Wikipedia Deep Dive

Rohingya genocide

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In August 2017, the largest human exodus in Asia since the Vietnam War began. Over seven hundred thousand people—men, women, children, the elderly—fled across the border from Myanmar into Bangladesh in a matter of weeks. They carried almost nothing. Many had watched their homes burn. Some had witnessed family members killed in front of them. They were Rohingya, members of a Muslim minority group that the United Nations has called "one of the world's most persecuted peoples."

What drove them out was not a natural disaster or an economic collapse. It was their own government's military.

A People Without a Country

To understand what happened to the Rohingya, you first need to understand their peculiar legal status—or rather, their lack of one.

Myanmar, the Southeast Asian nation formerly known as Burma, is home to about fifty-four million people. The overwhelming majority—roughly eighty-eight to ninety percent—are Buddhist. Small minorities practice other faiths, including about four percent who are Muslim. The Rohingya are part of this Muslim minority, concentrated in Rakhine State, a coastal province in the country's northwest that borders Bangladesh.

Here's what makes their situation extraordinary: since 1982, the Rohingya have been officially denied citizenship in the country where they were born and where their families have lived for generations. Myanmar's government considers them illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. Bangladesh doesn't want them either.

They are, in the most literal sense, stateless.

The Rohingya themselves trace their ancestry to Arab traders who settled in the region centuries ago. Some scholars believe Muslim communities existed in what is now Rakhine State as far back as the fifteenth century. Others argue that while a small number of Rohingya can indeed trace their lineage back that far, most arrived during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when the British controlled the region and encouraged migration from Bengal to work the fertile farmlands.

The historical debate matters because it shapes how people view the Rohingya's claim to belong in Myanmar. Are they indigenous people with deep roots in the land? Or are they relatively recent arrivals who don't have the same rights as other ethnic groups? The Myanmar government has chosen the latter interpretation—with devastating consequences.

Decades of Persecution

The violence of 2017 didn't emerge from nowhere. The Rohingya had been subjected to systematic persecution for decades.

Since the 1970s, they have faced restrictions that would be unimaginable to citizens of most countries. They cannot move freely without official permission. They are barred from higher education. They have been required to sign commitments limiting them to no more than two children. Rohingya men are routinely forced to give up one day per week for labor on military or government projects, plus one night per week for sentry duty.

Much of their farmland has been confiscated by the military and redistributed to Buddhist settlers brought in from other parts of Myanmar.

The 1982 citizenship law didn't create this discrimination—it formalized what was already happening. But by stripping the Rohingya of legal citizenship, it made them uniquely vulnerable. Without citizenship, they had no recourse, no rights, no protection under the law.

Periodic waves of violence drove many Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh over the years. In 2005, the United Nations tried to help some of them return, but allegations of human rights abuses in the refugee camps undermined the effort. By 2015, around 140,000 Rohingya were living in internally displaced persons camps within Myanmar—essentially refugees in their own country, stuck in limbo after communal riots in 2012.

That same year, researchers at Yale Law School conducted an eight-month study of the situation in Rakhine State. Their conclusion was stark: they found "strong evidence that genocide is being committed against Rohingya."

The 2016 Crackdown

On October 9, 2016, armed individuals attacked several border police posts in Rakhine State, killing nine police officers and stealing weapons. A newly formed insurgent group called Harakah al-Yaqin, later known as the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, claimed responsibility.

The military's response was swift and collective. Rather than pursuing the specific individuals responsible for the attacks, security forces launched a sweeping crackdown against Rohingya villages across northern Rakhine State. What followed was a campaign of brutality that shocked international observers.

Satellite images released by Human Rights Watch in late November 2016 showed approximately 1,250 Rohingya houses in five villages reduced to ash. Reports emerged of security forces using helicopter gunships to fire on civilians. Boats carrying Rohingya refugees across the Naf River toward Bangladesh were gunned down by the military.

The survivors who made it to Bangladesh told harrowing stories. Women described being gang-raped by soldiers. Men recounted watching family members executed. Parents spoke of young children being thrown into burning buildings.

