Thank you Mr. President.
Distinguished delegates, Mr. Secretary-General, ladies and gentlemen.
I am honoured by the opportunity to address the Security Council at this critical juncture. I am not here as an expert. I stand before you only as a witness. As someone who has seen and cannot look away.
I went to Bangladesh last March as a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador, to see what I could contribute in responding to the massive humanitarian needs unfolding there.
Nothing could have prepared me for the extent and depth of the suffering I saw.
An eighteen year old woman who I'll call Laila is chief among my memories. Yousuf. One of the 720,000 stateless Rohingya refugees who fled violence and abuse in Myanmar's Rakhine State since last August, Laila fled her burning village with her infant son, As she cradled Yousuf in her arms, she described to me how her husband was forcibly taken from their village and how he has not been heard from since.
How five days later, these same people returned, setting fire to her home and forcing her to flee alone with her baby. She saw her uncle killed by men with knives. She told me: " when I saw this, I just ran" . She and her son hid in a forest for months, surviving off plants and trees. Her harrowing journey ended in Bangladesh, where her present hardship persists.
Another refugee family took her and Yousuf in, sharing their cramped shelter.
As I sat with Laila, a small child played behind me and I noticed terrible scars on his leg. When I asked how he came by these, his family told me he had been caught in the flames when their home had been torched. Luckily they pulled him free, but the scars will remain: both the physical and the psychological.
If only such stories were atypical. But visiting with refugee families in Bangladesh, I found that they were shockingly routine.
