Senators’ Statements: World Refugee Day 2018
Hon. Ratna Omidvar: Honourable senators, tomorrow, June 20, is World Refugee Day, and I ask this chamber to pause for a few minutes to reflect on the lives and the plight of the 68.5 million people in the world who are fleeing violence, persecution and civil war.
There are two headlines in recent days that add urgency to this context. The first is the onslaught of the monsoon season in Myanmar and Bangladesh. This brings to mind the testimony provided to the Human Rights Committee by the Prime Minister’s Special Envoy to Myanmar, the Honourable Bob Rae. He told us of Rohingya women who recounted to him vicious attacks of assault and rape in their own homes at the hand of security forces. Nine months later, health workers in Cox’s Bazar fear that many of the women and girls are hiding pregnancies out of fear of being stigmatized.
He told us of the Rohingya’s fear that the world had forgotten that they were human, let alone that they were people and citizens of Myanmar. He told us — and he wept as he did so — of the thousands of young people whose futures hang in the balance in poorly resourced camps now threatened by cascades of monsoon water and overcrowding.
The other headline is closer to us, and it comes to us from south of the border, where 2,000 migrant children from countries like El Salvador and Honduras are being separated from their mothers and fathers as they cross the U.S. border informally and claim asylum. There are images of these children held in makeshift detention camps with large fenced cages, lying on makeshift blankets made of aluminum foil. These images have rattled many here, around the world and, in fact, in the U.S. as well. These two headlines — monsoons adding to the misery in refugee camps in Bangladesh, detained children in the U.S. torn from the arms of their mothers in the U.S. — underline the call for action over inaction, empathy over indifference, and the rule of international law over flagrant disregard for it.
On World Refugee Day, let’s recall our own checkered past. There have been times when we have closed our doors and turned away ships and people. But there have also been times when we have opened our hearts and minds to refugees with great generosity and compassion. Let’s reflect on which choice has made us stronger, not just nationally but internationally. Let’s focus more on what can and must be done by us as individuals, by us as a nation, and by us as a member of the global world order.