rohingya genocide essay

The Rohingya Genocide: How Geopolitics Have Brought the Crisis to a Standstill

‌"After a careful and thorough analysis of available facts, it is clear that the situation in northern Rakhine state constitutes ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya,” said US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on November 22, 2017. His statement came months after the August outbreak of violence from the Myanmar military against the ethnic Rohingya group from a state in the north of the country. Human rights groups had been calling for action for some time and criticizing US indecision , and at last, the words had been said. Not merely a crisis, or unrest, but ethnic cleansing. Crimes against humanity .

Over 700,000 refugees fled the country initially, desperately making their escape from a “systematic slaughter of Rohingya Muslim civilians by the military ,” according to reporting from CBS news. The current UN report estimates that number at around one million . And yet, despite the crisis having come to the official attention of the UN over two years ago, the international community is now remarkably silent. The Rohingya people are still at serious risk of genocide , and it is both unsafe and impossible for them to return from refuge in Bangladesh to their homes. And while there have been sanctions from the United States against some Burmese generals and troops, no major changes have occurred.

Reports about the Rohingya are few and far between, far from the flood of righteous outcry during the first few months, despite statements from the UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide describing the actions of Myanmar’s military as a “ scorched-earth campaign ” against the Muslim ethnic group.

The Rohingya are not among the ethnic groups officially recognized by the state, and are therefore denied citizenship under Myanmar’s 1982 Citizenship Law . However, persecution occurred long before this law was signed–discrimination against the Rohingya has been getting worse for at least the past 55 years, as summarized by the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights .

The Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar found in their September 2019 report that “this formal exclusion of the Rohingya has resulted in severe inhumane suffering and persecution, thereby rising to the level of crimes against humanity.” The atrocities were so significant that the United Nations Human Rights Council opened a special session in 2017 on the crisis of the Rohingya in Myanmar, in which countries wholeheartedly condemned the large-scale violence taking place, especially against women and children.

The Myanmar military, known as the Tatmadaw, executed what they referred to as ‘clearance operations’­–a chillingly indifferent term for the mass slaughter of at least 6,700 Rohingya in the first month of the conflict alone, as estimated by Doctors Without Borders , many from being burned alive, and the brutal rape of many thousands of others. Based off of the atrocities, the conclusions of the Mission’s 2019 report directly placed responsibility for the genocide on the state of Myanmar, and said that not only does Myanmar continue to commit these crimes, but it still has “genocidal intent” towards the Rohingya. But the regional politics have brought the situation to a standstill, because China and Japan have become some of the strongest protectors of Myanmar, defending the government from both economic and diplomatic retaliation. Japan maintained economic support for the country throughout the Western sanctions of 2003, fostering a good relationship with the government. China, on the other hand, is Myanmar’s biggest trading partner, and the rivalry between these two titans of the Asian markets has spurred a competition for influence in Myanmar’s frontier market.

These rival interests means that both major countries are actively avoiding any dispute with the government. Also, much of the relationship between Myanmar and North Korea in the past based on arms trade, and a recent UN report said that China, India, Russia, and North Korea were involved in supplying weapons to the Tamatdaw that were used in the Rohingya genocide. Add the economic competition to Russia, China, and North Korea’s military support of the Tamatdaw, and the situation is frozen. The extermination of an entire ethnic group continues silently, and debates and negotiations progress while villages burn . Economic interests should not shield horrific crimes, and the Rohingya are suffering for the world’s inaction.

Paige K. Anderson

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Article Contents

Introduction, stanton’ stages in a burmese geographical and historical setting, design, methodology, and results of our discussions with refugees.

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Stages of the Rohingya Genocide: A Theoretical and Empirical Study

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Mohammad Pizuar Hossain, Stages of the Rohingya Genocide: A Theoretical and Empirical Study, Holocaust and Genocide Studies , Volume 35, Issue 2, Fall 2021, Pages 211–234, https://doi.org/10.1093/hgs/dcab033

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This article delineates processes of the ongoing Rohingya genocide by analyzing victim narratives through the lens of Gregory H. Stanton’s model of ten stages of genocide. Addressing the issues from theoretical and empirical perspectives offers a structured—if refracted—view of the plans, policies, and actions of the perpetrators. While bringing in historical origins and socio-political factors, the article rests primarily on victims’ accounts, along with evidence gathered by human rights organizations and the international press. The leaders of Myanmar seem intent on limiting international understandings of their program to simple ethnic cleansing—not prosecutable under the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. But while internal documents would be required to reveal the regime’s intentions and so validate Stanton’s model, testimonies and witness accounts afford ample grounds to assess the evolution of events as genocide. The following privileges the experiences and narratives of grassroots Rohingya victims.

This article addresses Myanmar’s ongoing genocide against its Rohingya minority, starting with precedents in the 1960s and even earlier. Myanmar (as the military dictatorship renamed Burma in 1989) is a majority-Buddhist nation in Southeast Asia that gained its independence from British rule on January 4, 1948. The country has a protracted history of inter-religious and inter-ethnic conflict. 1 The Rohingya, who are mostly Muslims and numbered over one million, and possibly 1.4 million, at the beginning of 2017, are one of the country’s many ethnic minorities (the majority group being the Burmese-speaking Bamar/Bama/Burmans). 2 During the 1930s various frictions triggered anti-Muslim (Indian and Rohingyan) rioting and killings. With Burma under Japanese occupation during World War II, the Buddhist majority mostly greeted the invaders, but the Rohingyas remained loyal to the colonial British. Supported by local Buddhists, the Japanese carried out massacres that drove between 22,000 and 40,000 Rohingyas into neighboring Chittagong district (then British India, now Bangladesh); thousands more fled to Bangladesh as a result of frictions with the government following Burma’s independence from Britain in 1948. 3 Repressions and persecutions of the Rohingya took place under varying circumstances over the following decades. 4 Major incidents of anti-Muslim violence, generally subsuming anti-Rohingya components, took place from 1974 to 1978, in 1997 and 2001, and from 2012 to 2017. Occurring in many parts of the country, most of these events involved mob assaults on mosques, homes, and businesses, and the killing of scores or even hundreds of victims. In some episodes the police or military put an end to disturbances, but more often looked the other way as crowds—encouraged or even mobilized by radical Buddhist monks, Buddhist youth associations, or the “Buddhist-nationalist” organization 969—carried out the violence. Space precludes full consideration here of whether official involvement was direct or indirect, of radicals’ association of Buddhism with “race,” or oppressions of other minorities by the majority Burmans and the governing structures they dominate.

Oppression of the Muslims, and especially the Rohingyas, took a turn for the worse in the second half of the 2010s, despite—or perhaps in part due to—the staged reform of the political system by the military government. As both regime and society have sought new forms of political mobilization, a militant, violently anti-Muslim, political Buddhism has gained notable traction. 5

Assaults on the Rohingya escalated especially after incidents of armed resistance on August 25, 2017, an episode that triggered overwhelming reprisals by government forces, semi-official paramilitaries, radicalized Buddhist-nationalist groupings, and Buddhist mobs. Widespread burnings of Rohingya villages, massacres, detentions, torture, looting of Rohingya livestock and household property, and systematic gang rapes of Rohingya women and girls triggered the flight to Bangladesh and other nearby countries of perhaps 700,000 people in 2017 and 2018, with more departures continuing after that. As many as one million Rohingya refugees could be living in Bangladesh today, with tens of thousands in other countries. 6 As of September 2019, perhaps 600,000 Rohingyas were hanging on in Myanmar’s Rakhine (Arakan) State, possibly one fifth of them interned in concentration camps—though what these numbers might be now remains anybody’s guess. 7

Genocide is widely considered the most serious international crime. 8 It expresses a government and/or a dominant group’s destructive actions with the intention of destroying, entirely or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. 9 Although the Republic of the Gambia (a predominantly Muslim, West African nation) has no historic link with Myanmar, it filed a case against the country (with the support of the fifty-seven-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation) at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on November 11, 2019, citing a “common interest” in fulfilling the “object and purpose” of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. 10 On January 23, 2020 the ICJ urged Myanmar to cease all acts that might amount to genocide against the Rohingyas, though without yet formally supporting Gambia’s charge. 11 On January 20, 2021 Myanmar contested The Gambia and the ICJ’s authority to make these charges, and eight days later the ICJ gave the latter country until May 20 to substantiate and re-affirm its charges (no action has in fact been taken). 12

The present study has adopted a qualitative research methodology in order to collect and present victims’ narratives. It employs a well-known model of genocide outlined by Gregory Stanton to make sense of victim experiences. 13 Though far from being the only stage-based model, Stanton’s framework has several virtues: it is clear, detailed, logically sequenced, and supple enough to encompass the non-linear progression of stages in specific cases.

The following chart represents the ten stages in Stanton’s model, each of which I elaborate in the following discussion. 14

The first stage of genocide in Stanton’s model is Classification of a group based on its ethnicity, race, religion, or nationality. The Rohingyas first came under direct state-sponsored persecution in 1962, when Burma fell under military rule. 15 The first official assault was their de facto, if not yet de jure, classification as “Bengalis” rather than Burmese (the Rohingyas speak Ruáningga, a Bengali-Assamese language mutually intelligible with Chittagonian, spoken in Bangladesh). 16 Stage 2, Symbolization, denotes the assignment of names or other symbols to members of a group, often based on their physical distinctiveness, but also on their attire or other stereotypes, all exaggerated in propaganda. 17 Initially differentiating the Rohingyas as Bengalis, official and unofficial propaganda soon labelled them Kalar (a pejorative adjectival noun meaning “dark,” used also for other non-Burmese ethnic groups), or simply referred to them as “dirty.” 18

Discrimination (Stage 3) denotes the denial of civil rights or citizenship by implementing prejudicial laws and policies, or by resurrecting prejudicial customs. 19 In Myanmar officials (if not necessarily all) have been treating the Rohingyas (whether de facto or de jure) as “immigrants” and drastically curtailing their civil and political rights since the mid-1980s: the freedom to practice their religion, the freedom of movement, and thus the right to be treated as equal citizens. 20 In 1993 the authorities started issuing Rohingyas—or rather those with “pending process[es] to validate applications for citizenship”—with “Temporary Registration Certificates,” widely called “White Cards” or simply TRCs, that officially identified them as “Bengalis.” 21 White Cards were issued to some ethnic Chinese or Indians elsewhere in Myanmar, but most holders were Rohingyas of Rakhine State (though now “Bengalis,” officials and policemen continued to refer to them informally—including in written documents—as Rohingyas). 22 Members of “recognized” ethnicities did not need these cards.

We know little about how many Rohingyas actually even attempted to obtain White Cards, though in 2007 the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported that of the 230,000 refugees repatriated from Bangladesh to Rakhine State between 1992 and 1997 only 35,000 had been able to convince village authorities to issue them the documents. Control over Rohingyas’ movements remained systematic: the White Cards allowed Rohingyas any freedom of movement only in Rakhine State, but just how restrictive life was for those without them remains unclear Virtually no Rohingyas are allowed to travel outside Rakhine State today; permission to travel between townships (counties) within the state is difficult to obtain, expensive, and limited to two weeks; even visits between villages in the same township require a “departure certificate,” and spending the night in someone else’s house requires police permission. The government exercises control via local orders, verbal instructions to district and village officials, threats of violence, and checkpoints. 23 Restrictions over Rohingyas’ right to marry and over childbirth that were imposed in 1993 figure in this stage (and others). The White Cards thus confirmed and reinforced the de facto denial of full citizenship under the 1982 citizenship law. 24 Moreover, under the White Card system Rohingyas were not permitted to study past elementary school, allowed only the most basic medical services, and in general equated to “temporary residents” of Myanmar. 25

In effect, denaturalizing the Rohingyas facilitated their further Dehumanization (Stage 4) as second-class citizens, sub-humans, or non-humans: animals, parasites, insects, disease germs. 26 Jeffrey Gettleman has cited a statement by influential Buddhist monks that “the Rohingya were the reincarnation of snakes and insects and should be exterminated, like vermin.” 27 Patrick Winn has quoted government officials characterizing them as “ugly as ogres,” and even advocating “Nazi-style pogroms” to clear them from the country. 28 The systematic rape of Rohingya women and girls that seemed to spike around 2012 may be understood as another form of Dehumanization, all the more so for the impunity the government accorded the perpetrators. (In June of that year mob violence between Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims broke out after an alleged gang rape and murder of a Buddhist woman; respondents during my research told us that soldiers and local Buddhists had shouted at them, “Rohingyas raped our women so we will rape you all.”)

Stage 5, Organization, consists of discussion and planning, primarily to arrange military support, create paramilitary formations, and mobilize (or encourage the self-mobilization of) local individuals of the dominant population for widespread killing of the targeted group. 29 Actual Preparation (Stage 7) cannot, however, get underway until the systematic exclusion of the victims from mainstream society, a stage Stanton locates between Organization and Preparation, namely “Polarization” (Stage 6). This phase embraces the employment of propaganda, the manipulation of norms, and the formulation of policies calculated to separate the intended victim group from other communities, for instance, by prohibiting intermarriage, ending social interaction, or blaming the targeted group for any violent resistance or disorders in response to their persecution.

In Myanmar milestones of Stage 5 included establishment of the notorious NaSaKa border security police that blockaded Rohingyas in Rakhine State, or rather in the townships of that state’s North; the regime’s training and arming of informal paramilitary organizations; intensified controls over Rohingyas’ movement between villages; and the imposition of exploitative taxes and fees (both legal and extortionate), along with the assignment of Rohingyas to forced labor, all of which left their victims materially defenseless. Hallmarks of Stage 6, Polarization, included controls (mentioned both above and below), over marriage, childbirth, and physical movements; and, restarting in 2014, armed attacks on the Rohingyas, which were justified as “counter-terrorism,” along with verbal attacks along the same lines in the media.

Stage 5 having set the gears in motion, and Stage 6 having provided the rationales by which to involve or at least neutralize the mass of the dominant population, the perpetrators continued on to Stage 7, Preparation, legitimized euphemistically as “ethnic cleansing,” “clearance operations,” “counter-terrorism efforts,” and the like (governments can represent such activities as discrete projects when in fact they constitute parts of bigger programs). 30 The government of Myanmar has portrayed the Rohingya community as a threat to national security, thus rationalizing a “counter-terrorism strategy” against peaceful civilians. 31 Government and military officials spread propaganda over the broadcast media: starting in 2012 but continuing more aggressively after the events of August 25, 2017, explaining that the Rohingyas were fleeing because they were associated with terrorist groups and they wanted to avoid law enforcement. 32 In reality, much of the Rohingya community fled due to well-founded fears following repeated persecutions that had nothing to do with either “law enforcement” or “counter-terrorism.”

