‘I have never seen anything like it and I hope I will never see anything like it again...’

WELSH MP JO STEVENS ON HELL OF THE ROHINGYA MUSLIM REFUGEE CAMPS:

IMAGINE if the entire population of Cardiff, Swansea and Newport had no UK citizenship and the army and government decided to drive them out of the UK, murdering, raping and torturing some of them as they did so, all in the space of a few months.

Well that’s what has happened to the Rohingya people from Rakhine Province in Burma, since the end of August this year.

The UN has described the Rohingya people the most persecuted community in the world, yet very little has been done about their plight.

There have been successive waves of displacement of the Rohingya into Bangladesh since 1990.

Prior to August 2017, nearly 200,000 people had fled to Bangladesh.

However, the speed and scale of over 650,000 refugees from an estimated total Rohingya population of 1.2 million since 25th August this year has been unprecedented.

I represent Cardiff Central, the most diverse constituency in Wales.

There is a large British Bangladeshi diaspora in Cardiff Central and I had been watching this humanitarian crisis unfold with horror, as had many of my constituents.

Lots of them contacted me, distressed and angry about what was happening and the lack of action by the international community.

I wanted to see the situation for myself, to speak to politicians and aid workers but, most importantly, the Rohingya people themselves, about what was going on.

So in November, I visited the refugee camp at Kutupalong in the Cox’s Bazar area of Bangladesh on a factfinding mission with a small group of parliamentarians, organised by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR).

I’ve seen some pretty awful places over the years; slums in India and the inside of Colombian prisons to name just two, but nothing could have prepared me for the shock of Kutupalong.

I stood on a hill in the camp in the searing heat and looked out as far as the eye can see.

From where I was standing right to the horizon was a mass of humanity.

I have never seen anything like it and I hope I will never see anything like it again.

I was viewing only a small section of the camp though. It covers 3000 acres and every day, more people arrive having fled ethnic cleansing, brutal murder and sexual violence.

In the few days before I visited, there had been 5,000 new arrivals. It’s hard to describe this living hell. What shocked me most were the sheer numbers of children.

Nearly 60% of the refugees are children and many of them have been become separated from their parents.

There is very little food, mainly just rice, and many people are suf-