[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 64 (Thursday, April 19, 2018)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2304-S2306]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                      Rohingya Humanitarian Crisis

  Mr. President, while accepting his Nobel Peace Prize, the great 
humanitarian and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel said: ``Wherever men or 
women are persecuted because of their race, religion or political 
views, that place must--at that moment--become the center of the 
universe.''
  As we look around the world today, there are far too many places 
where men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or 
political views, but a place that really stands out is the nation of 
Burma.
  The Rohingya people have endured unimaginable pain and suffering. 
Since August of last year, with assaults by the military and nearby 
groups in Burma, 350 villages have been burned; women and girls of all 
ages have been raped; and over 700,000 Rohingya have fled their nation 
for neighboring Bangladesh to escape this horrific assault. In just the 
first month of this crisis, Doctors Without Borders said well over 
6,000 Rohingya were killed, including hundreds of children under the 
age of 5. One U.N. adviser on genocide prevention said: ``The Rohingya 
have endured what no human beings should ever have to endure.''
  Now we are seeing the brutality of the Burmese military, followed by 
a deliberate strategy of isolation and starvation.
  Several times in recent years, Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times 
has traveled to Burma to report on the Rohingya. Earlier this year, he 
entered the country on a tourist visa. He was warned by the Burmese 
Government not to do any reporting, but he did. He traveled to a total 
of five Rohingya villages and worked hard to be able to see these 
places to which everyone was banned from going.
  Back in November, a group of five Members of Congress went to visit 
these same villages--two Senators and three House Members. We were told 
by the Government of Burma that we would be allowed to visit the 
villages, but at the very last moment, the government rescinded its 
invitation. Two months earlier, in September of last year, the leader, 
Aung San Suu Kyi, had said to the United Nations that Burma had nothing 
to hide and that the international community was welcome to come and 
see for themselves. So five Members of Congress went to see for 
themselves and for their constituents and to be able to report back to 
the entire Nation, but we were not allowed to see these camps, these 
villages, that had been burned.
  Nicholas Kristof did succeed in going. Here is what he wrote:

       What I found was a slow-motion genocide. The massacres and 
     machete attacks of last August are over for now, but Rohingya 
     remain confined in their villages--and to a huge 
     concentration camp--and are systematically denied most 
     education and medical care. So they die. No one counts the 
     deaths accurately, but my sense is that the Myanmar 
     Government kills more Rohingya by denying them health care 
     and sometimes food than by wielding machetes or firing 
     bullets.

  Matthew Smith, from the human rights group Fortify Rights, said: 
``These tactics are right out of the genocidaires' playbook . . . 
underfeeding and systematically weakening a population has been 
characteristic of other genocides.''
  We in the congressional delegation were not allowed to go to those 
villages to see for ourselves. We were allowed to go to Sittwe, the 
capital of Rakhine State, where the Rohingya live. In the capital, we 
were told we could visit Aung Mingalar. It is also called the Muslim 
Quarter. When I took this picture, I was standing in the Muslim 
Quarter, looking down the street. What you see is a police station at 
the end of the street and a barrier. This neighborhood is cut off from 
the rest of the capital.
  If you think of the early stage of the Warsaw Ghetto, when people 
were not allowed to leave the neighborhood, that is what is happening 
right at this moment in the capital of Rakhine State in Sittwe. It is 
illegal for them to leave. In fact, the folks who live there have 
stores that have been locked up and shut for years because they are not 
allowed to leave this neighborhood and open their stores. There is a 
hospital right around the corner, and they are not allowed to go to it. 
Instead, they have to get safe passage to an internally displaced 
person's camp outside of Sittwe, get a referral slip, and come back to 
Sittwe to go to the hospital. There are incredibly difficult logistical 
challenges placed between this neighborhood and the hospital that is 
right next door.
  This happens to be in the capital, where folks can stand along these 
fences and make trades for food, and they can receive on their 
smartphones international support. Yet imagine if you took this 
neighborhood and lifted it out of the city and placed it out in the 
countryside where there is no supporting community around the outside--
maybe no cell service, so you can't receive money on your cell phone. 
There are 120,000 people who are living in these camps, IDP camps, in 
Rakhine State--120,000.
  Then think of those folks who fled those 350 villages that were 
burned--who fled and saw their family members shot, their family 
members raped, their family members burned inside of the huts that were 
torched in those villages.
  Nicholas Kristof writes: ``The folks who remain are being subjected 
to slow-motion genocide through starvation and deprivation of medical 
resources.''