Organization, Polarization, and Preparation give way to active “Persecution” in Stage 8, the creation of death lists of community leaders and intellectuals, increasing overall brutality against the target community, and even outright massacres. 33 A wave of violence, widespread rapes, and exploitation (the large-scale assignment of Rohingyas to forced labor, primarily for the army) drove up to 250,000 (possibly fewer) refugees from the country in 1991 and 1992, an event better associated with Stage 8 than Stage 9 (Extermination, from 2012 on). Most (230,000) of the refugees of 1991 and 1992 repatriated (under inhumane conditions, and not all voluntarily) between 1992 and 1997 under an agreement between Bangladesh and Myanmar arranged under the auspices of the UNHCR. 34

In state-sponsored genocides, official perpetrators seize private property such as homes, money, businesses, farms, and personal possessions, while continuing to segregate and confine the victims, often in internment or concentration camps. 35 The Myanmar authorities interned some 120,000 Rohingyas and perhaps 3,000 Kaman (a smaller Muslim people) in central Rakhine State, starting in 2012 and culminating around 2020—sometimes citing violence against the Rohingyas (!) as justification. 36 According to a Human Rights Watch report of October 2020, detainees are not only deprived of their last shreds of freedom of movement, but also of access to sufficient food, clean water, adequate shelter, education, and proper medical care. 37 One Myanmar soldier who participated in looting Rohingya villages stated that his unit’s commander told the men to raid the markets, adding, “what you take is what you get.” 38 Christopher Sidoti, a member of a UN fact-finding mission, reported in July 2019 that “There are concentration camps—let’s call it what it is—with 128,000 internally displaced people in central Rakhine, outside Sittwe. In Sittwe, there are three areas where Rohingya people live and they have become urban ghettos like those Jews lived in under Nazi-occupied Europe.” 39 Several of the events and initiatives we have mentioned already can also be associated with this stage of Stanton’s model. Although mentioned under Stage 1 (Classification) above, confiscation of the Rohingyas’ National Registration Cards under “Operation Sabe” between 1974 and 1978 may be associated with Stage 8. Operation Sabe was attended by anti-Rohingya violence and intimidation on a significant enough scale to convince 200,000 to flee to Bangladesh, though most of these returned following an agreement the two governments spent sixteen months hammering out (most likely in 1979 and 1980, also under UN facilitation). 40

The official armed forces (military and police), semi-official militias, and the supportive part of the general majority population are trained, armed, and taught that any crimes they commit will be regarded as “defensive,” for it is the victims who are the aggressors: “kill or be killed.” 41 A Myanmar soldier explained that when they started assaulting Rohingya villages, they had orders to “shoot everyone you see and everyone you hear.” Accordingly, in one village his unit killed and buried thirty Rohingyas: “eight women, seven children, and fifteen men and elderly.” This soldier revealed that their commanding officer ordered them to “exterminate all Kalar,” and admitted that his unit used to rape Rohingya women before killing them. 42 In Myanmar attacks on the Rohingyas in the name of counter-terrorism operations spread in 2012 and led to widespread internment in concentration camps. Mass killings and systematic rape reached a peak in 2016 (after a Rohingyan attack on the NaSaKa border police confining them to Rakhine State), and then surpassed that crest after the events of August 25, 2017. According to some of our respondents, the campaign seemed to begin subsiding at the end of October.

Though Stage 10 takes place after the actual killing, it is an inherent part of genocides according to Stanton: Denial, a component of genocide that may present several aspects, including, but not limited to, the refusal to acknowledge the commission of crimes, blocking investigations, or the destruction of evidence (disguising mass graves, burning dead bodies, threatening witnesses). 43 Perpetrators may seek to justify their actions by blaming the victims for the casualties, or argue that their actions do not qualify as genocide. 44 After the operations of August 25, 2017, the Myanmar government obstructed both global and local media from verifying the casualties of the military’s attacks on villages in Rakhine State, and from investigating the camps for internally displaced persons. 45 In fact, it had become more assiduous about burying or burning the evidence of the killings from 2016, not to mention more systematic about intimidating witnesses and even killing journalists. The total number of the Rohingyas killed during the ongoing genocide has never been precisely determined; indeed, the government currently blames the Rohingyas for burning their own villages and for having attacked the Myanmar security forces. 46 Most recently, Aung San Suu Kyi criticized the case brought by The Gambia before the ICJ as “an incomplete and misleading factual picture.” 47

Methodological Approach and Sampling Design

My study chose “Focus Group Discussion (FGD)” as a qualitative research method and data collection technique. This offered a cost-effective and promising alternative to participatory research, in which research subjects themselves reflect on and analyze the information they generate. I limited the study to only the Kutupalong refugee camp of Ukhia, Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, for two reasons: first, there was limited funding and limited time (my team was afforded only a few days, and limited visiting hours on each day); and second, Kutupalong is the largest camp of the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, where both the earlier-registered and newly-registered (essentially, before and after the events of August 25, 2017) populations are living together. As of January 31, 2019, an estimated 150,000 Rohingya households—perhaps 620,000 people—were living there. 48 My sample consisted of 383 households. 49 The primary field work started in December 2018, and the FDGs were conducted between February 20 and 24, 2019.

The study applied “simple random sampling” as its method. At first, a total of 383 households were identified from the estimated 150,000 by using the “random number table” method and each assigned an individual number. Then, two separate lists of male and female household members over the age of 18 were prepared. Afterward, 12 focus groups were formed, each consisting of 7 to 9 participants; more specifically, I used the random number table method to identify 96 participants out of the total of 1,786 adult members of the 383 households. A total of 81 of my subjects had come to Bangladesh on or after the events of August 25, 2017, the rest having arrived at various points starting from the 1980s. Of the 96 participants, 59 were male and 37 female—the smaller number of the latter reflects the fact that many women were unwilling to participate in the FGDs. I categorized the subjects by age into young adults (18 to 35 years old), middle-aged adults (36 to 55), and older adults (over 55). 50 The sample ranged from 18 to 71 years of age. The majority of my participants came from Maungdaw, Buthidaung, and Rathedaung Townships (districts), although a small number came from Ponnangyun, Kyauktaw, Mrauk-U, and Minbya Townships—all in Rakhine State.

Methods of Data Collection and Analysis

While conducting the FGDs, the research team (myself, twelve research assistants, two interpreters, two psychologists, and two note-takers) followed a checklist that included open and non-committal questions that permitted participants to convey their experiences without being led by the wording or the initial explanation of the research topic. Most FGDs continued for 90 to 120 minutes, occasionally more depending on circumstances. Team members were instructed to respect the preferences of participants regarding the flow of the conversation, when to break, whether to record or to take notes. These aspects thus varied between sessions. All steps of the study were explained to the participants, including its objectives. Male moderators carried out the FGDs with the male participants, and female moderators with the female. The teams employed audio recording, note-taking, and participant observation as data collection methods, all after receiving agreement via consent forms. The present study uses content analysis as the method of coding data and classifying them into categories; it draws upon careful review of the recordings and study of the transcripts. It also considers reports by governmental and non-governmental organizations, information presented on websites, newspaper and journal articles, and books.

Interview Analysis and Interpretation

The total number of participants is quite limited compared to the population now living in several camps in the Cox’s Bazar area. Thus, our research may understate the sheer brutality occurring in Rakhine State. Moreover, some victims of rape or other sexual abuse may have refused to discuss their experiences due to the stigma and the lack of privacy in the temporary shelters of the camp. The reactions of Myanmar officials, soldiers, militia members, and local perpetrators regarding the allegations against them are of course hardly accessible. Nevertheless, the overall course of the actions designed to eliminate the Rohingya ethnic group within Myanmar can be analyzed by deconstructing victims’ narratives and associating them with organizational reports, other published material, and the available responses of Myanmar officials. I have organized testimony in the light of a stage model, but it should be noted that any single participant’s testimony may associate actions conforming to more than one of these stages.

Classification appears in 80.21 percent of participant accounts. 51 Participants were specifically asked how the “dominant group” 52 differentiated them from other communities of Myanmar. Among them 93.22 percent of male and 59.46 percent of female participants confirm that they were identified as Bengalis and required to accept White Cards. A 36-year-old Rohingya woman also asserts that, “While attacking our villages, the soldiers used to yell at us … ‘this is not your country, you are Bengalis, go somewhere else.’” The Classification our informants were telling us about began with the military regime established under General Ne Win in 1962, which excluded Muslims from the military. Ne Win’s government may have had a secret twenty-year plan to eliminate the Rohingyas from Rakhine State, 53 which they apparently abandoned until Operation Sabe between 1974 and 1978. Under that assault, the military government confiscated NRCs (post-independence Burma’s first identity cards, first issued in 1951) from some tens of thousands of Rohingyas. Citing vague pretexts, or no pretexts at all, they did so with no formal legal process, and these cards were never returned. 54 Under the government’s new citizenship law of 1982, the term “Rohingya” was no longer recognized in official government documents. 55 Between 1989 and 1992 the government introduced “Citizenship Scrutiny Cards (CSCs)” replacing the old NRCs (the CSCs are pink for full citizenship, blue for associate citizenship, or green for naturalized citizenship). 56 Only a few Rohingyas ever received any kind of CSC, though we simply do not know how many. 57 Starting in 1993 the TRCs (White Cards) were issued for Rohingya, identifying them as Bengalis (officials continued to refer to them verbally, or occasionally in documents, as Rohingyas). 58 Evolving, and increasingly oppressive, processes of Classification under different regimes have thus been underway for more than 50 years.

Symbolization appears in the responses of 84.38 percent of participants. 59 Specifically, we asked participants what names, symbols, or insulting expressions members of the dominant group used to label them. Of the males 93.22 percent, and of the females 70.27 percent, affirmed that they were often addressed as “Bengalis,” “Muslim Bengalis,” or “Kalars.” As one Myanmar journalist affirmed, “Rohingya is still a dirty word in Myanmar.” 60 More crudely, a Myanmar diplomat recently affected umbrage at Rohingya women testifying before the ICJ who reported systematic sexual assaults by the Myanmar military: in his words nothing of the sort could have happened because Rohingyan women are too “dirty” to rape. 61

Discrimination appears in 89.58 percent of our responses (96.61 percent of the men and 78.38 percent of the women). 62 Responders report authorities taking away their citizenship (as defined by the 1982 citizenship law), replacing the NRCs with the CSCs from 1989 to 1992, forcing them to accept White Cards from 1993 onwards, and implementing various restrictions (official and informal) on marriage and childbirth. As an example of entry into this stage a 35-year-old Rohingyan woman told us that,

We had to provide money, ranging from 200,000 to 300,000 Burmese kyat [approx. $142.00 to $213.00], to government officials for permission to marry. Our marriage certificate prohibits having more than two children per couple. We were ordered to maintain an up-to-date family photo which government officials used to make sure if there were more children after the previous year. Sometimes, they compelled us to breastfeed our infants in front of them [i.e., to determine whether she was not lactating, and thus potentially holding the infant for a friend with more than two children]. If we were found to have more than two babies, we were immediately fined or put in jail. We were also given a mandatory birth-control injection known as dibu to prevent pregnancy.

From that same year of 1993, Myanmar began imposing exorbitant fees for Rohingyas to marry, as well as other restrictions over marriage and childbirth, controls that were renewed in 2009. Fortify Rights reported that in 2014 police were demanding an unofficial extra 100,000 kyat (roughly $71.00) or more for Rohingyas to marry outside their township. In any case, the police were taking almost two years to grant permission. Violations were to be punished by heavy fines and/or imprisonment for up to 10 years under Sections 188, 417, and 493 of the Criminal Code. Myanmar enforced a strict 2-child policy under “Regional Order 1/2005” against the Rohingyas. Many Rohingyan women have reported mandatory abortions, from which some suffered medical complications. 63

One participant in our study, a 46-year-old man, explained another form of Discrimination: because their right to stand as candidates had been rescinded in 2010, Rohingyas could no longer serve on village councils. Positions could be filled from that point forward only by the Buddhist Maghs (a Bengali term for Rakhine/Arakan Buddhists). 64 The Rohingyas were allowed to vote in the 2010 elections—though not to stand as candidates, per the military government’s Political Parties Registration Law of 2010. 65 On February 2, 2015 Parliament did decide to allow White Card holders to vote in an upcoming referendum on amendments to the constitution in November, 66 but on the eleventh President Thein Sein declared that all White Cards would expire on March 31, effectively barring Rohingya participation. 67

Dehumanization appeared in 94.79 percent of our responses (96.61 percent of the men’s and 91.89 percent of the women’s). 68 Relevant episodes included the abuse of women and children, torture, and other acts by which the dominant group humiliated members of the Rohingya community as sub-human or non-human. Our study devoted particular attention to the personal relationship of the Maghs to the Rohingyas. One 36-year-old Rohingya man reported that after several incidents of robbery in 2012, residents of his village appealed to the local police for protection—to no avail. Indeed, after that, a group of Maghs repeatedly threatened them (suggesting police collusion) not to make any further complaints. He specifies that the latter shouted, “Who are the mad dogs who went to the police to give a complaint against us? Come in front of us, we will send you to your Allah.” Likewise, many complaints of abuse by the security forces met with rejection by officials, who termed them “fabricated rumors.” In this manner offenders enjoyed immunity over many years. 69

The Global Justice Center reported in 2018 that incidents of rape and sexual violence by the Myanmar forces to terrorize the entire Rohingya community had been increasing since 2015. 70 We identified such actions as Dehumanization because they are part of a pattern, the perpetrators conducting them in a way deliberately calculated to demean the Rohingya community. As a 21-year-old Rohingya woman told us, “In March 2015, soldiers attacked the women of our village. They first raped me inside my house and then took me outside naked. They forced around 20 to 30 naked women to make a queue and march toward the paddies. After walking for a while, I felt blood running down my legs. After 1 or 2 hours, the soldiers … fired their guns toward the sky and yelled at us not to bring any complaint about the incident to anyone.” A quarter century earlier in the former Yugoslavia, the Bosnian-Serb army’s special services and “experts” in psychological warfare urged a “chilling sociological rationale” for similarly targeting women. 71 They indicated that, “the morale, will, and bellicose nature of [the Bosnian Muslims] can be undermined only if we aim our action at the point where the religious and social structure is most fragile. We refer to the women, especially adolescents, and to the children.” 72 Similarly, Rohingya women were publicly humiliated and violated to degrade their community as a whole in their own eyes, in the eyes of the perpetrators, and in the eyes of other communities of Myanmar.

