On Monday, hundreds of Rohingya refugees gathered at Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh demanding justice and the right to return to their homes, on the ninth anniversary of the genocide perpetrated against them in Myanmar. Since then, more than one million stateless Rohingya have remained stranded in tightly packed camps in Bangladesh’s coastal district of Cox’s Bazar, where living conditions are steadily deteriorating as international aid declines. The presence of the Rohingya in Bangladesh has made the South Asian country home to one of the world’s largest refugee populations.
Key bodies and actors have deemed the Rohingya crisis a genocide, including United Nations officials and former United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken in 2022, but what action has the international community taken, and is there any resolution in sight? As of 2021, there were an estimated 120,000 Rohingya, a Muslim-majority ethnic group, internally displaced in Myanmar. They have been described by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres as “one of, if not the, most discriminated people in the world”.
Before 2017, there were more than one million Rohingya in Myanmar. While Myanmar is an ethnically diverse nation, with 135 major ethnic groups and seven ethnic minority states, according to the international human rights organisation, Minority Rights Group, the Rohingya are not formally recognised as one of them. They have been denied citizenship in Myanmar since 1982, which makes them the world’s largest stateless group.
The Burmese are the largest and most dominant ethnic group in Myanmar. The government of Myanmar, a predominantly Buddhist country, views the Rohingya as undocumented immigrants from Bangladesh. They were not included in the country’s 2014 national census.
Nearly all the Rohingya remaining in Myanmar live in the coastal state of Rakhine, which was called Arakan until 1989 and which borders Bangladesh. The Myanmar military has repeatedly cracked down on the Rohingya in Rakhine state since the 1970s. Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, was under military rule for five decades until the 2015 election, when Aung San Suu Kyi won a landslide victory.
While Aung San Suu Kyi’s electoral victory was initially viewed as a desperately needed reprieve from a long period of military regimes, she remained silent on the issue of the Rohingya, who continued to suffer harassment. In August 2017, a violent military crackdown forced more than 700,000 Rohingya refugees to flee across the border into Bangladesh. Many refugees have since reported rape, torture, arson and murder by Myanmar security forces, backed by Buddhist groups.
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