  This is beyond acceptable. That condition is a form of ethnic 
cleansing, a form of genocide, and the United States should be 
absolutely vigilant in leading the world to respond.
  Those folks who fled to safety in Bangladesh are also continuing to 
experience extreme hardship. This is a picture from the hillside, which 
is where we were. There are still a few trees standing, but the trees 
have been coming down to provide firewood and

[[Page S2305]]

to provide various, little supports to keep the houses upright. Mostly, 
these little houses--these little shelters--are being built on split 
bamboo that is split into very tiny pieces, tied up into a frame, and 
then plastic is draped over it. It is hard to imagine what this camp is 
going to look like when the monsoons hit. The monsoons were supposed to 
hit a few weeks ago. They have not yet, but they could hit any day now, 
and these camps are going to become a devastated mess when that occurs.
  There are now 900,000 Rohingya--700,000 from this last horrific 
year--and several hundred thousand from previous episodes in which they 
were attacked by the military. Terrible sanitation makes these camps a 
breeding ground for cholera, diphtheria, and measles. There is a lot of 
concern that when the flooding comes with the monsoons, that will be 
when the sanitation systems will overflow and contaminate the water, 
and the cholera epidemic will follow.
  Save the Children and other organizations have said: ``The Rohingya 
refugee crisis is a children's emergency.''
  Camps are full of young men and women. This little boy here had built 
a little, tiny kite and was flying it around--just a scrap of plastic 
and two little scraps of wood. When I first saw it fluttering in the 
air, I asked: What is that? He brought it down and showed us here. You 
can see the shadow on the ground. They are children who are just trying 
to be children, making a little toy.
  This young man and the other children are the lucky ones who got out 
alive. The survivors tell us about infants being ripped from their 
mothers' arms, thrown alive into the burning fires, toddlers murdered 
in front of their families, countless teenage girls and even younger 
raped. Infants and young children in both the IDP camps and the refugee 
camps are still dying of disease and malnutrition. Those who are 
surviving now have to grow up in camps like this. Where will they go? 
How will they thrive? They have to figure out right now just how to 
survive day-to-day.
  When I was in Bangladesh and at this camp, there was an international 
group who had set up a tent and was enabling the kids to come and play 
games, to draw pictures, to sing songs. This young man here--by the 
way, here is Congressman Cicilline from the House side--was showing me 
the drawing that he had made that shows helicopters shooting at the 
villages. This is a piece of what these children had experienced. Many 
of them have drawings of helicopters and trucks that are shooting at 
the villagers as their families flee. I hope that the children have 
many joys like making and flying kites, but they are carrying scars we 
cannot even begin to imagine.
  Now these children--homeless, without a school or access to minimal 
healthcare--have to figure out how to go forward. In one of Nicholas 
Kristof's articles, he writes that he spoke to a 12-year-old child in a 
camp and asked him what he hoped to do when he grew up. That is a 
question we often ask children. What do you hope to be? What do you 
hope to do? The child responded: ``I don't have any dreams.'' That is a 
fairly heartbreaking response--young age, dreams crushed, just the 
challenge of surviving day-to-day. Every child in the world deserves to 
be able to dream.
  The Rohingya in Bangladesh today are facing an impossible challenge. 
They are in a refugee camp that is full of hundreds of thousands of 
people and that has inadequate infrastructure. They would like to be 
able to reclaim their villages and return home. Quite frankly, 
Bangladesh, which is hosting them, would like them to be able to 
reclaim their villages and return home, but they can't do so without 
enormous effort on the behalf of the very government that sent its 
military to annihilate them. They need international protection. They 
need a change of heart of the leaders of Burma.
  Aung San Suu Kyi is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate because she stood up 
for the democratic process and suffered years of home detention as she 
pushed to have democracy restored. We in the world have expected her to 
stand up for this community and say it is unacceptable for these 
Rohingya families to be persecuted, this community to be persecuted in 
this fashion, but she has not stood up. I know many Members here have 
encouraged her to reverse course and stand up and not be part of this 
ethnic cleansing and part of this genocide. Only with her change of 
heart, only with her championship, only with her determination to have 
Burma respected on the international stage and to have human rights 
respected in that nation will the return be able to happen.