Organization was reported in the interviews of 93.75 percent of our participants (98.31 percent of the men and 86.45 percent of the women; men were the major targets in this stage). 73 Interviewees depicted incidents requiring higher levels of organization: attacks by the military, widespread (and unlawful) arrests and confinements, and forced deportations on a group scale. A 56-year-old Rohingya man who left Myanmar in 2012 recounted the clashes between Arakanese Buddhists (predominant in the South of Rakhine State) and Rohingyas during which the military systematically targeted the latters’ religious leaders and the rich for slaughter, thereby decapitating the community. A 25-year-old man similarly recounted the conflicts in 2012 during which the police, the NaSaKa, and Buddhist mobs attacked Muslims. 74 (Amnesty International reported in 2004 that Rohingyas connected the restrictions on their freedom of movement and such exploitation as arbitrary taxation with the NaSaKa.) 75 It seems that the government formed militia forces and trained and armed informal paramilitary groups to terrorize the Rohingyas no later than 1992 (before then it appears to have been the official military). 76 A 39-year-old Rohingya man recounted a comparable event: “our village was attacked on the eve of Eid-ul-Adha [the Muslim holiday honoring Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son to God] on September 1, 2017 by the Magh rabata [chairman of the local government], who was our neighbor, local police, Buddhist Maghs , and soldiers. They cut our children into pieces and threw them into the canal. They also burnt our houses and looted our properties.” The military launched two major attacks in October 2016 and August 2017 that drove hundreds of thousands of Rohingyas to neighboring countries, primarily Bangladesh. 77 Reuters reported that during the operation of August 25, 2017 the military and paramilitary police, having previously mobilized Buddhist villagers in Rakhine State’s Inn Din village in Maungdaw Township, and in a minimum of two other unspecified villages of the same township, burned Rohingya houses. 78 The military and police involved the majority population specifically by working through chairmen and members of the local governing councils.

Polarization appeared in 90.63 percent of our responses (96.61 percent of the men, 81.08 percent of the women). 79 Decades of Islamophobic propaganda and agitation gradually moved a large part of the Buddhist population to regard the Rohingyas as a threat. The BBC reported on October 24, 2013 that even Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Myanmar’s de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi refers to a “climate of fear” between Muslims and Buddhists 80 —but attributed this to the fact that the “global Muslim power is very great.” 81 As part of the process of Polarization an entire targeted group may be blamed for any incidents of violence that occur in a country. Some observers argue that perpetrators sometimes commit attacks in order to provoke responses by the victims, or at least to generate a popular perception of ongoing “conflict” for which the targeted group can be painted as the source. 82 Such a widespread perception has helped Myanmar’s leaders mobilize the Buddhist public against the Rohingyas and justify ongoing acts against them. Acts of Polarization have thus occurred in earlier, as well as more recent, phases of Myanmar’s ongoing campaigns against the Rohingyas.

Examples of engineered Polarization are numerous. A 30-year-old Rohingya man told us that during the crackdown of 2012, soldiers forced Muslims to convert under threat of expulsion from the country. Many of our participants indicate that the broadcast and social media indicted their entire people as extremists or terrorists. A 58-year-old Rohingya man told The Guardian in 2013 (referencing events in 2012) that “the Myanmar military and police force began arresting mostly the young adults and some middle-aged adults of our villages, accusing them of joining a terrorist group. We thought that they were taken to the police station but after a few days we found dead bodies of many of them, and some are still missing.” A prominent Buddhist cleric promoted a 2014 rumor that Rohingyas had raped a Buddhist woman; 83 some of our participants felt that this particular allegation exacerbated Buddhists’ “ethnic hatred” against the Muslim Rohingyas. Far from preventing such agitation, the government itself identifies the entire Rohingya community as terrorists. 84

Preparation comprises all the acts that reflect the intention of the perpetrators to destroy the targeted group. This specific stage overlaps with Organization and Polarization. In our study, 92.71 percent of participants (98.31 percent of the men and 83.78 percent of the women) reported events that we identify as preparation. 85 In 2012, for instance, Buddhist monks and the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party 86 issued a number of anti-Rohingya leaflets and other public statements demanding the elimination of the Rohingyas from Myanmar, specifically employing the term “ethnic cleansing” for the first time. 87 Despite the fact that they expressed their demands at public meetings, no local, state, or national authorities raised any objections, 88 but rather carried out their own program of oppression to force the Rohingyas to leave. 89

Several violent attacks in Rakhine State between 2012 and 2015 drove approximately 125,000 Rohingyas to flee to Bangladesh. 90 A new Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) started organizing after the deadly communal violence of June 2012, claiming to be fighting to protect the rights of the Rohingyas. 91 Denying affiliation with any terrorist groups, on October 9, 2016 the ARSA did launch an attack on NaSaKa headquarters and two bases. 92 The government charged that the ARSA had carried out this attack in affiliation with a group called the Aqa Mul Mujahidi (apparently an invention of the Myanmar government following the violent events of 2012, which the government associated with a long-dormant—and possibly also invented—1980s militant group known as the Rohingya Solidarity Organization). 93 Regardless, there is no evidence to suggest that any “Aqa Mul Mujahidi” worked with ARSA. 94 Still, the government claimed that the assault had resulted in the deaths of 9 policemen, and therefore assigned the military to a “clearance operation” in Rakhine State against the Rohingyas. 95 Thus, just as allegations of gang rapes and mass killings of Rohingyas were eliciting international criticism, the government responded that its latest operations were “a lawful counter-insurgency campaign.” 96 Officially reacting to “a serious threat to Myanmar’s unity, stability, and sovereignty” supported by “international Islamist groups,” 97 and justifying its own actions as simple counter-terrorism, 98 the government’s “clearance measures” resemble genocidal acts.

Persecution, Stage 8, appears in 100 percent of our responses, those of both male and female participants, the highest percentage for any stage. As Persecution starts with identifying the victims as members of a distinct group, some features of the Classification, Organization, and Preparation stages reappear in this stage. A 60-year-old Rohingya man states that, “During October 2016, the police raided our village, arrested 19 wealthy, religious, and educated men, including my elder brother [62 years old], who was an imam, and opened fire on our locality. Subsequently, we learned that the military had burned my brother alive.” This example underscores the perpetrators’ deliberate targeting of individuals who could potentially offer leadership to members resisting such military operations.

Concerning the widespread rape of women in this stage, a 25-year-old Rohingya woman recounted the following:

On the eve of Eid-ul-Adha in 2017 [i.e., August 31], the Myanmar military entered my house by breaking the main door. They started beating my husband with their guns. I was around 8-months pregnant then. Two military personnel dragged me to the floor from my bed. I started begging them to leave me alone because I was pregnant. But one of them started torturing [raping] me; I tried to resist but I could not protect myself or even my child. I do not know how many of them [raped] me that night, as I fell unconscious. I could not protect my husband; they killed him.

It is apparent that the rape of women, torture, and arbitrary killings are common phenomena in the Persecution of the Rohingya. Combined with the looting of their belongings and intimidation into leaving their homeland, these actions clearly reflect a policy of making the Rohingya disappear as a group.

Extermination appears in 77.08 percent of our participants’ responses, 99 81.36 percent of the males’ and 70.27 percent of the females’: these either directly witnessed killing and raping of family members, relatives, or neighbors, or became victims of violence themselves. In one example, a 40-year-old Rohingya man reported to us that “on the night of August 28, 2017, the soldiers and Maghs started firing rockets into our village. While I was running away … with members of my family, I saw dead bodies of many people in the streets. I also heard people screaming who had been locked in their houses [which were set] on fire.” Of the 37 women we interviewed 14 identified themselves as rape survivors. The narratives of 9 of these indicated gang rapes, in various locales, usually involving at least 5 uniformed soldiers. A 38-year-old Rohingya woman who lost 16 members of her family told us about the following experience:

On one morning of the last week of August 2017, the Myanmar military randomly assembled about 400 to 500 people from our village in a field. After that, they separated the men and women. Approximately 200 to 300 men stood in a row and were [shot] in front of our eyes. Next, they dragged many of us, not all women … to a house and confined all of us inside…. They did not provide us any food or water for hours. During the evening of the same day, 20 to 30 soldiers entered the house and began torturing [raping] us. I was also tortured [raped] but I had no choice except screaming and bearing the pain.

Human Rights Watch suggests that although the exact number of rapes of Rohingya women and girls cannot be estimated, incidents were both widespread and systematic. 100 The ultimate intensity of the killings and rapes across Rakhine State amounts in our judgment to Extermination (under the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide systematic impregnation destroys the self-experienced integrity of a victim group, and thus constitutes genocide).

Accounts of subsequent Denial (Stage 10) by the authorities and the majority population appear in 67.71 percent of our participant accounts (72.88 percent of the males’ and 59.46 percent of the females). More specifically, two thirds reported having witnessed burials in mass graves and/or the burning of bodies, or having been directly or indirectly intimidated from reporting crimes they had witnessed. A 31-year-old man recounted that “soldiers held captive 19 Rohingyan imams and intellectuals in a Buddhist temple in October 2016. Then, six of them were burned alive and the others were tortured to death. Finally, the dead bodies were buried in a mass grave.” According to an estimate by Reporters without Borders, “60 per cent of the 65 journalists who were killed during 2017 [in Myanmar] were deliberately targeted in order to silence them.” 101 At the beginning of September 2017 the government officially claimed that the Rohingyas deliberately set their own villages and houses on fire; 102 participants in our study, however, affirm that only the military and majority population mobs committed these arsons. As a 26-year-old Rohingya man testified,

When I learned that the village neighboring ours, where my younger sister lived with her husband, had been set on fire, I immediately looked outside through the window of my room and saw that black fire smoke was floating in the sky. I was terrified but I went a little closer to the village and noticed that the villagers were trying to put out the fires and chase away the soldiers and Rakhine mobs. I still remember that some of these were throwing fireballs made from rope at the houses.

In early October 2017 Amnesty International indicated that “fire-detection data, satellite imagery, and photographs and videos from the ground,” along with Rohingya testimonies, indicated the systematic burning of villages. 103 On December 18, 2017 it was reported that since August 25, a total of 354 villages in Rakhine State had been fully or partly destroyed, along with more than 7,000 of their inhabitants. 104 Despite all this, on December 11, 2019 Aung San Suu Kyi appeared before the ICJ to deny any atrocities against the Rohingyas. 105 Her government refused to permit independent international investigations of mass crimes against the Rohingyas. 106 Myanmar military and civilian officials at all levels have invoked a defense of denial and defiance, mainly to thwart any international prosecution of the perpetrators for genocide or other crimes against humanity, but as well to evade any responsibility or accountability whatsoever.

The events recounted in numerous studies and reports, as well as the narratives of our Rohingya witnesses, support Stanton’s ten-stage model of genocide. The research and analysis presented above show that although Myanmar’s policies and actions have not necessarily conformed precisely to Stanton’s sequence of stages, the ten stages he laid out appear in the overall phases of the Rohingyas’ experience. Whatever their precise sequence on the ground, each stage affords windows into the genocidal intent of the perpetrators trying to eliminate the Rohingyas as an ethnic group.

This study suggests that the Rohingyas were classified long ago as Bengalis, which officially set them apart from other communities of Myanmar, bearing out the Classification psychology of “us” versus “them.” As a process of Symbolization, the government and others also identified the Rohingyas as Kalars and “dirty” people in order to personify them as “Other.” The military, the security forces, and the Rakhine Buddhist leadership enjoyed unofficial carte blanche to treat the Rohingyas however they pleased. The practice of Discrimination was enabled and strengthened by denying their citizenship, right to education, right to practice their religion, right to travel freely in their own country, right to vote or run for office, right to get medical treatment, right to employment, and right to due process. Their reproductive decisions were disrupted by eliminating their access to family planning services, and forcing them to receive injections to prevent pregnancy or forcing them to undergo involuntary abortions.

Both fieldwork and research suggest that Myanmar pursued Dehumanization, Polarization, and Preparation for genocide by representing the Rohingyas as Islamists and terrorists in order to justify not only treating them as non-human or sub-human, but also to rationalize violent operations falsely termed “counter-terrorism.” To fracture, weaken, and ultimately dissolve the Rohingya community, Myanmar carried out many kinds of crimes against it: extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detention and torture, internment, rape and sexual violence, arson, plunder, and so forth. 107 Far from investigating any such crimes, the authorities blamed the Rohingyas for all violence. The government-controlled Global New Light of Myanmar generalized all Rohingyas as “Islamic extremists,” though in fact there is little evidence of significant involvement in any transnational Islamist agenda. 108

During the process of Organization, the Myanmar officials engaged the Rakhine Buddhist nationalist and police-paramilitary forces to complement the military and security forces’ programs of Persecution and Extermination. Widespread mass killing and the systematic rape of women increased after August 25, 2017. Therefore, the Rohingyas had few options but to flee from Myanmar to neighboring countries such as Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. 109 Many of them have been interned in camps within Myanmar itself, where some are living under inhuman conditions. Nevertheless, Myanmar officials have resolutely invoked Denial of such atrocious crimes, regardless of the presence of perhaps 1,100,000 Rohingyas in refugee camps in Bangladesh, 110 which makes it clear that the main goal of the government was to expel the entire Rohingya community from Myanmar. Some 600,000 may remain in Rakhine State as of early 2021 according to UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric, who told reporters that this number includes 120,000 “who are effectively confined to camps [and] cannot move freely and have extremely limited access to basic health and education services.” 111 The circumstances of these people remain cloudy, and we have little information about how those not interned have held on. For all of the above reasons, my study concludes that although a state-sanctioned genocide of the Rohingya ethnic group is still underway, the Rohingyas have already experienced all ten stages of genocide in Stanton’s model.

Mohammad Pizuar Hossain is Senior Lecturer in Law at East West University in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He is also a researcher and human rights trainer at the Center for the Study of Genocide and Justice of the Liberation War Museum, Bangladesh; and a consultant for the Bangladesh Office of Asia Justice and Rights (AJAR). He has worked for the International Criminal Tribunal—Bangladesh as a research intern. His research interests concentrate on international law, including human rights; criminology and criminal justice; and constitutional law and public policy. He has published on trial by media, human rights violations, plea-bargaining and the criminal justice system of Bangladesh, rape as a weapon in Bangladesh’s War of Liberation and Pakistan’s genocide, amnesty for war crimes and genocide, and political Islam and the Bangladesh genocide.

Research for this article was funded by the East West University Center for Research and Training (EWUCRT), Dhaka, Bangladesh, and facilitated by the Center for the Study of Genocide and Justice of the Liberation War Museum, Bangladesh. The author declares no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the study, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Informed consent was obtained from all participants included in our questionnaire. Work with refugees took place from December 2018 to February 2019; the refugees quoted herein were interviewed from February 20 to 24, 2019.

Mathew J. Walton and Susan Hayward, “Contesting Buddhist Narratives: Democratization, Nationalism, and Communal Violence,” Policy Studies 71 (2014): 7.

