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Torsdagen den 14 december 2017 - Strasbourg

9.7. Situationen för rohingyafolket (RC-B8-0668/2017, B8-0668/2017, B8-0669/2017, B8-0670/2017, B8-0671/2017, B8-0672/2017, B8-0673/2017, B8-0674/2017)

Mündliche Erklärungen zur Abstimmung

  Daniel Hannan (ECR). – Mr President, we were, I think, slow to grasp the enormity of what has been happening in Burma. It was a while before the stories of the atrocities suffered by the Rohingya people began to spread beyond newspapers that were either in Muslim-majority countries or Muslim-oriented in their readerships. But I think we have now got a sense of the magnitude of what is taking place.

I wonder whether we were slow because it challenged our western perceptions. We think of Buddhism as a kind of Californian, hippy, peaceful phenomenon and we tend in our recent coverage to think of Islam as militant rather than being on the receiving end of violence. It is what behavioural psychologists call the problem of agents and patients. We simultaneously struggle to see people as victims and as doers of violence. There is, at the moment, no worse human rights crisis on the planet and we cannot leave overwhelmed Bangladesh to try and deal with this issue bilaterally. If ever there was a case where we needed to step in, this is it.