The Myanmar government blocked journalists and human rights investigators from entering the affected areas. Rakhine State became what observers called an "information black hole." The exact number of people killed during this first phase of violence remains unknown, though it clearly numbered in the hundreds at minimum.

In February 2017, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights released a report based on interviews with more than two hundred Rohingya refugees. Nearly half said family members had been killed. Half of the women interviewed reported being raped or sexually assaulted. The report described the sexual violence as "massive and systematic."

August 2017: The Exodus

If the 2016 crackdown was devastating, what began in August 2017 was catastrophic.

The trigger, again, was an attack by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army on Myanmar border posts. And again, the military responded with overwhelming force directed not at the insurgents specifically, but at the Rohingya population as a whole.

This time, the scale was different.

In just the first month—between August 25 and September 24, 2017—at least 6,700 Rohingya were killed, according to estimates. A study conducted in January 2018, based on surveys of more than 3,300 refugee households in Bangladesh, attempted to calculate the full toll. The researchers estimated that the military and local Rakhine population had killed at least 25,000 Rohingya. They estimated that 18,000 Rohingya women and girls had been subjected to gang rape and other forms of sexual violence. They estimated that 116,000 Rohingya had been beaten, and 36,000 had been thrown into fires.

These numbers are staggering. They represent not isolated incidents but a systematic campaign.

The United Nations found evidence of extrajudicial killings, summary executions, gang rapes, the burning of Rohingya villages and schools and businesses, and infanticides. The organization's assessment was blunt: this was "a textbook example of ethnic cleansing."

By September 2018, more than 700,000 Rohingya had fled to Bangladesh, creating what would become the world's largest refugee camp. The total number who have been forced to leave Myanmar exceeds one million. Some escaped to India, Thailand, Malaysia, and other parts of South and Southeast Asia, though they often face persecution in those countries too.

The World Responds—Slowly

International condemnation came, but it came late and it came without much force behind it.

The United Nations, Amnesty International, the U.S. Department of State, and numerous governments labeled what was happening as ethnic cleansing. Some went further. In late September 2017, a panel of the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal found the Burmese military guilty of genocide—not just against the Rohingya, but also against the Kachin, another minority group. In August 2018, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights declared that military generals should be tried for genocide.

In January 2020, the International Court of Justice ordered Myanmar to prevent genocidal violence against the Rohingya and to preserve evidence of past attacks. But orders from international courts are difficult to enforce against sovereign nations, particularly when those nations simply refuse to comply.

The Myanmar government dismissed the international findings as "exaggerations."

Perhaps the most painful aspect of the international response was the role—or rather, the non-role—of Aung San Suu Kyi.

The Fallen Icon

For decades, Aung San Suu Kyi was one of the world's most celebrated human rights figures. She had spent years under house arrest for opposing Myanmar's military dictatorship. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for her nonviolent struggle for democracy. When Myanmar finally allowed free elections in 2015 and her party won, she became the country's de facto leader with the title of State Counsellor.

The world expected her to be a champion of human rights.

Instead, she was largely silent as the military conducted its campaign against the Rohingya. Worse than silent—she defended the military's actions and dismissed reports of atrocities. When two Reuters journalists were arrested and imprisoned for covering a massacre of Rohingya civilians, it happened under her government.

Her fall from grace in the eyes of the international human rights community was total. The woman who had once been compared to Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi was now defending what the UN called genocide.

Why? The most charitable interpretation is that she had no real power over the military and was trying to preserve the fragile democratic gains Myanmar had made. The Myanmar constitution reserves enormous power for the armed forces, including control over key ministries. Perhaps she calculated that speaking out would accomplish nothing except to provoke the military into ending the democratic experiment entirely.

But even this interpretation leaves her complicit in the crimes by her silence. And her active defense of the military's actions goes beyond mere silence.

The Refugee Crisis Continues

More than a million Rohingya now live in refugee camps in Bangladesh, most of them in and around Cox's Bazar near the Myanmar border. The conditions are dire. The camps are overcrowded, vulnerable to flooding and disease outbreaks, and dependent on international aid that is never quite sufficient.