Andrew Selth, Myanmar’s Armed Forces and the Rohingya Crisis (Peaceworks, no. 140) (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2018), 6; The Gambia v. Myanmar: Case Concerning Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (ICJ Report 2020), para. 21. Francis Buchanan used the term Rooinga for the first time in English in a 1799 historical piece describing the dialects and ethnic communities of Myanmar: “A Comparative Vocabulary of Some of the Languages Spoken in the Burma Empire,” Asiatic Researches 5 (1799): 219–40, reprinted in SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research 1, no. 1 (2003). The earliest ancestors of the modern Rohingyas can be traced in Burma to at least the ninth century.

Moshe Yegar, The Muslims of Burma: A Study of a Minority Group (Wiesbaden, Germany: Otto Harrassowitz, 1972), 2; Md. Ali Siddiquee, “The Portrayal of the Rohingya Genocide and Refugee Crisis in the Age of Post-Truth Politics,” Asian Journal of Comparative Politics (2019): 1; Ashutosh Pandey, “Myanmar’s Rohingya: A history of forced exoduses,” Deutsche Welle , September 9, 2017, https://www.dw.com/en/myanmars-rohingya-a-history-of-forced-exoduses/a-40427304 (accessed April 29, 2021).

Azeem Ibrahim, The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide (London: Hurst, 2016), 256.

The military government of Burma long identified itself as socialist; the recent reforms were intended in part to make the country more acceptable in international contexts and more attractive to foreign investment. In comparable situations, China gradually substituted nationalism for Communist ideology; and in India the governing “Hindu nationalist” Bharatiya Janata positioned itself as the alternative to the “socialist” Indian National Congress. See “The Rohingyas: The most persecuted people on Earth? ” The Economist , 13 June 2015, https://www.economist.com/asia/2015/06/13/the-most-persecuted-people-on-earth (accessed February 24, 2021).

The operations that started on August 25, 2017 drove an estimated 716,915 Rohingyas to the Cox’s Bazaar region in Bangladesh by the end of 2020. Including refugees already living there, estimates suggest a total of 911,566 Rohingyas in that country, some two-thirds of them (631,470) in Kutupalong alone, the world’s largest refugee camp. Tens of thousands have found at least temporary refuge in neighboring Southeast Asian countries, as well as others farther away. UNHCR Operational Portal, “Refugee Response in Bangladesh,” https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/myanmar_refugees (accessed February 16, 2021); Humanitarian Data Exchange, “Rohingya Refugee Crisis,” https://data.humdata.org/event/rohingya-displacement (accessed February 4, 2021); Voice of America, “Tens of Thousands of Rohingya Mark ‘Genocide Day,’” https://www.voanews.com/africa/south-sudan-focus/tens-thousands-rohingya-mark-genocide-day (accessed February 23, 2021) suggested over one million Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh as of August 25, 2019. The figure of 911,566 seems more probable than “over a million.”

Human Rights Watch, “Myanmar: Rohingya Await Justice, Safe Return 3 Years On,” August 24, 2020, https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/08/24/myanmar-rohingya-await-justice-safe-return-3-years # (accessed February 2, 2021); and “Statement on Myanmar Coup: UNSC members unable to agree,” The Daily Star , February 16, 2021, https://www.thedailystar.net/frontpage/news/rohingyas-rakhine-state-coup-will-worsen-their-plight-un-2038181 (accessed February 16, 2021).

Raphael Lemkin first used the term in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944). See too idem, “Genocide,” American Scholar 15, no. 2 (1946): 227–28; idem, “Genocide: A Modern Crime,” Free World 4 (1945): 42–43; UN General Assembly Resolution 96 of December 11, 1946, “The Crime of Genocide,” https://www.refworld.org/docid/3b00f09753.html (accessed September 19, 2020); Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (1969), art. 53. For helpful discussions see Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 139; Barbara Harff, “No Lessons Learned from the Holocaust? Assessing Risks of Genocide and Political Mass Murder since 1955,” American Political Science Review 97, no. 1 (2003): 63; Chris Sidoti, “Personal Reflections on the Law of Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 21, no. 2 (2019): 228.

William A. Schabas, Genocide in International Law: The Crime of Crimes (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 291. On intent in actual criminal cases see, for example, Prosecutor v. Athanase Seromba (ICTR-2001-66 T), December 13, 2006, para. 176; Aloys Simba v. Prosecutor (ICTR-01-76-A), November 27, 2007, para. 264; Prosecutor v. Theoneste Bagosora et al (ICTR-98-41 T), December 18, 2008, para. 2116; Prosecutor v. Tharcisse Muvunyi (ICTR-2000-55-A-T), September 12, 2006, para. 480; Prosecutor v. Juvénal Kajelijeli (ICTR-98-44A-T), December 1, 2003, para. 806; Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstic (ICTY-98-33-A), April 19, 2004, para. 513; Prosecutor v. Goran Jelisić (IT-95-10), December 14, 1999, para. 78; Prosecutor v. Radoslav Brdjanin (ICTY-99-36 T), September 1, 2004, para. 704; Prosecutor v. Clement Kayishema and Obed Ruzindana (ICTR-95-1 T), May 21, 1999, para. 93; Prosecutor v. Jean-Paul Akayesu (ICTR-96-4 T), September 2, 1998, para. 513. See too Arne Johan Vetlesen, “Genocide: A Case for the Responsibility of the Bystander,” Journal of Peace Research 37, no. 4 (2000): 524.

Stephanie van den Berg, “Gambia Files Rohingya Genocide Case against Myanmar at World Court: Justice Minister,” Reuters , November 11, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-world-court1jhWrg0euHYOKbdx5UYtbXog (accessed November 25, 2019). The Convention was adopted on December 9, 1948 as General Assembly Resolution 260A(III), and it came into force on January 12, 1951. The widespread, and varied international responses to the events in Rakhine State are too numerous to receive reflection here; likewise, the implications of the Myanmar military’s recent coup cannot be addressed.

ICJ Report 2020, para. 80.

“Genocide: Myanmar raises objection over Gambia’s eligibility in filling cast ICJ,” The Daily Star , February 4, 2021, https://www.thedailystar.net/rohingya-crisis/news/genocide-myanmar-raises-objection-over-gambias-eligibility-filling-case-icj-2039149 (accessed March 20, 2021).

Gregory H. Stanton is currently president of Genocide Watch and Research Professor in Genocide Studies and Prevention, School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University. See also Martin Shaw, “From Comparative to International Genocide Studies: The International Production of Genocide in 20th-Century Europe,” European Journal of International Relations 18, no. 4 (2011): 646, which stresses structures and processes over subjectivities in the lead-up to genocides; and Shelley J. Burleson and Alberto Giordano, “Spatiality of the Stages of Genocide: The Armenian Case,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 10, no. 3 (2016): 40, 52. Burleson and Giordano also offer a stages-based model to explain the origins and development of genocides. Relying on victim testimonies, my study addresses primarily only some of Stanton’s stages (e.g., Discrimination—Stage 3, or Extermination—Stage 9); a study focused on other stages (e.g., Organization—Stage 5, or Denial—Stage 10) would require alternative sources.

The earliest version of Stanton’s model suggested eight stages, only later elaborated into ten: Genocide Watch, “The Eight Stages of Genocide” (1996), http://www.genocide-watch.com/genocide/8stagesofgenocide.html (accessed November 5, 2020); and Genocide Watch, “Ten Stages of Genocide” (2016), http://genocidewatch.net/genocide-2/8-stages-of-genocide/ (accessed November 5, 2020). Other scholars developed stage-based models. See in particular Helen Fein, Accounting for Genocide: Victims and Survivors of the Holocaust (New York: Free Press, 1979), 35–36; Burleson and Giordano, “Spatiality of the Stages of Genocide,” 41; Daniel Feierstein, Genocide as Social Practice: Reorganising Society under the Nazis and Argentina’s Military Juntas (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014), 8; Penny Green et al., Countdown to Annihilation: Genocide in Myanmar (London: International State Crime Initiative, 2015), 47.

Erin Blakemore, “Who Are the Rohingya People?” National Geographic , February 8, 2019, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/people/reference/rohingya-people/ (accessed April 2, 2020).

See Donald N. Wilbur, Pakistan: Its People, Its Society, Its Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964), 219. Amman Ullah, “The Rohingya and the White Cards Saga,” The Rohingya Post , April 5, 2019, https://www.rohingyapost.com/the-rohingya-and-the-white-cards-saga/ (accessed March 20, 2020). All the way to 1947 the British referred to the Rohingyans informally as “Chittagonians”; the census of 1802 referred to the “Chittagonians” (which likely referred to both actual Chittagonians and Rohingyas) as “Bengalis.”

Ullah, “The Rohingya”; Burleson and Giordano, “Spatiality of the Stages of Genocide,” 42.

Sai Latt, “Intolerance, Islam and the Internet in Burma,” New Mandala , June 10, 2012, https://www.newmandala.org/intolerance-islam-and-the-internet-in-burma-today/ (accessed March 22, 2020); Azeezah Kanji, “Myanmar: Defending Genocide at the ICJ,” Al Jazeera , December 22, 2019, https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/myanmar-defending-genocide-icj-191219113440939.html (accessed March 22, 2020). I have found no reference to the Rohinyas as “Kalars” before 1962.

Stanton, “Ten Stages of Genocide.”

As of 2019 all Rohingyas were prevented from traveling outside Rakhine State, and even travel between villages required expensive and time-restricted official permissions: Human Rights Council, “Detailed Findings of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar,” September 16, 2019, p. 50, https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/HRCouncil/FFM-Myanmar/20190916/A_HRC_42_CRP.5.pdf (accessed February 19, 2021); the present status of mosques in the state remains unclear.

Ullah, “The Rohingya”; Human Rights Watch, “‘An Open Prison without End’: Myanmar’s Mass Detention of Rohingya in Rakhine State,” October 8, 2020, https://www.hrw.org/report/2020/10/08/open-prison-without-end/myanmars-mass-detention-rohingya-rakhine-state (accessed February 2, 2021); Green et al., Countdown to Annihilation , 8; Verena Hölzl, “Identity and belonging in a card: How tattered Rohingya IDs trace a trail toward statelessness,” The New Humanitarian , March 1, 2018, https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/feature/2018/03/01/identity-and-belonging-card-how-tattered-rohingya-ids-trace-trail-toward (accessed February 3, 2020). See also note 24 below.

Green et al, Countdown to Annihilation .

“Detailed Findings of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar,” 50.

That law of 1982 established three categories: full citizenship, associate citizenship, and naturalized citizenship. Without discussing the law’s nuances, we note that full citizenship inheres in eight major ethnic groups (including of course the majority Bamar or Burmese, and the Arakan or Rakhines); these eight groups were later broken down into 135 sub-groups, but all were present in the country as of 1824, the year the first Anglo-Burmese War started (some date it from 1823), followed by the incorporation of part of Burma into the British Empire and the consequent importation of workers from neighboring lands under British sway (the remainder of Burma came under British rule following the Second and Third Anglo-Burmese Wars later in the century); International Crisis Group, “Identity Crisis: Ethnicity and Conflict in Myanmar,” https://www.crisisgroup.org/asia/south-east-asia/myanmar/312-identity-crisis-ethnicity-and-conflict-myanmar (accessed April 19, 2021). The listing thus excludes not only Rohingyas but people of Indian, Nepali, or Chinese descent. Associate citizenship is for others who applied under the citizenship law of 1948 (national independence) and whose cases were still pending (!) as of 1982: https://statelessjourneys.org/wp-content/uploads/StatelessJourneys-Myanmar-final.pdf , p. 6. Burmese Rohingya Organization, UK, “Myanmar’s 1982 Citizenship Law and Rohingya,” December, 2014, https://burmacampaign.org.uk/media/Myanmar%E2%80%99s-1982-Citizenship-Law-and-Rohingya.pdf (accessed April 19, 2021). Naturalized citizenship may be granted to persons who can provide “conclusive evidence” of entry into Burma before 1948 and residence there since then. These people’s children had to be born in Burma/Myanmar, speak one of the major recognized languages, and be “of good character” and “sound mind.” Only a quarter of Myanmar’s population could provide such documentation, but many Rohingyas had lost family papers during numerous violent assaults, robberies, the burning of their homes, flight from the country, sometimes return to it, and sometimes renewed flight. Even so, those Rohingya able to obtain “naturalized citizenship” cannot hold elective office, form their own political party, or, escape the onerous controls over movement about the country. “Detailed findings of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission.” Few Rohingyas are either associate or naturalized citizens, and it is unlikely that more than a few are applying to become either.

Green et al., Countdown to Annihilation , 8; Simon Lewis and John Zaw, “Rohingya Muslims defiant as ‘white card’ deadline arrives,” UCA News , August 19, 2015, https://www.ucanews.com/author/john-zaw-12 (accessed February 20, 2021); the authors put things somewhat differently than some others, noting that the White Cards allowed Rohingyas to move freely between villages, and gave them access to some education and health services.

“Rohingya Recount Atrocities: ‘They Threw My Baby into a Fire,’” The New York Times , October 11, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/11/world/asia/rohingya-myanmar-atrocities.html?r=0 (accessed April 15, 2021).

“Myanmar State Media Alludes to Rohingya Muslims as ‘Human Fleas,’” Public Radio International , November 30, 2016, https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-11-30/myanmar-state-media-alludes-rohingya-muslims-human-fleas (accessed April 15, 2021).

Myanmar’s militias are diverse, operating in vastly different environments. Bodies of armed fighters manifest the aims of specific ethnic, religious, tribal, clan, criminal, or political groups. Some serve the government directly or indirectly; others operate independently to pursue particularist goals, to fight other groups, or to resist the government. See John Buchanan, Militias in Myanmar (San Francisco: The Asia Foundation, July 2016), 1–2, https://asiafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Militias-in-Myanmar.pdf (accessed April 15, 2021).

Governments can represent the activities of stage seven as discrete projects when in fact they constitute parts of bigger programs. Stanton, “Ten Stages of Genocide”; Burleson and Giordano, “Spatiality of the Stages of Genocide.”

International Crisis Group, “Myanmar’s Rohingya Crisis Enters a Dangerous New Phase,” December 7, 2017, https://www.crisisgroup.org/asia/south-east-asia/myanmar/292-myanmars-rohingya-crisis-enters-dangerous-new-phase (accessed April 2, 2020).

“Suu Kyi ‘Skipped’ Talks on Rohingya Rape at UN Meeting,” The Daily Star , December 27, 2017, https://www.thedailystar.net/rohingya-crisis/suu-kyi-skipped-talks-on-rohingya-rape-at-un-meeting-1511170 (accessed April 1, 2020); “Is social media inciting violence in Myanmar?” The Daily Star , April 18, 2018, https://www.thedailystar.net/star-weekend/social-media-inciting-violence-myanmar-1561876 (accessed April 1, 2020).

