the entire civil service and bureaucracy of Burma has been controlled by the Burmese military for the last 60-plus years.

Unravelling that is going to be a lot of work. It is going to be district-by-district, province-by-province work to unravel that bureaucratic nightmare. It is very complicated. Yes, they need technocratic help from outside lawyers, parliamentarians, and others to unravel all these bureaucratic nightmares.

[Iqra Khalid, Liberal, Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON]

I'm sorry, one very quick—

[The Chair, Liberal, Michael Levitt]

We have to move on.

Mr. Sweet, go ahead.

[David Sweet, Conservative, Flamborough—Glanbrook, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Sifton, for your testimony and all the good work you do at Human Rights Watch. We are reliant upon people like you, who are able to collaborate with those in the know, on the ground, and get us some clear information on what is really happening. Thank you as well for the cogent way in which you described how there are seemingly two parallel governments working here between the military and the government of Aung San Suu Kyi.

I would also like to say, Mr. Chair, that the case of Burma is a little different from other cases where the Government of Canada has focused its foreign policy to try to help a nation through the travails of what was a military junta into democracy, in the sense that the president herself is an honorary citizen of our country.

I think my colleague's questioning in regard to her position indicates some extra investment that we have in this country's being successful in its process of transition, with the leader of the governing party being someone we can be proud of, an honorary Canadian citizen.

In that respect, Mr. Sifton, I wanted to ask you, do you still hold to your 2012 position that what happened to the Rohingya was essentially ethnic cleansing?

[John Sifton]

Yes, absolutely. The violence was systemic and widespread, and it met the definition. We would not change that.

A more interesting question now that I would add to the mix, though, is whether you can have ethnic cleansing or crimes against humanity committed via the slow, sort of tortured persecution of ghettoization, versus the more dynamic, kinetic violence of pogroms.

In other words, creating a ghetto and not letting anybody in or out, making their lives completely miserable and psychologically compelling them to think that they have no choice but to leave—is that ethnic cleansing? I don't know, but it is a question we ought to be asking because that is what they are doing.

[David Sweet, Conservative, Flamborough—Glanbrook, ON]

In fact, in this case it began with pogroms and ended up in this ghettoization. I think there is evidence of both.

Could you tell me who has access to these camps? We know that the Rohingya have travel restrictions on them and that they can't get out. Is there any restriction on NGOs coming in with aid? Do we have UN representatives on the ground visiting any of these camps? From independent reports, do we have any knowledge of the quality of life they are living?

[John Sifton]

Yes, there is access to the camps. There are restrictions, but they can be navigated by the humanitarian groups and by the United Nations. The United Nations has its humanitarian side, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, OCHA. OCHA plays a big role in this.

On the fact-gathering side, though, there is a very key issue that we haven't talked about yet that you ought to know about, which is the issue of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and his office. His office is in Geneva but he has staff in the country.

Typically in a country that is recovering from authoritarianism, war, or whatever, a new government will have a memorandum of understanding with the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to set up an office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in the country to help the country address its human rights problems or it can be done through a Security Council resolution if it's a country like Afghanistan. But the point is, it's often the case that you have the High Commissioner for Human Rights setting up an office.

When President Obama visited, he compelled, diplomatically, the government to basically promise that they would do that. Yet here we are four years later, and it never happened. There is no formal MOU with the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and, as a result, there is no formal office, which means that the few staff that are allowed in are allowed in sort of under the umbrella of the UN at large, and they're under the central authority of the UN residential coordinator, which is a UNDP position.

This means that monitoring the human rights situation in places like Rakhine State—Arakan State—or the war zones of the northeast suffers because there simply aren't as many staff. They're not under a unified office structure. They don't have an MOU with the government that would allow them to negotiate specific terms of access, and there's much more mercy to the government, to the whims of the whole UN system, and everything else.

This has been a key thing we've pressed and pressed again. I'm testifying from Washington. This is one of the sort of thorny little factual things that we brought up even at the White House. We've gone to the White House and said, “They promised President Obama that they would sign an MOU”. It was in a written pledge to President Obama himself, and yet they haven't done it.

Amazingly, even now under the NLD government, it doesn't look like it's going to happen any time soon because of de facto military vetoes through the Home Ministry, which has to sign off on it. It's all very bureaucratic and political. It just hasn't happened, and it needs to be hammered through. It's a key thing, because you mentioned monitoring in the camps.

Overall yes, you can get in. We've gotten in. You can get in, but it's a tortured sort of process of navigating with local Rakhine officials to get access. There's also another problem, which is that the Rakhine people in the country are also in very dire straits humanitarian-wise. So a lot of the human rights groups and humanitarian groups have to engage in a kind of a political calculus if they want to access the Rohingya camps. They also have to access some of the poorest parts of the country where Buddhists live and report on their situation as well in order to get a balanced assessment of what the human rights situation is.

[The Chair, Liberal, Michael Levitt]

Thank you, Mr. Sifton.

We have a little bit of time. I know that you also have to get to another meeting.

Let's keep it to a fairly short question and answer on this, Mr. Miller, thank you.

[Marc Miller, Liberal, Ville-Marie—Le Sud-Ouest—Île-des-Soeurs, QC]

You touched briefly on the conditions faced by the Rohingya in two other countries. You didn't mention Bangladesh, and our numbers from 2015 indicate that there are 32,000 registered Rohingya and perhaps even 200,000 non-registered there.

Can you touch a little on the conditions faced by those refugees in Bangladesh and perhaps the response of the Bangladesh government in response to that mass entry?

[John Sifton]

I'll amend what I said. I didn't mean to suggest that Rohingya are all just in Thailand and Malaysia. There are Rohingya all over the world. However, Bangladesh is another key country. There are many, many who have fled there. The problems I talked about in Malaysia exist in Bangladesh, but they are nowhere near as serious as in Malaysia.

I consciously didn't mention Bangladesh because I just wanted to focus on Malaysia, and also maybe subconsciously I often don't mention Bangladesh because there's no point. They are so recalcitrant, and they don't listen to anything we, or you, the Canadian government, have ever said.

I believe right now that the assistant secretary of state of the United States government is in Bangladesh talking to them about all kinds of things—labour rights, human rights, political freedoms, and the Rohingya—and I'm sure she's having a very frustrating time. This is a government that simply doesn't listen very well on human rights. You offer them money that you say can be used to care of the Rohingya, and they reject it. That's the kind of government we're dealing with in Bangladesh.

Should they be condemned for the way they don't co-operate on seeking long-term solutions for the Rohingya? Yes. Do I think it will do any good? I'm not so sure that it will.

If I sound a bit cynical about Bangladesh, it's because I am.

[The Chair, Liberal, Michael Levitt]

Thank you very much for your testimony before this subcommittee today.

I think we touched on a number of issues, and certainly we've all benefited from your perspective on the Rohingya. We may well be in touch. If there are any additional follow-up points, we can be in touch by email.

Thank you very much for taking the time to join us.

[John Sifton]

Thank you for having me.

[The Chair, Liberal, Michael Levitt]

Does anyone have any other business briefly?

[David Sweet, Conservative, Flamborough—Glanbrook, ON]

Mr. Chair, I like it that we're early. It's amazing.

[The Chair, Liberal, Michael Levitt]

Okay.

As there is no other business, I adjourn this meeting.