ROHINGYA GENOCIDE, ongoing ethnic-cleansing campaign against the Rohingya people by the military government of Myanmar.
The Rohingya are a Muslim ethnic minority in the Rakhine State of northwest Myanmar. The region, previously known as Arakan, is separated from the rest of Myanmar by the Arakan Mountains and populated primarily by the Rakhine people, Buddhists who have historically pushed for independence from Myanmar.
While the Rohingya claim to trace their history in the region back to the eighth century, they are often described within Myanmar as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. After Myanmar’s government was overthrown by the military in 1962, the junta adopted nationalist, anti-immigrant policies, and the motto of Myanmar’s immigration ministry became “The Earth will not swallow a race to extinction, but another race will.” In 1982 the government passed a law defining citizenship based on membership in one of 135 nationally recognized ethnic groups said to have lived in Myanmar since before the British invasion of 1823. This new law effectively rendered the Rohingya stateless. Their lives became increasingly regulated under an apartheid system that restricted their movement, work rights, education, and access to social services and humanitarian aid, as well as sanctioned the seizing of land and property, arbitrary arrests, state violence, and torture. Among the Rakhine majority anti-Muslim rhetoric and fears of ethnic replacement became widespread. Anti-Muslim organizations and civilian militia groups proliferated, and local governments spoke openly about expelling Muslims. Over decades of persecution many thousands of Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh, where they also lack legal protection and suffer intolerable conditions in refugee camps. Many have also been turned away or forced to return to Myanmar.
In June 2012, following the murder of a Rakhine woman by three Muslim men, the Rakhine State riots erupted. A state of emergency was declared in response to escalating vigilante attacks, and 140,000 Rohingya were displaced in the conflict.
In October 2016 members of the Rohingya insurgency group the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) attacked several border-police posts with knives and slingshots and looted weapons and ammunition. The Myanmar military retaliated by declaring a “clearance operation” that entailed widespread murder, rape, and arson. This campaign included a coordinated anti-Muslim propaganda effort carried out mainly on Facebook.
These attacks escalated dramatically in August 2017 after ARSA attacked a military base. UN reports describe Myanmar military forces, border guards, and vigilante groups committing mass executions, firing into fleeing crowds, perpetrating systemic rape and sexual violence, murdering children, destroying food sources, conducting mass arrests, and burning nearly four hundred villages to the ground. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights called the attacks a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”
Nearly half of the Rohingya population, over 740,000 people, were forced to flee. The death toll is estimated at ten thousand people but the exact number remains unknown. Myanmar has refused to allow media and human-rights groups into the region, including the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, both of which opened investigations into human-rights abuses and genocide. Two Reuters journalists were imprisoned from December 2017 to May 2019 for covering the story.
Aung San Suu Kyi, the democratically elected leader of Myanmar at the time, who won a Nobel Peace Prize while under military house arrest in 1991 for her efforts to bring democracy to the country, was internationally criticized for defending the military’s actions. She negotiated the return of some refugees from Bangladesh in 2018 but was ousted in February 2021 by a military coup, leaving the status of the Rohingya both inside and outside Myanmar uncertain.
There are 1.6 million Rohingya refugees across Southeast Asia, primarily in Bangladesh, India, Thailand, and Malaysia. Nearly a million of them live in Bangladesh, most in the Kutupalong refugee camp, the world’s largest. Most have no path to legal status in any country and face overcrowding, a severe lack of resources, and mistreatment from authorities.
An estimated six hundred thousand Rohingya still live in Rakhine under military rule; 140,000 are internally displaced and confined to closed camps.
The ongoing civil war in Myanmar has left the Rohingya caught in the middle between Myanmar’s military and the Arakan Army, a Rakhine State independence group. Military blockades, communication shutdowns, diversions of food and medical supplies, as well as armed conflict have disproportionately affected the Rohingya, who continue to lack resources, political protections, and freedom of movement.