Stanton, “Ten Stages of Genocide”; Burleson and Giordano, “Spatiality of the Stages of Genocide.”

Yousuf Storai, “Systematic Ethnic Cleansing: The Case Study of Rohingya,” Arts and Social Sciences Journal 9, no. 4 (2018): 1, 3; Edith M. Lederer, “UN Chief: Myanmar Rohingya are Victims of Ethnic Cleansing,” The Washington Post , September 13, 2017, https://www.apnews.com/a0bf75ec1f41490cacbfec49d1911718 (accessed March 12, 2021); Ray Sanchez, Ben Westcott and Jamie Tarabay, “UN Chief Calls Myanmar’s Rohingya Crisis “Catastrophic” as Security Council Condemns Violence,” CNN , September 13, 2017, https://edition.cnn.com/2017/09/13/asia/rohingya-un-guterres/index.html (accessed March 12, 2021).

Human Rights Watch, “‘An Open Prison without End.’”

“Myanmar Army Deserters Say Officers Ordered Rohingya Massacres, Rapes,” News Wires , September 8, 2020, https://www.france24.com/en/20200908-myanmar-army-deserters-say-officers-ordered-rohingya-massacres-rapes (accessed September 20, 2020).

“UN Official Likens Rohingya Living Conditions to Nazi Concentration Camps,” The Guardian , July 4, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/04/un-warns-of-possible-new-war-crimes-in-myanmar (accessed March 29, 2020).

Y. Katie Dock, “Breaking a Cycle of Exodus: Past Failures to Protect Rohingya Refugees Should Shape Future Solutions,” Stimson , June 21, 2020, https://www.stimson.org/2020/breaking-a-cycle-of-exodus/#:∼:text=chooses%20to%20use (accessed March 15, 2021).

“Myanmar Army Deserters Say.”

Independent Permanent Human Rights Commission , Report of the OIC-IPHRC Fact Finding Visit to Rohingya Refugees’ Camps in Bangladesh to Assess Human Rights Situation of Rohingya Muslim Minority in Myanmar , January 2–6, 2018, 9.

Kubra Chohan, “Over 350 Rohingya Villages Burned in Rakhine State: HRW,” Anadolu Post , December 18, 2017, https://www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/over-350-rohingya-villages-burned-in-rakhine-state-hrw/1008043 (accessed April 11, 2020); “HRW: New Rohingya Villages Destroyed in Myanmar,” VOA News , December 18, 2017, https://www.voanews.com/east-asia-pacific/hrw-new-rohingya-villages-destroyed-myanmar (accessed April 11, 2020).

“Top UN Court Orders Myanmar to Protect Rohingya from Genocide,” UN News , January 23, 2020, https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/01/1055841 (accessed February 2, 2020).

UNHCR Operational Portal, “Refugee Response in Bangladesh.” The author verified this estimated data from information collected by two different non-governmental organizations—Mukti Cox’s Bazar and Care-Bangladesh—and a concerned government official who preferred to remain anonymous.

As the number of Rohingya households of the Kutupalong camp is unspecified, the sample size was obtained by computing the minimum sample size required for precision in determining proportions by taking into consideration the standard normal deviation set at 95 percent confidence level (1.96), percentage picking a choice or response (50 percent = 0.5) and the confidence interval (0.05 = ± 5). The formula is: n = z 2 (p)(1-p)/c 2 ; here z = standard normal deviation set at 95 percent confidence level, p = percentage picking a choice or response, and c = confidence interval).

Nathan Kogan, “A Study of Age Categorization,” Journal of Gerontology 34, no. 3 (1979): 359.

Some pertinent events of Discrimination (Stage 3), Organization (Stage 5), and Persecution (Stage 8) appear in this stage.

Participants defined the “dominant group” as the government, political parties, the military, security forces, and the local authorities (including some of the Buddhist clergy and some influential members of the general majority population).

Aman Ullah, “Abusive State Policies against Rohingya Muslims in Burma,” The Rohingya Post , April 5, 2019, https://www.rohingyapost.com/abusive-state-policies-against-rohingya-muslims-in-burma/ (accessed February 3, 2021).

Aman Ullah, “Abusive State Policies against Rohingya Muslims in Burma,” The Rohingya Post , April 5, 2019, https://www.rohingyapost.com/abusive-state-policies-against-rohingya-muslims-in-burma/ (accessed February 3, 2021). The NRCs for men were green, those for women pink. Hölzl, “Identity and belonging in a card.” See also Ahmed Kawser and Helal Mohiuddin, The Rohingya Crisis: Analyses, Responses, and Peace-building Avenues (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), 214–15.

Ullah, “The Rohingya”; Ken MacLean, “The Rohingya Crisis and the Practices of Erasure,” Journal of Genocide Research 21, no. 1 (2019): 88; “Myanmar’s Mass Detention of Rohingya in Rakhine State.”

“Myanmar’s Mass Detention of Rohingya in Rakhine State.”

Danish National ID Centre, “Myanmar: Citizenship and issuance of passports for Rohingyas,” September 1, 2020, 2–3, https://nidc.dk/-/media/D0A2AFFEA7DF400B9AA45AFB3F5373B6.pdf (accessed February 3, 2020).

Ullah, “The Rohingya.”

Some events of Organization (Stage 5), Polarization (Stage 6), and Preparation (Stage 7) appear in this stage.

John Zaw, “Rohingya Still a Dirty Word in Aung San Suu Kyi’s Myanmar,” UCA News , May 16, 2016, http://www.rohingyablogger.com/2016/05/rohingya-still-dirty-word-in-aung-san.html (accessed March 20, 2020).

Azeezah Kanji , “Myanmar: Defending Genocide at the ICJ,” Al Jazeera , December 22, 2019, https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/myanmar-defending-genocide-icj-191219113440939.html (accessed March 22, 2020).

Some pertinent events of Dehumanization (Stage 4), Organization (Stage 5), and Persecution (Stage 8) appear in this stage.

Fortify Rights, “Policies of Persecution: Ending Abusive State Policies against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar,” February 28, 2014, 24, 31–32, http://www.fortifyrights.org/downloads/Policies_of_Persecution_Feb_25_Fortify_Rights.pdf (accessed March 22, 2020); police were also instructed to compare children in age and appearance to verify which family they belonged to, while older children might be questioned separately from the adults; many of our interviewees confirmed the same. See too Chris Lewa, “Two-Child Policy in Myanmar Will Increase Bloodshed,” CNN , June 6, 2013, http://edition.cnn.com/2013/06/06/opinion/myanmar-two-child-policy-opinion (accessed March 24, 2020); Human Rights Watch, “Joint Submission to CEDAW on Myanmar,” May 24, 2018, https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/05/24/joint-submission-cedaw-myanmar#_ftn25 (accessed March 24, 2020).

Jacques P. Leider, “Forging Buddhist Credentials as a Tool of Legitimacy and Ethnic Identity: A Study of Arakan’s Subjection in Nineteenth-Century Burma,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 51, no. 3 (2008): 429.

Sithu Aung Myint, “White Cards: The Junta’s Toxic Legacy,” The Myanmar Times , April 7, 2014, https://www.mmtimes.com/opinion/10076-white-cards-the-junta-s-toxic-legacy.html (accessed March 25, 2020).

Ullah, “The Rohingya”; “Hundreds Protest Rohingya Vote on Myanmar Charter Change,” Radio Free Asia , February 11, 2015, https://www.refworld.org/docid/5507ea2015.html (accessed March 30, 2020).

Ibid; and “Myanmar Revokes Rohingya Voting Rights after Protests,” BBC , February 11, 2015, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-31421179 (accessed March 30, 2020).

Some relevant events of Classification (Stage 1), Discrimination (Stage 3), and Persecution (Stage 8) appear in this stage.

“Burma/Myanmar: Flawed Domestic Investigations Necessitate UN Commission of Inquiry on Serious Crimes,” Progressive Voice, March 7, 2017, https://progressivevoicemyanmar.org/2017/03/07/burmamyanmar-flawed-domestic-investigations-necessitate-un-commission-of-inquiry-on-serious-crimes/ (accessed March 26, 2020); United States Department of State, “2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices—Burma,” April 13, 2016, https://www.refworld.org/docid/57161291c.html (accessed March 31, 2020).

UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Report of OHCHR Mission to Bangladesh: Interviews with Rohingyas Fleeing from Myanmar since 9 October 2016 , February 3, 2017, 39, https://www.refworld.org/docid/5899cc374.html (accessed March 25, 2020); Global Justice Center, Discrimination to Destruction: A Legal Analysis of Gender Crimes against the Rohingya , September 2018, 44, http://www.globaljusticecenter.net/files/Discrimination_to_Destruction.pdf (accessed March 30, 2020).

Abdus Sattar Ghazali, “24th Anniversary: Srebrenica Genocide Remembered,” The Milli Gazette Online , July 12, 2019, http://www.milligazette.com/news/16736-24th-anniversary-srebrenica-genocide-remembered (accessed April 1, 2020); Oytun Eskiyenenturk, “Balkan Tragedy: Who Is To Blame?” in The History and Analysis of the Conflict in the Former Yugoslavia: 1991–1995 , https://web.stanford.edu/class/e297c/war_peace/confrontation/hformeryugoslavia.html (accessed April 1, 2020).

Eskiyenenturk, “Balkan Tragedy.”

Some relevant events of Polarization (Stage 6) and Preparation (Stage 7) appear in this stage.

“Burma/Bangladesh Burmese Refugees in Bangladesh: Still No Durable Solution,” Human Rights Watch 12, no. 3(c) (2000), https://www.hrw.org/reports/2000/burma/index.htm (accessed March 30, 2020); “Burma: The Rohingya Muslims; Ending a Cycle of Exodus?” Human Rights Watch/Asia 8, no. 9(c) (1996): 5.

Amnesty International, “The Rohingya Minority: Fundamental Rights Denied,” May 18, 2004, 5, https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/92000/asa160052004en.pdf (accessed February 2, 2021).

See n. 30 above.

Zoltan Barany, “The Rohingya Predicament—Why Myanmar’s Army Gets Away with Ethnic Cleansing,” IAI Papers 19:07 (2019): 1–5, https://www.iai.it/sites/default/files/iaip1907.pdf (viewed March 1, 2021).

Wa Lone et al., “Myanmar Forces and Buddhist Villagers Torched Rohingya Homes, Then Killed,” Reuters , February 9, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rakhine-events-precis/myanmar-forces-and-buddhist-villagers-torched-rohingya-homes-then-killed-idUSKBN1FS3BL (accessed March 30, 2020).

Some pertinent events of Classification (Stage 1), Symbolization (Stage 2), Organization (Stage 5), and Persecution (Stage 8) appear in this stage.

“Suu Kyi Blames Burma Violence on ‘Climate of Fear,’” BBC , October 24, 2013, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-24651359 (accessed April 1, 2020).

Ibid.; The Sentinel Project, “Operational Process—Stages of Genocide Model,” https://thesentinelproject.org/what-we-do/early-warning-system/operational-process-stages-of-genocide-model/ (accessed February 4, 2020).

“Buddhist Monk Uses Racism and Rumours to Spread Hatred in Burma,” The Guardian , April 18, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/apr/18/buddhist-monk-spreads-hatred-burma (accessed November 20, 2019); “All You Can Do is Pray: Crimes against Humanity and Ethnic Cleansing of Rohingya Muslims in Burma’s Arakan State,” Human Rights Watch , April 22, 2013, https://www.burmalibrary.org/en/all-you-can-do-is-pray-crimes-against-humanity-and-ethnic-cleansing-of-rohingya-muslims-in-burmas (accessed November 20, 2019).

In addition to some events of Organization (Stage 5) and Polarization (Stage 6), some events of Persecution (Stage 8) appear in this stage.

Formed by Arakanese nationalists in 2010, apparently an affiliate of the military’s Union Solidarity and Development Party.

“Burma: End ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ of Rohingya Muslims, Unpunished Crimes against Humanity, Humanitarian Crisis in Arakan State,” Human Rights Watch , April 22, 2013, https://www.hrw.org/news/2013/04/22/burma-end-ethnic-cleansing-rohingya-muslims (accessed March 27, 2020).

Pandey, “Myanmar’s Rohingya: A History of Forced Exoduses.”

Iftekharul Bashar, “Rohingya Crisis and Western Myanmar’s Evolving Threat Landscape,” Counter Terrorist Trends and Analyses 11, no. 6 (2019): 14.

“India opens probe into Rohingya militant group Aqa Mul Mujahidin,” Radio Free Asia , February 20, 2018, https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b2221054.html (accessed February 3, 2021).

Counter Extremism Project, “Myanmar (Burma): Extremism & Counter-Extremism,” https://www.counterextremism.com/sites/default/files/country_pdf/MM-12172019.pdf (accessed April 2, 2020).

“Myanmar Says Military Operation in Troubled Rakhine Has Ended,” Reuters , February 16, 2017, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-army/myanmar-says-military-operation-in-troubled-rakhine-has-ended-idUSKBN15V0BI (accessed April 3, 2020).

Selth, “Myanmar’s Armed Forces,” 289.

Sufyan bin Uzayr, “Buddhism and Ethnic Cleansing in Myanmar,” Foreign Policy in Focus , August 19, 2014, http://fpif.org/buddhism-ethnic-cleansing-myanmar/ (accessed November 1, 2019).

Some relevant events of Organization (Stage 5) and Persecution (Stage 8) appear in this stage.

Rick Gladstone, “Rohingya Were Raped Systematically by Myanmar’s Military, Report Says,” The New York Times , November 16, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/16/world/asia/myanmar-rohingya-rapes.html (accessed April 11, 2020).

Siddiquee, “The Portrayal of the Rohingya Genocide,” 4. Other reasons for killing journalists remain unclear in this source, though they likely enough include ordinary robbery.

“Rohingya Muslims Respond to Claims They Set Fire to Their Homes,” BBC , September 14, 2017, https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-41262953/rohingya-muslims-respond-to-claims-they-set-fire-to-their-homes (accessed March 18, 2020); “‘They Burned Their Own Houses and Ran Away’: Myanmar Police Tell Journalists Rohingya Torched Their Own Village,” South China Morning Post , September 7, 2017, https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/south-asia/article/2110155/they-burned-their-own-houses-and-ran-away-myanmar-police-tell (accessed April 12, 2020).

Independent Permanent Human Rights Commission , Report of the OIC-IPHRC .

Ibid.; Chohan, “Over 350 Rohingya Villages Burned”; “HRW: New Rohingya Villages Destroyed in Myanmar,” Voice of America , December 18, 2017, https://www.voanews.com/east-asia-pacific/hrw-new-rohingya-villages-destroyed-myanmar (accessed April 11, 2020).

