Thank you for having me here. I'm going to get right into it because I have a lot to say and not a lot of time.
Although Mr. Smith did give you some description of how bad it is there, I want to share with you testimony that was submitted at the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal and is ongoing right now in Malaysia on the situation in Myanmar.
This is one of the testimonies that was submitted. It is very graphic, but I want to show how serious, how bad, and just how horrifying what they're going through is. It states, “ My sister had just given birth in her house when the Myanmar soldiers came into the village. We all ran away, but my sister couldn't. I returned and found the dead bodies of my sister and her baby. They had taken off her clothes and cut into her vagina. They had cut off her breasts and put the dead baby on her chest. The baby had been stomped to death. Its stomach had burst open and the intestines had come out. They had put the breasts next to each other on the pillow beside her. She was lying in her bed. They had stuck a rifle in her vagina.”
I want to respond now to Aung San Suu Kyi's address that she gave a few days ago.
The Burma Task Force is the organization I work for. We are a non-profit organization registered in Canada under the Task Force for Peace and Justice. We are a coalition of organizations and are accredited in the U.S. by the UN.
The Burma Task Force rejects Myanmar State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi's speech addressing the ongoing military attacks on Rohingya in Burma. The speech, delivered in English, was clearly meant for the consumption of foreign audiences in order to temper the growing international outrage and condemnation of Myanmar's crimes against humanity targeting Rohingya Muslims.
Suu Kyi's speech boasted ignorance of the well-documented crimes against the Rohingya, claiming “solid evidence” was needed before action could be taken. Over 400,000 Rohingya have been forced to flee to Bangladesh. There are satellite images of 214 burned-down villages. That's about 50% of the villages belonging to the Rohingya, if not more, that have been burned to the ground. What “solid evidence” she's referring to is still for her to answer.
Human rights organizations and the United Nations have documented and presented Suu Kyi's government with facts regarding the ongoing abuses by Myanmar's military. In fact, 52% of female refugees interviewed by the UN in Bangladesh reported having been sexually abused by Myanmar's forces.
Suu Kyi also conceded that 50% of Rohingya Muslim villages are still standing, so then she must recognize that 50% have been destroyed by the Burmese military.
She also claims that there have been no conflicts since September 5, but this has now been documented by many organizations. That's available. I can submit proof to you after the session we have here today. The documentation of the things that are going on is still happening right now.
Finally, she says that the Rohingya will be welcomed back through a verification process. To us, this sounds like a pretext in order to not allow the Rohingya to return, because obviously they are not recognized as citizens right now and they do not have proper verification. This has already been echoed by the spokesperson for Aung San Suu Kyi.
She's also said that three camps were closed. There have already been reports by others who have visited camps that she said were closed and who've said that on Wednesday morning people were still in those camps.
A lot of what she was saying, if not everything, she has either completely misconstrued or are outright lies.
As I've said, nearly half the Rohingya population has been displaced in less than three weeks. In three weeks, over 200 villages were burned. Right now, the Myanmar army is mobilizing troops in downtown Maungdaw and preparing for another onslaught as we speak.
The reports on the mass killings, mass raids, and babies being killed are already done, so I'm not going to go into that.
Additionally, the Myanmar military is laying land mines across the border right now and preventing people from crossing into Bangladesh.
This is where I'm leading to in my discussion now. Yesterday, the French president said that what is going on now appears to be “genocide”. Seven Nobel Peace Prize laureates have come out with a joint statement calling what is going on “a textbook case of genocide”. Yale University has released a report. Fortify Rights has released a report calling what's going on a genocide. The Prime Minister of Malaysia, the President of Nigeria, the President of Turkey, and the Bangladeshi foreign minister are all calling what's going on right now a genocide.
I urge the committee to stop using the term “ethnic cleansing”. It is a term that was put forward by Milosevic to cover his crimes in Bosnia. We should be using the word “genocide”, which urges and forces the international community to take direct action. We also ask Canada to bring up the possibility of putting in UN peacekeepers and creating a safe zone for the remaining villages and the Rohingya people until we can figure out the long-term solution to this crisis.
I'll stop there. I'll leave the rest for questions.