Officially, both Bangladesh and Myanmar have discussed repatriation—returning the refugees to their homes in Rakhine State. In November 2017, the two governments signed a deal to facilitate returns within two months. But the agreement drew mixed responses from international observers who questioned whether conditions in Myanmar were safe for the Rohingya to return.

The fundamental problem remains: Myanmar has never acknowledged that the Rohingya belong there. Without citizenship, without legal rights, without protection from the same military that drove them out, what would returning mean except a return to persecution?

In August 2022, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights visited the refugee camps and met with Bangladesh's Prime Minister, who asked the refugees to return to Myanmar. But the UN emphasized that any repatriation must be voluntary and dignified, and must only happen when conditions in Myanmar are genuinely safe. As of now, those conditions do not exist.

The situation has actually grown more complex since 2024, when the Arakan Army—an ethnic Rakhine armed group fighting against the Myanmar military—has also been accused of abuses against the Rohingya in areas under its control. The Rohingya find themselves caught between multiple armed factions, none of which seem to regard them as people deserving protection.

What Makes This Genocide?

The word "genocide" carries specific legal meaning. It was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer who had lost most of his family in the Holocaust. The 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines it as acts committed "with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group."

The key elements are the acts themselves—killing, causing serious harm, imposing conditions designed to bring about physical destruction, preventing births, or forcibly transferring children—and the intent behind them.

What happened to the Rohingya fits this definition. The killings were not random violence or even ordinary war crimes. The systematic nature of the attacks—the coordinated burning of villages, the mass rapes, the targeting of civilians including children and the elderly—demonstrates intent to destroy the Rohingya as a people.

The Myanmar military didn't just want to defeat insurgents. They wanted to eliminate the Rohingya presence in Rakhine State entirely. And they very nearly succeeded. The population that remained after the 2017 exodus was a fraction of what it had been.

The Broader Context

Myanmar's treatment of the Rohingya exists within a broader pattern of ethnic conflict. The country is home to more than 130 recognized ethnic groups, and the central government—whether military or civilian—has never fully controlled all of its territory. Armed ethnic organizations have fought for autonomy or independence in various regions for decades.

The Kachin people in the north have faced their own military campaigns. The Karen, the Shan, and other groups have long histories of conflict with the central government. Myanmar is less a unified nation-state than a collection of territories held together, often tenuously, by military force.

But the Rohingya occupy a unique position even within this fractured landscape. Other ethnic minorities are at least recognized as belonging to Myanmar. They have citizenship. They have political representation, however limited. The Rohingya have none of this. They are not even acknowledged as one of the country's ethnic groups.

This total exclusion made them uniquely vulnerable. When the military decided to drive them out, there was no institutional resistance, no political cost, no domestic constituency that would object. Buddhist nationalists—including some monks who had built large followings by preaching hatred of Muslims—actively supported the campaign.

What Happens Now?

The Rohingya genocide is not a historical event. It is ongoing.

Those who fled to Bangladesh remain in camps with no clear path forward. Those who stayed in Myanmar continue to face persecution and violence. The military that committed the atrocities remains in power—in fact, it seized complete control of the government in a 2021 coup, ending even the partial democracy that had existed since 2011.

International justice moves slowly, when it moves at all. The International Court of Justice has ordered Myanmar to prevent genocide, but has no means to enforce that order. Prosecuting individual commanders for war crimes would require either Myanmar's cooperation—which will not happen—or the ability to arrest them abroad, which seems unlikely.

The most realistic hope for the Rohingya may simply be survival. Surviving in the camps until Myanmar changes, or until some other country offers them a home, or until the international community develops the will to do something more than issue statements of condemnation.

But survival is not justice. And without justice, without acknowledgment of what was done to them and why, the Rohingya remain what they have been for decades: a people denied even the basic recognition that they exist and that they matter.

The world watched this genocide unfold in real time. Journalists reported it. The United Nations documented it. Satellite images showed the villages burning. And still it happened, and still its perpetrators face no meaningful consequences, and still more than a million people wait in camps for a future that may never come.

This is what ethnic cleansing looks like in the twenty-first century. Not hidden, not secret, but broadcast to the world—and met with little more than expressions of concern.