“Myanmar Rohingya: What You Need to Know about the Crisis,” BBC, January 23, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-41566561 (accessed April 14, 2020).

“Myanmar’s Genocide against Rohingya is Ongoing and Aung San Suu Kyi is in ‘Total Denial,’ UN Investigator Warns,” South China Morning Post , October 25, 2018, https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/southeast-asia/article/2170125/myanmars-genocide-against-rohingya-ongoing-and-aung-san-suu (accessed October 2, 2019).

United States Department of State, “2015 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices—Burma.”

Siddiquee, “The Portrayal of the Rohingya Genocide,” 5; Selth, “Myanmar’s Armed Forces,” 289; Counter Extremism Project, “Myanmar (Burma).”

Eleanor Albert and Lindsay Maizland, “The Rohingya Crisis,” Council on Foreign Relations , January 23, 2020, https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/rohingya-crisis (accessed April 4, 2020).

Matthew Pennington, “Bangladesh point finger at Myanmar for Rohingya ‘genocide,’” Fox News , September 27, 2018, https://www.foxnews.com/world/bangladesh-point-finger-at-myanmar-for-rohingya-genocide (accessed September 12, 2020).

“Statement on Myanmar Coup: UNSC members unable to agree,” The Daily Star , February 3, 2021, https://www.thedailystar.net/frontpage/news/rohingyas-rakhine-state-coup-will-worsen-their-plight-un-2038181 (accessed February 4, 2021).

Author notes

Muhammad Pizuar Hossain is Senior Lecturer in Law at East-West University in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He is also a researcher and human rights trainer at the Center for the Study of Genocide and Justice of the Liberation War Museum, Bangladesh; and a consultant for the Bangladesh Office of Asia Justice and Rights (AJAR). He has worked for the International Criminal Tribunal—Bangladesh as a research intern. His research interests concentrate on international law, including human rights; criminology and criminal justice; and constitutional law and public policy. He has published on trial by media, human rights violations, plea-bargaining and the criminal justice system of Bangladesh, rape as a weapon in Bangladesh’s War of Liberation and Pakistan’s genocide, amnesty for war crimes and genocide, and political Islam and the Bangladesh genocide.

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Genocide case against Myanmar over Rohingya atrocities cleared to proceed

UN’s international court of justice rejects arguments advanced by military junta over crackdowns against Muslim minority group

The United Nations’ highest court has rejected Myanmar’s attempts to halt a case accusing it of genocide against the country’s Rohingya minority, paving the way for evidence of atrocities to be heard.

The international court of justice rejected all preliminary objections raised by Myanmar , which is now ruled by a military junta, at a hearing on Friday.

The case, which was filed by the Gambia , centres on brutal military crackdowns in 2016 and 2017 that forced more than 700,000 Rohingya to flee over the border to neighbouring Bangladesh.

It accuses Myanmar’s military of carrying out widespread and systematic “clearance operations” against the Rohingya , committing mass murder, rape and torching villages, with the “intent to destroy the Rohingya as a group in whole or in part”.

Myanmar had argued that the court did not have jurisdiction, claiming the Gambia could not bring the case because it was not directly affected by the events, and because a legal dispute did not exist between the two countries before the case was filed. It also claimed that the Gambia was acting as a “proxy” for the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, and lacked standing because the ICJ only rules on disputes between states.

Such arguments were each rejected by the court. Reading the decision, the court’s president, US Judge Joan E Donoghue, said: “The court notes that the Gambia instituted the present proceedings in its own name as a state party to the statute of the court and to the Genocide Convention.”

Akila Radhakrishnan, president of the Global Justice Centre, said Friday’s decision was “an enormous step forward for justice”.

“It sends a signal to Myanmar’s military that they cannot commit atrocities with impunity. The case proceeding is all the more important in light of the February 2021 coup, which was enabled and emboldened by the impunity the military has been afforded for far too long,” she said.

The military seized power in a coup last year, and has unleashed a relentless campaign of violence to crush dissent. The UN rights office warned in March that the junta was carrying out widespread and systematic abuses against civilians that may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Tun Khin, president of the Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK, said objections filed by Myanmar were an attempt to slow proceedings, and that oppression of Rohingya continues. “For a year and a half the case has been delayed and every day the genocide continues. Laws and policies designed to make life unbearable and drive Rohingya out of Myanmar are part of the genocide and continue despite provisional measures ordered by the court,” he said, referring to a previous court order instructing Myanmar to do all it can to protect Rohingya from genocide as the case, which will take years, proceeds.

Tun Khin called on the UK to join the Gambia and back the case. “The UK claims international leadership on Myanmar but it’s Gambia, not the UK which has been leading,” he said. The Netherlands and Canada are supporting the Gambia.

Following last year’s coup, the junta is now representing Myanmar at the ICJ. The national unity government, formed by elected lawmakers, ethnic minority representatives and activists, had argued it should represent Myanmar in court , and that it would withdraw preliminary objections.

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Dozens of Rohingya refugees rescued from overturned boat in Indian Ocean

Fears grow for hundreds of Rohingya refugees adrift for two weeks

About 180 Rohingya refugees feared dead after boat goes missing

Activists appeal for rescue of Rohingya refugees stranded at sea in leaking boat

Myanmar junta takes place of Aung San Suu Kyi at Rohingya hearing

Thousands homeless as fire sweeps through Rohingya refugee camp

Rohingya sue Facebook for £150bn over Myanmar genocide

Prominent Rohingya leader shot dead in Bangladesh refugee camp

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India detains Rohingya refugees and threatens to deport them to Myanmar

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Modern-Day Genocide, A Study of the Rohingya Minority in Burma

The Rohingya, a religious and ethnic minority in Burma, went from being citizens to outsiders and became the targets of a sustained campaign of genocide. By exploring the online exhibition  Burma’s Path to Genocide , students learn how government policies and the proliferation of hate speech led to genocide of the Rohingya. Rohingya are still at risk of genocide today. 

Grade level:  Adaptable for secondary and college students Subject:  Multidisciplinary Time required:  Chapter I functions as the introduction. Other chapters may be completed independently depending on desired educational outcomes.

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Chapter V: Surviving (60 minutes)

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• Complex networks
• Cultural and media studies

Frequently called the most persecuted minority in the world, the Rohingyas have suffered systematic violence and oppression in Myanmar since the 1970s. Today, the vast majority of the nearly three million Rohingyas are in exile, escaping state-sponsored human rights violations and persecution in the Rakhine state of Myanmar—a place they call “home”. Neighbouring Bangladesh, which currently hosts over a million displaced Rohingya, has been a ‘sanctuary’ for at least the last four decades. A sizable community has also emerged successively in other South-East Asian countries and pockets of Australia, Europe and North America. In this context, bringing together issues at the crossroads of (im)mobilities, online connectivity and the quest for identity, this study examines the role of social media platforms in forming and shaping new types of diaspora activism among the exiled Rohingyas. Drawing on yearlong online ethnographic findings, it unpacks how digital platforms constitute a space for togetherness, where diasporic Rohingya identities are constructed, contested and mediated. Analysing recurring themes and patterns of engagement on these web-based platforms, the paper looks at how diasporic civic and political e-activisms are transforming the very contours of Rohingya identity formation and their pursuit of recognition. Finally, focusing on such a creative constellation of socio-cultural and political issues in virtual space, we demonstrate how Rohingyas practice a politics of resistance and recognition when confronting the policy pretensions of Myanmar’s government.

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Introduction

“In the first place, we do not like to be called ‘refugees.’“ —Hannah Arendt.

In her classic essay “We Refugees” , Hannah Arendt describes the endless cognitive anxiety amongst the Jews of Europe as they fled the continent and made a new life in exile (Arendt, 2017 ). She depicts how difficult it is to relate to the psychological effects of political non-existence unless one has traversed the liminal space of a refugee. The contemporaneous of forced displacement, statelessness and the relentless search for a ‘safe place’ and an ‘identity’ across the globe reminds us how recurring and prescient Hannah Arendt’s century-old observation remains. Set within such interconnected trajectories of violence, statelessness and an endless search for identity, this paper puts a spotlight on Myanmar’s displaced Rohingyas—a scattered community in the process of becoming a nascent diaspora as a result of their protracted displacement. Since 2017, after their mass exodus from the Rakhine state into neighbouring Bangladesh, exiled Rohingya communities have started highlighting their plight while asserting a distinct ethnic identity (Ansar & Khaled, 2022 ; Abraham & Jaehn, 2020 ). Considering their increasing involvement in social, cultural and political issues on social media platforms, this article explores how the Rohingya diaspora has coalesced in digital spaces to build a transnational identity and how their digital activism has evolved to include a political dimension over time.

Frequently termed ‘the world’s most persecuted minority’, the Rohingyas have been subjected to persistent human rights violations, including ethnic cleansing, statelessness and possibly even genocide (Khaled, 2021 ; Ansar, 2020 ; Ibrahim, 2018 ; Alam, 2018 ). By introducing punitive policies, Rohingyas have been categorically denied a range of fundamental rights by the Myanmar government, including the freedom of movement, rights to education, primary health facilities, having family, marriage and employment (Ansar & Khaled, 2021 ; Uddin, 2020 ). Ethnic cleansing and persecution of Rohingyas in Myanmar and denial of their citizenship (therefore, effectively rendering them stateless) has been the political strategy of the successive military regimes. Today, the vast majority of the nearly three million Rohingyas is displaced, mostly in neighbouring Bangladesh, Malaysia, India and Thailand, as well as in in pockets across Europe, Australia and North America.

The predicament of the Rohingyas essentially remain unresolved in exile. The ambiguity around Rohingya’ s legal status pertaining to their perceived statelessness, irregular migration and lack of comprehensive protection policies in the host countries add to their struggle to survive and sustain. Most Rohingya-hosting Asian countries deny their rights as refugees stipulated in the 1951 Refugee Convention. Their confinement in makeshift settlements and sprawling camps, ambiguous and/or undocumented legal status and host countries’ arbitrary practices create certain mobility constraints, which Aziz ( 2022 , p. 1) refers to as “immobility turn” or limited mobility within “situations of unequal power”. Furthermore, mobility is linked to legality and capacity in modern nation-states, which Rohingyas lack in Myanmar due to draconian military laws banning social gatherings and community mobilisation (Ansar & Khaled, 2022 , p. 281). In exile, this “arrested refugee mobilities” (Hoffstaedter, 2019 ) that the Rohingya community continues to endure produces both horizontal (i.e., spatial/geographic) immobility and vertical (social) immobility, which cyclically compound each other (Jernigan, 2019 ). Nevertheless, amid such challenges, a diaspora network has grown, especially since 2017, with considerable online imprints. We define the growing digital footprint of the Rohingya community as the emergence of a ‘Rohingya Digital Diaspora’. Highlighting their increasing online participation, our findings reveal how such engagement reinvigorates a collective identity, mobilises civic resistance and builds a virtual ‘community of hope’ by providing material and emotional support.

Reflecting on these evolving Rohingya online engagements, this study makes a threefold contribution to digital diaspora studies. First, we examined how the (re)production of Rohingya identities on social media demonstrates their hybrid, multi-layered and fluid nature. Second, considering the constrained offline space and (im)mobility dynamics, we looked into how access to social media can yield an opportunity for ethnic and religious minorities such as Rohingyas for transnational lobbying, advocacy and agenda-framing towards building a strategic and positive consensus around their cause. Third, while celebrating “digital optimism”, a nuanced reflection on the offline inequalities, such as those manifested by age, gender, internet access, economic status and spatiality, needs to be adequately contextualised.

The debate on Rohingya identity: the unfolding of belonging, exclusion and exile

The nation-state centric identity has always been marked by a high degree of hybridity and ambiguity in post-colonial societies. In South and Southeast Asia, “questions surrounding nationality, citizenship, religion and identity are recurrent themes between the countries once united but separate nation-states now” (Sengupta, 2020 , p. 114). Similarly, ethnic and religious identity and space are constantly being contested, refined and reorganised in the political landscape of Myanmar. This is particularly prominent in the bordering Rakhine state, where the formation of Rohingya identity has been heavily influenced by such fluidity (Ansar, 2020 , p. 4).

Several issues appear to be decisive when we explore the documentation and broad historical analysis of how questions of Rohingya identity and conflict in the Rakhine state have arrived at this stage. These include: the stripping of the Rohingya citizenship and their statelessness (Uddin, 2020 ; Holliday, 2014 ); the role of Rohingyas during the colonial period (Alam, 2018 ; Ibrahim, 2018 ); military dictatorship and the emergence of Taing-Yin-tha meaning “national races” (Cheesman, 2017 ); and religion and the perceived threat from Islam (Ansar, 2020 ; Kyaw, 2015 ; Wade, 2017 ). These are just some of the profound issues to unpack in order to understand the making of the current crisis.

Broadly, three lines of arguments can be identified when exploring the Rohingya identity. First, some scholars claim a historic Rohingya presence in Myanmar (Uddin, 2020 ; Shafie, 2019 ; Ibrahim, 2018 ). Secondly, there are scholars who tend to discredit such narratives that argue Rohingya is a post-colonial political identity promoted by the Muslim political elites in Arakan as a tool to promote their fight for political autonomy after the Second World War (Leider, 2018 ; Tonkin, 2014 ). The third line of argument instead takes a critical approach between the two opposing narratives. Going beyond the polarising opinions, it argues that the fundamental question of the process of identity formation and the complex status of the ethnic and religious minorities in post-colonial nation-state formation should be in the spotlight (Ansar, 2020 ; Sengupta, 2020 ; Alam, 2018 ).

One of the watershed moments in modern-day Myanmar’s identity politics is the emergence of Taing-Yin-tha , or “the indigenous races”, under the 1982 citizenship law introduced by the military dictatorship in Myanmar. The concept of Taing-Yin-tha emerged as a decisive political language that provides the guideline of which facts are accepted and rejected in determining membership in Myanmar’s political community. In contemporary Myanmar, Taing-Yin-tha has become an exemplary term of state: a contrivance for political inclusion and exclusion, political eligibility and domination (Cheesman, 2017 , p. 462). The Rohingya were not included among the 135 official indigenous races. Consequently, some 2.5 million Rohingyas are excluded from Taing-Yin-tha , making them one of the world’s largest stateless populations. They remain the only community in independent Myanmar whose citizenship is “still unresolved and contested by the government and people”(Kyaw, 2015 , p. 50). Going further, Uddin ( 2020 , p.4) argues that Myanmar’s dealing with the Rohingyas is not just a manifestation of their non-citizenship; it is precisely a practice meant to “reduce the Rohingyas to a status lesser than that of human beings”, and thereby push them into a ‘subhuman life’.