  Right now there is no expectation that this can occur. However, there 
was an interesting story this past week. Earlier this week, a Facebook 
post on the official page of Burma's Information Committee showed a 
family being repatriated back--a family of five being repatriated. They 
were being checked out medically. They received packages of rice, 
mosquito nets, and blankets, according to this post. But do you know 
what? No one really believes this story. There is no international 
agency involved in protecting this family. Were they even refugees to 
begin with? We don't know.
  What we do know is that the story itself said they are not going to 
be able to return to their village. They are going to be sent to an IDP 
camp--an internally displaced persons camp. There are already 120,000 
people in camps just like this. Those are prison camps. While this is 
meant as a public gesture to the world that Burma is going to protect 
this family, Burma is sending them to a prison camp. Let no one in the 
international community be fooled.
  The publicity campaign also showed them receiving national 
verification cards, but not citizenship cards. They are not being 
welcomed back as citizens. They are still being stripped of their 
citizenship. Even in their best effort to pretend that they are doing 
something positive, this family is being denied citizenship and being 
sent to a prison camp.
  The international world must respond. How are we to do so?
  Let us all encourage the President of the United States--our 
President of the United States--to speak about this horrific 
international case of genocide and ethnic cleansing. Since August, we 
have not had one word from the leader of our country about this 
horrific crime. We need to hear from our President. The world needs to 
hear from our President.
  Second, we need to pass the repatriation resolution that has passed 
the Foreign Relations Committee unanimously, calling for the safe and 
dignified, voluntary and sustainable return of the Rohingya people. It 
demands that the United Nations must be part of any formal agreement. 
It has the unanimous support of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. 
Let's put it on the floor and have the unanimous support of the Senate 
as well.
  Third, let's have on the floor and pass the sanctions bill called the 
Burma Human Rights and Freedom Act. This, too, has passed committee. 
This targets the military, which perpetuated this genocide. It doesn't 
allow those military leaders to travel to the United States. It doesn't 
allow military weapons sales to Burma. It cuts off military 
cooperation, except for humanitarian cooperation and training, to 
target the military that perpetuated this crime and to send a signal 
that this is unacceptable. Who else in the world--what dictator in the 
world--is looking at what has occurred in Burma and saying: We, too, 
can drive out a minority community we have gotten tired of.
  The United States must respond in force. We need to invest in the 
education of children who are in those refugee camps. They are there 
with no schools. If it takes several years for them to find a permanent 
home, if ever, we can't afford to then go years without education, 
without schools. Let the international community invest in their 
education and let the United States lead in that effort.
  Let's give strong international support to Bangladesh. Bangladesh 
didn't have to open their borders to this flow of 700,000 refugees from 
across the river in Burma, but they did. In a humanitarian way, they 
did. They said: We will not let you be shot down on the banks across on 
the other side. Come and find refuge.
  But now, the Government of Bangladesh needs international support. 
They are a poor country--poor in a way we can't even imagine. That 
nation is half the size of Oregon. When it floods,

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it is a quarter of the size of Oregon. In my home State of Oregon, we 
have 4 million citizens. Bangladesh already has 160 million citizens. 
There is no space. That is why these camps are crowded onto hillsides 
and carved into the dirt, because there is no place for people to be 
set up on flat land where it is easy to establish facilities.
  These five things are what we must do: first, for our President to be 
a vocal international leader and bring the international community 
together; second, to pass the repatriation resolution; third, to bring 
to the floor and to pass the sanctions bill, the Burma Human Rights and 
Freedom Act; fourth, to send a message to Burma and the rest of the 
world to invest in the education of the children; and fifth, to give 
strong international support to Bangladesh, which is doing all it can 
but is in a very difficult spot to receive so many in an overcrowded 
and impoverished nation.
  Elie Wiesel said: ``Wherever men or women are persecuted because of 
their race, religion or political views, that place must--at that 
moment--become the center of the universe.'' Let us then make Burma and 
the refugee camps in Bangladesh the center of the universe and come to 
their assistance.
  I thank the Presiding Officer.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Cassidy). The Senator from Rhode Island.