Executive Calendar--Continued

Floor Speech

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Mr. President, anyone who watches the news, reads the newspaper, or goes on social media knows there are a lot of bad things happening in our world. Folks at home and across the globe are confronting devastations from hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, wars, and forest fires, as in my home State. Tensions between the United States and North Korea have never been higher, reaching a dangerous level. The world is watching all of this with bated breath.
In the midst of this deluge of news, a human rights catastrophe is unfolding virtually unnoticed. I am talking about the members of the Burmese military engaging in horrific acts of unthinkable violence against the Rohingya--a Muslim minority population in a predominantly Buddhist nation.

The Burmese military, along with civilian accomplices, have slaughtered more than 3,000 innocent civilians. They have raped thousands of Rohingya women. They have beheaded children as young as 6 years old. They have burned countless villages to the ground. Through these brutal acts, the Burmese military has driven half a million Rohingya refugees to camps in nearby Bangladesh, with Burmese soldiers continuing to shoot at them as they try to cross the border--a border, by the way, along which landmines have been laid by the Burmese military.

The brutality of what is happening in that country is truly beyond comprehension. The Burmese Government calls it a security operation, but we need to call it exactly what it is--ethnic cleansing. So often I have heard the words ``never again,'' that the United States will stand up to ethnic cleansing. This is one of those moments when we must stand up.

What is happening in Burma is a crime against humanity. As a country, we have more responsibility to take a stand and to speak out against it, to make the world take notice of the atrocities, call for their end, and to work toward their end.

The Rohingya are a people trapped in a cycle of violence and persecution by the Burmese Government and military. The Government of Burma has turned them into stateless people--refusing to recognize them, refusing to give them citizenship in spite of the fact that much of the Rohingya community has been there for centuries. They need our help.

The Burma Government has adopted laws that ban the Rohingyas from traveling without official permission, from owning land, from securing a public education, from obtaining employment by either a state or private business.
When the Burmese Government says that it will welcome back the refugees who can prove their citizenship, they are being completely disingenuous and completely treacherous, because they know--and the whole world should know--that the very laws of Burma make it impossible for the Rohingya to prove their citizenship since they have been denied citizenship by the Government of Burma. We cannot sit idly by and let ethnic cleansing continue.

One nation that has stepped up is Bangladesh. As the leaders of Burma have persecuted the Rohingya and burned the villages and shot the refugees as they were fleeing, the Government of Bangladesh has opened its door. It has proceeded to allow humanitarian groups access and the United Nations access. This is commendable, but more needs to be done.

These refugee camps are overcrowded. There are not enough supplies, clean toilets, food, or clean water. Doctors Without Borders says that they are on the brink of a ``public health disaster.'' Unlike Bangladesh, other countries have yet to speak up.

Indeed, I am concerned by reports that some factions within India have been explicitly, publicly seeking to expel India's own Rohingya population. It is important for the international community to weigh in with them and to ask them to respect international law and to protect the Rohingya refugees. India knows full well that there is nowhere to send them. If they send them back to Burma, there will just be more persecution of the men, the women, and the children.
It underscores the fact that the Rohingya need help and that the world should answer the call. As we do, we must use what influence we have to put an end to the violence and the persecution of this ethnic minority. We need to call on Burma's leaders to protect these minorities, not to assist in the persecution. We need to call on the Government of Burma to immediately give humanitarian groups access to the Rohingya who are trapped in Burma, in what some have described as concentration camps. We need to call on Burma's leaders to provide the hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees who have been forced to flee their homes and villages with a safe and assisted right of return.
In addition, the Burmese Government--the Burmese nation--needs to figure out how to end the root causes of this conflict--an age-old ethnic and religious conflict--and find a way to embrace the diversity within their nation. Certainly, this is not the first time that the tensions have erupted into violence. It has happened time and time and time again, but this is the worst we have ever seen.

Kofi Annan, the former U.N. Secretary General, is the current chairman of the Advisory Commission on Rakhine State. He and his team have called on Burma to take the appropriate actions to end this cycle of violence, this cycle of radicalization.

The entire Rohingya community is counting on us--the world--to notice and to act. We must immediately see an end to the violence, full access for humanitarian organizations, cooperation with and access for the United Nations fact finding mission, the safe return of refugees, and the implementation of the full set of recommendations from Kofi Annan's report.

It is also critical that the United States and the international community continue to shed light on this horrific problem, provide sustained aid and support to the refugees in Burma and in Bangladesh, and take action to show other repressive governments that there will be consequences for pursuing this type of persecution, starting with a strong U.N. Security Council resolution.

International action to end this violence, increase humanitarian assistance, and extend our aid to the Rohingya people is the right thing to do. I pray that together we will answer that call.

I also thank my colleagues who have already been engaged in this issue. There are a number of them, but I am particularly aware of Senator Richard Durbin's, Senator John McCain's, and Senator Ben Cardin's involvement and leadership.

Let's build on that foundation to have the Senate demonstrate attention to this issue through letters, and we should also try to arrange a Senate trip to visit both Burma and Bangladesh in order to draw additional international attention and build momentum for action.

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