From diaspora to digital diaspora: revisiting a complex transformation

Diaspora is a concept subject to various definitions and interpretations (Ponzanesi, 2020 ). It is defined “as a set of relationships between the homeland, which functions as a centre of gravity, and a periphery of nodes—communities, groups and individuals—who relate to the territory of origin as a centre of gravity but live in different parts of the world” (Ben-David, 2012 , p. 461). Earlier studies mainly considered the dispersed population as diaspora, i.e., the Jewish, Greek and Armenian communities in exile. Today, this term shares meanings “with a larger semantic domain that includes words like an immigrant, expatriate, refugee, guest worker, exile community, overseas community, ethnic community” (Tölölyan, 1991 , p. 04). While a distinction between various forms of diasporas is plausible, community belongingness, a sense of loss, nostalgia and transnationality are universal features embedded in almost all diaspora communities.

The influence of information and communication technology in the past decade has not only transformed the ways and scales of interactions among diaspora members but also led to a substantial transformation in the modern understanding of diaspora (Marat, 2015 ; Lobbé, 2021 ; Bernal, 2020 ). From structured networks of migrant websites to more personalised WhatsApp and Facebook groups, the wide variety of digital layers is taking the notion of diasporic organisations to a new height (Dekker et al., 2018 ; Dumitriu, 2012 ). In this changing milieu, hybrid and multifaceted migrant identities are constructed and negotiated through various discursive means (Georgalou, 2021 ). The advancements and proliferation of such online communication technologies encouraged a new form of virtual diasporic connections and networks that is gaining prominence as the digital diaspora. This connection reminds the members of “where their roots are, their original home, their sense of belonging, their community” (Ponzanesi, 2020 , p. 983).

Emerging scholarship has started to accentuate the evolving nexus between technological advancement, the proliferation of social media and the ability of diaspora populations to create networks and become part of transnational diaspora networks (Alonso & Oiarzabal, 2010 ; Kapur, 2010 ; Alunni, 2019 ). In digital migration studies, research has made a significant contribution to understanding refugees’ engagement with social media and other digital tools to stay in contact with transnational families during their migration, as well as during their process of settlement in the host countries (Alencar et al., 2018 ; Kaufmann, 2018 ; Leurs & Smets, 2018 ). Recent studies on digital diasporas also bring together complex intersections of technology, culture, political economy and agency (Bernal, 2020 ). For instance, in contrast to the earlier opinion of celebrating digital media as liberating and empowering for marginalised groups (Titifanue et al., 2018 ), more critical analysis now raises questions regarding the outcome of digital empowerment and whether such tools can bring about changes in the political and social discourse (Taylor & Meissner, 2020 ; Latonero & Kift, 2018 ; Papacharissi, 2015 ).

Scholars also attempted to reveal how big corporations and states use digital platforms to extend their centralised power and use it for surveillance purposes when necessary (Bircan & Korkmaz, 2021 ; Zuboff, 2019 ). Furthermore, social media posts and activities are being systematically monitored to validate or disprove the LGBTIQ identity of many refugees requesting asylum in European countries. Targeted social media campaigns and recruitment of paid agents to monitor the Facebook activities of migrants have also become one of the strategies for governments to control and counter immigration (Andreassen, 2021 ; Brekke & Thorbjørnsrud, 2020 ). Scholars have also started to highlight the potentially pernicious role of digital tools in stimulating ‘digital nationalism’ by dividing public debate through the establishment of filter ‘bubbles’ and ‘echo chambers’ in which individuals with homogenous political thinking promote ethnocentric ideas and content that align with their views and opinions. (Mihelj & Jiménez-Martínez, 2021 ; Cardenal et al., 2019 ; Dubois & Blank, 2017 ).

There is also growing criticism of the dominant strand of literature on digital migration studies that are heavily focused on the Global North, particularly Europe. Such criticism has become more widespread following the so-called refugee crisis in Europe in 2015, which demands a decentralised approach to diaspora and forced migration studies and input from the perspective of the Global South (Leurs & Smets, 2018 ). For instance, despite the scale and extent of the Rohingya crisis in Southeast Asia, literature that offers a nuanced understanding of their digital resistance and resilience remains inadequate. To date, we have come across only a few studies that partly address the digital engagement of Rohingya refugees (e.g., Aziz, 2022 ; Ansar & Khaled, 2022 ; Abraham & Jaehn, 2020 ). Taking a gender lens, Ansar & Khaled ( 2022 ) presents how social media has widened the scale and scope of Rohingya women activists’ civic participation in exile. In his latest work on Rohingya digital engagements, Aziz shows how digital platforms compensate for the community’s social and spatial immobility through “digitally mediated transnational care” (Aziz, 2022 , p. 01). In another recent contribution, he also presents how “the affordances of social media platforms” have facilitated Rohingyas negotiating their protracted experiences of suffering (Aziz, 2022a , p. 4082). With a mix of online and offline platforms, Abraham and Jaehn’s study ( 2020 ) shows how “diasporic Rohingya actions go beyond readily understandable demands for justice, accountability, redress” and consciously, or otherwise, take steps to reaffirm collective Rohingya identity (p. 1056). Adding onto these unfolding dynamics, this article brings an organic reflection on this ‘digital diaspora in the making’ and their forms of engagement in online platforms and its manifold implications.

Theoretical and methodological framework

The paper’s theoretical foundations are based on the premise that scattered and oppressed ethnoreligious minorities or endangered groups, frequently organised in diasporas, use the internet to “re-create identities, share opportunities, spread their culture, influence homeland and host-land policy, or create debate about common-interest issues using electronic devices” (Alonso & Oiarzabal, 2010 , p. 11). In an “unevenly interconnected world”, digital platforms provide spaces and offer alternatives to tap resources and capacity building, creating links and connectivity for dispersed communities (Ponzanesi, 2020 , p. 978). This virtual space acts as “crucial protagonists” (Marino, 2015 , p. 01) to manifest “diasporic identity, political activism and sentiment towards homeland” (Marat, 2015 , p. 01). Besides, the “low barriers to entry and exit, and non-hierarchical and non-coercive” nature of the internet provides diasporas with a complete package of ‘benefits’ to pursue their socio-political and cultural endeavour on digital platforms (Brinkerhoff, 2009 , pp. 47–48). Apart from creating a transnational network of solidarity, it allows the “expression of diverse and contested views” of the community members (Titifanue et al., 2018 , p. 02).

Given the access to digital platforms by the exiled Rohingyas and the scale and extent of their virtual engagement, we have employed digital ethnography (Pink, 2013 ) as a method for observing their activities in virtual space. It is argued that such internet-based observations “can creatively deploy forms of engagement to look at how these sites are socially constructed and, at the same time, are social conduits” with ‘online traces’ such as retweets, hyperlinks and hashtags (Hine, 2009 , p. 11). The rapidity with which people across several platforms keep up to date and their willingness to argue and voice opposing perspectives when appropriate via these interconnected networks is even more remarkable (Postill & Pink, 2012 ). These diverse and fast-changing characteristics have also led to more nuanced and innovative methods of using online ethnography (Pink et al., 2016 ). We use a ‘discourse-centred’ (Androutsopoulos, 2009 ) online ethnography and employ a ‘screen-based’ discourse analysis that concentrates on “systemic longitudinal and repeated observations of online-discourse” (Georgalou, 2021 , p. 4).

In doing online ethnography, it is also pertinent to acknowledge the limitations of virtual platforms on the findings. For instance, Dicks et al. ( 2005 , p.128) caution that the internet should never be read as a ‘neutral’ observation space, as it always remains a fieldwork setting and, as such, a researcher’s data selection and analyses are always biased by agendas, personal histories and social norms. Besides, the drawback of these research options is that membership of these communities is inherently restricted to the digital ‘haves’ (or at least those with digital social capital) rather than the ‘have nots’, and ethnic/gender digital divides strongly persist (Murthy, 2008 ). Therefore, like any other data source, social networking websites should be treated in a nuanced or layered fashion and contextualised properly (Murthy, 2008 , p. 846).

Informed consent appears to be a crucial aspect of researching online communities. Whether and to what extent informed consent is required remains a contested topic (Willis, 2017 , p. 3). According to Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) ethical guidelines, public forums can be considered more public than conversations in a closed chatroom (Ess and AoIR, 2002 : pp. 5, 7). Hence, ‘the greater the acknowledged publicity of the venue, the less obligation there may be to protect individual privacy, confidentiality, right to informed consent, etc.’ (Ess and AoIR, 2002 , p. 5). Whiteman ( 2012 , p. 9) also suggests it is preferable to take a contextualised approach to each online situation instead of adhering to generalised, context-free principles. Considering the above observations, the researchers sought ethical guidance from their respective institutions and received prior ethical approval before conducting their research. Furthermore, given the sensitivities of the topic, individual posts, images and tweets shared in this article are blurred to maintain confidentiality and any information that discloses the individual identity has been carefully revisited and avoided when referring to the data and images.

For data collection, we followed two major social media platforms: Facebook and Twitter. We analysed relevant Facebook and Twitter accounts and determined the top ten accounts based on the number of followers, the frequency of postings and the volume of comments. The Facebook pages and Twitter accounts were identified using eight search terms: ‘Rohingya refugee’, ‘Rohingya genocide’, ‘Rohingya women’, ‘exiled Rohingya’, ‘Rohingya activist’, ‘Arakan Rohingya’, ‘United Nations and Rohingya’ and ‘Rohingya in Bangladesh’. The qualitative corpus comprised posts and tweets that were open to the public. The study covers the period from August 2019 to August 2021. One of the authors has near-native fluency in the Rohingya language and initially attempted to explore Facebook pages and Twitter accounts on the Rohingya language despite the absence of Rohingya script, which remains an oral dialect (Aziz, 2022a , p. 4073). It did not yield significant success, prompting searching for relevant online platforms and social media tools using English. Footnote 1 For instance, UNHCR in Malaysia has a dedicated website on “The Rohingya language”, which is written in Latin alphabets. Footnote 2 Therefore, language and its digital representation bring another important dimension when exploring the Rohingya community’s social media engagement. The use of English in contemporary diaspora presents an ‘interesting cleavage’, as a native language is often considered a salient marker of collective identity (Kumar, 2018 ). We avoid the discussion at length here as it goes beyond the scope of our study; nonetheless, it is a crucial aspect to shed light on in future research on the Rohingyas. Nevertheless, we do acknowledge there are other platforms, including more private platforms like WhatsApp (Aziz, 2022a ). We did not pursue these, as our purpose was to retrieve online and easily accessible data to any random visitor to those webpages.

For analysis, the transcripts of Facebook discussions and tweets were manually inserted into a dataset. This dataset was then transferred and analysed using Max Q.D.A. software to categorise the thematic contents, frequency of words, hashtags and recurring themes. Through this categorisation and coding, key themes emerged. These themes were then merged and clustered thematically, as detailed in the following section.

From exile to online: emergence of a digital Rohingya diaspora

Multiple trajectories, including the construction of a collective Rohingya identity, political and social mobilisation and solidarity with fellow Rohingyas through providing information and long-distance emotional and material support, have emerged as the recurring features of their digital engagements. The internet has effectively bridged geographical barriers amongst Rohingyas with similar concerns by functioning as a ‘mobilising structure’ (Kumar, 2018 , p. 11). The proliferation of virtual engagements creates conditions where individuals come together on shared hopes, purposes and objectives, which Tsagarousianou ( 2007 ) defined as ‘co-presence’ and Marino ( 2015 ) refers to as ‘space making’.

To detail out these manifold engagements, we conduct a two-pronged analysis of the Rohingya diaspora’s digital participation. First, we begin with a focus on the scale of engagement , bringing attention to their growing participation in digital space. Second, we take a more in-depth look at the domains of engagement , highlighting the key aspects that predominate in the interaction that takes place online.

Scale of engagement

Owing to rapid development and relatively easier access to technologies, more Rohingyas are embracing digital platforms to interact with one another and the greater international communities. For example, only three of the ten most followed Facebook pages were created before 2017. Table 1 presents an overview of the ten most popular (in terms of membership) Rohingya Facebook groups active in different parts of the world, where membership reaches as high as 223,000 as of August 2021 (see Table 1 ). Footnote 3

Similarly, among the top ten Twitter accounts, only four accounts were active before 2017. A relatively recent phenomenon is the exponential increase in the number of Twitter accounts and followers of notable Rohingya activists. Table 2 illustrates the number of followers each of the top ten active Twitter accounts has. Another notable fact is that seven of the top ten account holders are based in North America and Europe (see Table 2 ). Footnote 4

A notable distinction is apparent between the two social networking platforms. As illustrated in Fig. 1 , posts and discussions on Twitter were more policy-oriented and directed at international audiences and activists. On the other, Facebook discussions mostly covered emotional aspects, focusing more on nostalgia, shared grievances and experiences of escape and everyday survival in the host country. Among the Facebook pages we analysed, we found an intra-community approach in their online interactions. Twitter users frequently engage with and speak to more diverse audiences, displaying an international perspective (see Fig. 1 ). The geographical diversity among users is another important marker of difference within the community of users. For example, Rohingya activists in the United States (U.S.), Canada, Europe, the United Kingdom (UK) and Australia are more active on Twitter. On the other hand, Rohingyas in Bangladesh and Malaysia engage mainly on Facebook to disseminate information and engage with the broader community members in a virtual space.

Rohingya diaspora on Facebook and Twitter: a comparative reflection.

Overall, three factors have contributed to Rohingya communities’ expanding activities on web platforms. First, the Rohingya crisis has garnered the global spotlight, particularly since 2017. This internationalisation has encouraged a section of the Rohingya diaspora to actively draw attention to their plight (Ansar & Khaled, 2022 ). Second, the proliferation of digital connectivity has offered new avenue to foster a collective Rohingya identity that is, otherwise remain suppressed in the face of long-standing marginalisation, statelessness and geographically dispersed settlement. Third, the Rohingyas’ mobility constraints and the aftermath of the pandemic further contributed to their reliance on social media platforms to voice their opinions.

Domains of engagement

Discussions on both social media platforms cover a wide range of subjects. As illustrated in Fig. 2 , a myriad of issues continues to surface on social media platforms, including Rohingya genocide and ethnic cleansing, homeland grievance, citizenship rights, current political deadlock and assertion of a distinct Rohingya identity (see Fig. 2 ). Furthermore, the widespread use of digital communication among the young population led to a noticeable increase in engagements with international and national humanitarian organisations.

Three major components of Rohingya diaspora’s digital engagement.

Based on the initial coding and clustering, we identified three major components of digital engagement, as illustrated in Fig. 4 : construction and assertion of distinct Rohingya identity, political and social mobilisation and use of the internet as an information and service-providing platform. The following section explains the issues in detail.

