Madam Speaker, I will be dividing my time with the illustrious member for Durham.
I want to divide my comments into three assertions. Assertion number one is that the catastrophe going on right now is of enormous proportions. Assertion number two is that this is not a new thing. The precursor to this crisis was a human rights tragedy that has been in play now for a number of years. The third assertion is that we as a country and as a world as a whole have not been paying due attention, and perhaps there is a lesson to be taken from that fact.
On assertion number one, this issue is top of mind right now because it is is a calamity of extraordinary proportions.
An article that was recently published in The Economist shows the number of refugees per week who have fled their country during various crises over the past 30 years. The number of Rohingya people fleeing Myanmar every week is about 120,000. That is since this crisis began, exactly one month and one day ago. By comparison, from Syria we never saw during any point in that crisis more than an average of around 40,000 fleeing per week, roughly one-third the flow. It was a much larger total population that fled, but a much smaller number per week. To make the point here, there are only around 800,000 Rohingya in Myanmar, and we are seeing over 10% of the entire population fleeing the country every single week. That is an extraordinary statistic.
The other crises that have produced large numbers of refugees over the past 30 years—Rwanda, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kosovo—have all produced smaller flows all at once. This has a number of consequences that are worth mentioning, one of which is trying to provide a place for these people to live where they will have adequate sanitation, water, and food. This is a matter of the greatest urgency; otherwise, one tragedy will be transformed into another, a health care emergency that will result in even more deaths than are being caused directly by the violence.
This driving out of an entire population from its homeland has been characterized by the United Nations human rights chief as “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing”. That actually misstates things to some degree. What this actually is, and let me quote another individual, is a “textbook example of genocide”, the destruction of an entire people, the wiping out of their ability to live in their homeland, the driving of that population from the land that is their home.
I am quoting now from last Thursday's hearings of the international human rights subcommittee, where one witness stated that the president of France had declared yesterday that what is going on now appears to be genocide.
Seven Nobel Peace Prize-winning lawyers have come out with a joint statement saying that what is going on is a textbook case of genocide.
Yale University has released a report. Fortify Rights has released a report calling what is going on a genocide. The Prime Minister of Malaysia, the President of Nigeria, the President of Turkey, and the Bangladeshi foreign minister have all called what is going on right now a genocide.
I urge the committee to stop using the term “ethnic cleansing”, the term that was put forward by Slobodan 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.
Genocide does not exist, even if the facts on the ground prove that it is there, until the magic words are spoken at the United Nations by the right kind of resolution. The fact is that the facts on the ground demonstrate a de facto genocide right now, whether or not the United Nations has uttered those magic words.
I would urge our government to do what it can to ensure the United Nations states that what is going on is a genocide so the proper international legal actions can take place.
I will talk a little about what has gone on in the past, because this is not new.
Back in 2013, I chaired the international human rights subcommittee. We conducted hearings on human rights in Burma, Myanmar. We noted at the time that the treatment of the Rohingya had been abysmal for decades.
In 1977, the Myanmar government began the process of stripping its Rohingya citizens of their citizenship, rendering them stateless. In 1982, a series of human rights abuses led to 200,000 Rohingya fleeing across the Bangladesh border. There were further crackdowns in Rohingya-dominated areas in 1991 and 1992, which resulted in 270,000 Rohingya fleeing into Bangladesh. Sometimes, many of these people returned. They had no way of surviving in Bangladesh. It was not their homeland and it did not recognize them as citizens, although the Myanmar government's position was that these were ancestrally citizens of Bangladesh and therefore the fact that they spent their whole lives in Myanmar counted for nothing. At the time of our writing, 200,000 stateless Rohingya were living in Bangladesh with no legal status.
We heard testimony in 2013 from Professor Schabas who wrote, “human rights violations committed against the Rohingya are sufficiently widespread and systematic to meet the legal threshold of crimes against humanity.” This was back in 2013, and his report had been issued in 2010, seven years ago.
We were informed that the Rohingya were subject to a number of serious human rights violations, which at the time included the following eight categories: severe travel restrictions; arbitrary widespread detention, torture, cruel or inhumane punishment; extrajudicial executions; forced labour, including forced labour by children as young as five or six years of age; forcible population transfer, on a smaller-scale version of what is happening now; sexual violence against women and girls; confiscation of land without compensation; and violation of their right to adequate housing.
Additionally, we were informed that families were brought in from central Burma to take over the lands that had been confiscated from the Rohingya, a version of what the Turkish government did when it drove out its Greek and Armenian populations in the period from 1915 to the early 1920s and replaced them with populations from Anatolia to ensure those people could never return to their homeland.
Therefore, this is a long-standing crisis. For a number of years, we have read about the Rohingya boat people trying to escape their plight by fleeing in inadequate craft down the coastline of Southeast Asia, sometimes meeting with disaster in Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia, where we find mass graves of those who died, and sometimes being forced into the sex trade and human trafficking. All of this has been happening, and happening in open view, yet we in Canada and in the world have turned our attention elsewhere.
In 2015, I was often reminded in Canada's debates about a little boy who had died on a beach in Greece, crossing the three-mile stretch of the Aegean Sea. We all remember the photograph. It was a tragedy. I was asked about this and if we should do more for refugees in that area. In response, I said that I took the point, but if the only thing that mattered when we were considering refugees was the amount of water they crossed and the dangers that were involved, then nothing that was faced by those fleeing from Syria through Turkey could compare to the plight of the Rohingya. However, we were not interested at the time. We are interested now. I hope we will finally take appropriate action and that the world will focus its attention where it ought to be focused: on this terrible tragedy.