Claim, construction and assertion of distinct Rohingya identity

Social media platforms have created a new possibility for the exiled Rohingyas to contest the official Burmese narratives, which portray them as illegal settlers. Although the genesis of Rohingya identity has been fraught with ambiguity and hybridity, there has been a “working consensus” among the Rohingya diasporas in reinforcing their ethnic identity (Goffman, 1959 ). They attempt to forge this working consensus through a wide range of online performances in their everyday digital activities. Spatial nostalgia, for instance, referring to the Rakhine state as Arakan, the regional capital Sittwe as Akyab, reciting poetry on the Kaladan river and reminiscing about their relatively peaceful past under the Arakan kingdom not only connects them to their motherland, but also indicates the relevance of residual memories of their ‘lost home’. Besides, memories of violence, persecution and forced displacement, deaths of loved ones and separation from family “contribute to the bonds of community and connectedness” (Bernal, 2010 . pp. 123–124) and serve as the ‘catalysts’ to form a collective identity (Alonso and Oiarzabal, 2010 ).

This identity construction and cultural reproduction are manifested in organised content and narratives illustrated on social media. They frequently present historical evidence, figures and visuals to support their claims of Rohingya ancestry in Arakan, which contradict the official narratives of the Myanmar government and ultra-nationalist Buddhist political and religious organisations. This resolute defending of ethnic Rohingya identity, referring to Rakhine state as their homeland and claiming right to return and citizenship of Myanmar, function as the ‘centre of gravity’ for users and the way they engage on virtual platforms within and beyond the community (Ben-David, 2012 ). Nevertheless, many Rohingya also strongly affiliate with their roots in Myanmar and assert their ‘Burmeseness’, thereby embracing multiple identities (see Fig. 3 ). As Fig. 3 shows, a young Rohingya who considers Myanmar an integral part of his identity not only reveals the fluidity of identity formation, but such expression of a multi-layered identity also confronts those who embrace a more ethnicised and religious identity.

Rohingya youth asserting multiple belongings on Twitter.

Such hybridity of Rohingyas’ online identity derives from the flexibility and temporality that one can assert on social media given the unfixed nature of cyberspace—‘nothing is real’ (Marat, 2015 , p. 9). This exercise of asserting a collective identity involves a process of constant adjustment and readjustment predicated on the time, space and social context of the host countries. For example, Fig. 4 shows how the digital activities of many Rohingya diaspora members reveal their ability to preserve local, transnational and global feelings of belonging simultaneously. The illustration of this Twitter activist’s profile reveals how, depending on the situation, their online advocacy and dynamic interactions of multi-layered belonging can represent both pluralistic and localised perspectives, switching between the two, if and when necessary (see Fig. 4 ). It also demonstrates their capacity to maintain traditional markers of ethnic, religious and cultural identity while also claiming different forms of membership, and thereby functioning as cultural intermediaries. Such flexibility puts them in a strategic position that allows them to support the issues of the Rohingya community, transcend ethnic boundaries and become international human rights activists. This multi-layered and elastic identity construction also indicates that key parts of the dynamics of digital engagement include staying flexible and being ready to keep moving beyond the ‘peripheral ties’ between diaspora and non-diaspora actors (Ben-David, 2012 ).

Rohingya diapsora activist claiming multiple identities on Twitter.

In addition, iconic images, traditional cuisines and other symbolic markers continue to appear online to foster cross-border feelings of collective identity and forge consensus. Music and folklore in the Rohingya language are frequently shared on social media platforms (see Fig. 5 ). Despite their scattered settlements, young Rohingyas can maintain ties with their culture and heritage by participating in online classes taught in their native language. Social media platforms often host cultural and art competitions to revive and promote Rohingya art and culture, which is vital to preserving and promoting their ethnic identity and tradition.

Dissemination of Rohingya folklore online via Facebook.

As part of this identity-building effort, social media posts and tweets promote particular hashtags. Hashtags are not just a facet of online culture; they are also a means of expression that has helped users create a “hashtag sociality” that grows out of the interconnections and relevant threads (Postill and Pink, 2012 , p. 9). The widespread use of hashtags has helped internationalise the Rohingya’s situation while assisting with identity development, self-image building and social and political mobilisation. Using hashtags such as # Rohingyarefugees, #Rohingya, #Rohingyaremembranceday and the like, Rohingya diasporas have created a network of interactions with fellow community members and beyond. The hashtags also assist them in locating each other, strengthening the notions of solidarity and identity assertion of what Boyd ( 2010 ) refers to as “networked publics” of imagined communities. This identity-building gradually becomes identity politics as the online users deploy their identity to shape the perception of belonging (Kumar, 2018 ).

Other than claiming and affirming Rohingya identity, there are efforts to revive other aspects of their identity, such as religion. For example, Rohingya Vision, the first Rohingya satellite news station with more than 240,000 Facebook followers, begins its live news with an invocation to Allah and the Prophet Mohammed. Political updates are posted regularly about the hardships Muslim communities face worldwide. Such display of religious rituals may obscure the boundaries between religion and ethnicity in constructing the Rohingya identity. Although it serves the purpose of creating a sense of solidarity and connecting with the global Muslim identity, such an exhibition may “engenders a cathexis between a community of believers and a people joined by suffering” (Abraham and Jaehn, 2020 , p. 1058).

Political and social mobilisation

Going beyond framing and asserting collective Rohingya identity, social media access also facilitated a new political and social mobilisation channel. Rohingyas employ a unified, coherent, human rights-based discourse on digital platforms to articulate their political grievances and present a coordinated call for action. Rohingya Campaigners, particularly on social media sites such as Twitter, commonly utilise hashtags to spread the news of ongoing events and frequently tag local and international organisations and known global human rights campaigners. For instance, there has been an organised social media campaign during the Gambia vs Myanmar case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on Twitter and Facebook. Numerous hashtags such as #StopRohingyaGenocide , #CallitaGenocide and #JusticeforRohingya dominated the social media platforms during the ICJ hearing in the Netherlands in December 2019. Participants frequently publish images of torture, accounts of state-sponsored abuse against women and amateur news clips from the Rakhine State, including footage of burning mosques, villages and dead bodies following military crackdowns.

Numerous webinars and online conferences have been organised in recent years to commemorate the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar. Figure 6 illustrates that Facebook pages and Twitter account covering these events constantly provide updates, disseminate important messages and even live stream the events. Such online mobilisation has taken the lead in political lobbying, awareness-raising and updating the international community about their shared struggle in Myanmar and in exile (see Fig. 6 ). Through this categorical display of suffering and dissemination of information, diaspora members function as the transporters of cultural and political views (Clifford, 1992 ). Thus, online platforms have become a crucial ‘mobilising structure’ and ‘focal hub’ to pursue their political goals (Kumar, 2018 , p. 11).

Rohingya diaspora platforms hosting webinars and podcasts on genocide recognition.

This coordinated web activism offers the diaspora members a “connective opportunity structure” in agenda-framing and in pursuing a concerted effort to pin their claims and concerns to the broader international system (Kumar, 2018 , p. 11–12; Marat, 2015 , pp. 6–7). By strategically using digital platforms, they seek wider recognition and support from the global community and mobilise opinions in their favour. Through real-time engagement with state and non-state actors, they continue to advance their social and political objectives. Since the February 2021 military coup, such web-based activism has started to connect with the broader Burmese civil resistance against the rule of the military. Human rights advocacy and the cultivation of an “oppositional consciousness” have helped them draw attention to the complex political situation in Myanmar and transmit information about the decades-long injustice they have suffered. Framing a human rights discourse and developing an ‘oppositional consciousness’, they spotlight complex political unfolding in Myanmar and disseminate information about how injustice has been done to them for decades (Mansbridge, 2001 ). This culture of resistance and oppositional consciousness help establish them as an emerging political voice beyond the community boundary.

A significant development amid such evolving political and social activism is the active participation of women and young people. For example, Fig. 7 shows how Rohingya women are taking a prominent role in shaping the political and social narratives on their displacement (see Fig. 7 ). They continue to challenge societal and patriarchal norms as they shed light on gender-sensitive issues, including menstruation hygiene, birth control and adolescent girls’ health, as a recent study shows (Ansar and Khaled, 2022 ). This is especially evident among the younger generation, many of whom fled Myanmar as children and have been profoundly influenced by their ‘long-term exposure to exiled life’ (Titifaune et al., 2018 ). Such active participation not only shapes their understanding of Myanmar but also adds an innovative perspective to pursue their collective gendered struggle. Digital platforms, therefore, contribute to the connectedness and bonds with their root and create an opportunity to coordinate lobbying and cultural brokerage by linking, managing and collaborating with relevant stakeholders (Andén-Papadopoulos, Pantti ( 2013 ), p. 2188).

Rohingya women activists raising gender awareness on social media.

Social media as an informational and service-providing platform

There is a broader consensus among scholars on how digital technologies have become an essential means to maintaining transnational connectivity, information and caregiving practices (Kaufmann, 2018 ; Leurs & Smets, 2018 ). This connectivity helps diaspora members to remain involved in everyday experiences and to fulfil their familial, social and communal responsibilities. For many Rohingyas, online communities serve as the initial point of contact for various services. Increasingly, digital platforms foster a sense of collective responsibility among social media users. Figure 8 shows, how social media users often function as first responders to disseminate emergency information, such as news about Rohingyas being stranded at sea, emergency blood donation and urgent response to flood victims in Bangladesh refugee camps. They also coordinate fundraising and encourage hesitant community members to get vaccines, against Covid-19 for example. Several petitions have been initiated online to protest what the Rohingya people see as unfavourable government policies, such as building barbed-wire fences around refugee camps (see Fig. 8 ). This networked, transnational solidarity that is shaped by the daily experiences of immobility is something Aziz refers to as “mediated care practices beyond nation-states and borders” ( 2022a , p. 14).

Rohingya activists leveraging social media to disseminate relevant information.

Online community members regularly advise each other on immigration-related bureaucratic procedures, Covid-19 regulations and health and refugee-rights related services. They post regular updates on the political situation in host countries and on policy changes that might impact their current status in the respective countries. In doing so, they also transcend the public-private boundaries of everyday life, as they create a direct communication channel between social media users. This virtual network of emotional and informational support systems and the ‘home feeling’ is what Marino refers to as a “community of comfort” (Marino, 2015 , p. 2).

The creative use of digital technologies also turned the online platform into a source for distance education. Users frequently post information on scholarships for refugees and offer online English language courses and skills training. It became particularly prevalent during the Covid-19 pandemic as a viable alternative to classroom instructions. For young Rohingyas in refugee camps in Bangladesh, access to online education provides a welcome opportunity to expand their horizons beyond the Burmese curriculum. Many young refugees pursue English language learning, as it creates opportunities to work with local and international NGOs and third-country resettlements. As Díaz Andrade and Doolin ( 2016 ) demonstrate, this online community provides diaspora members with five distinct affordances to help them adapt to their new home’s social and cultural challenges: “to participate in an information society, to communicate effectively, to understand a new society, to be socially connected, and to express a cultural identity” (p. 405). Arguably, a certain level of trust is involved in such virtual exchanges, which may derive from users’ shared experiences as persecuted refugees. Thus, digital platforms generate a sense of ‘togetherness’ and ‘belonging’ since they give a virtual social space, transmit critical information and motivate each other about new life prospects and opportunities (Ponzanesi, 2020 ; Alunni, 2019 ).

Embodying exile through collective identity, solidarity and civic mobilisation

The empirical discussion above shows that for Rohingya diasporas in exile, personal experiences of persecution, migration, statelessness and resistance are important experiences for forming identity, solidarity and political engagement. These lived experiences of diaspora constantly remind Rohingyas of their otherised identities as refugees, stateless, asylum seekers, immigrants, Muslims and Asians. Engaging in digital platforms has thus become a means of (re)creating and (re)affirming one’s identity and sense of belonging in response to otherisation and exclusion from mainstream communities. Furthermore, the myriad of digital engagements manifested on social media platforms has redefined the notion of connectivity, territoriality and civic activism among displaced Rohingyas, where, through self-representation, they attempt to claim their space by contesting and reshaping narratives that govern their everyday lives.

In digital platforms, there is a collective quest to promote a distinct Rohingya identity, which we have framed as the ‘pursuit of Rohingyaness’. The defining characteristic of Rohingyaness is the vigorous defence of a distinct Rohingya ethnicity that is deeply rooted in Myanmar’s social and political landscape. In their quest for Rohingyaness, they regard themselves as “bridge-builders” (Müller-Funk, 2020 , p. 1120), connecting not only the members distributed across diverse spaces but also with the larger international community. This portrayal of collective memories of suffering and feelings of victimhood resonates with the idea of “platformised pain” (Chouliaraki, 2021 , p. 10). Such platformised pain conveyed through virtual affinity likely contributes to offline interactions and community development, resulting in a sense of belonging to a broader diasporic network (Marino, 2015 , p. 06). In doing so, they craft “affective fabrics”, while reviving a sense of belonging and solidarity based on a shared history and homeland roots in cyberspace, which they “inhabit at the time of the permanently ephemeral” (Tsaliki, 2003 , p. 174). Given that most Rohingya “will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them” in offline space, the pursuit of Rohingyaness in cyberspace through the dissemination of memories, culture, symbols, and myths is analogous to the imagined community (Anderson, 2006 , p. 49). Thus, a parallel can be drawn between Benedict Anderson’s concept of an imagined community becoming a nation and how modern diasporic relationships are envisioned as transcending borders through these digital platforms. As a result, cyberspace has enabled them to connect with fellow Rohingyas in the diaspora and “homeland”, strengthening their feeling of shared imagined Rohingya Community and diasporic consciousness.

In addition, the Rohingya diasporic identity is not static, but rather shaped by a complex set of interwoven diasporic experiences. This transformation has been shaped by the socio-political attributes of the host country and overlapping intersectional factors such as age, gender, education and geographic location, among others. These multiplicities and fluidities of identity are something that Marat ( 2015 ) refers to as becoming (ongoing process) a mixture of endogenous and exogenous identity. In this complex process of self-representation and identity-making, social media users routinely transgress their symbolic ethnic and cultural boundaries by engaging with wider global audience who supports their struggle. Doing so, they facilitate political dissent and resistance against hegemonic Burmese military regime, both within and beyond their community, which Ansar and Khaled ( 2022 , p. 291) terms as ‘conditional solidarity’—exhibited through Rohingyas’ growing yet muted collaboration with other Burmese ethnic groups following the military coup in Myanmar in 2021.

Such political mobilisation, which has become an essential marker of the Rohingyas’ cyberspace engagement, is dependent on a wide variety of factors such as spatiality, positionality, the availability of cyber capital and the host country’s political opportunity structure, among others (Kopchick., et al., 2021 ; Bernal, 2018 ; Graham & Khosravi, 2010 ). For the geographically scattered Rohingya, considering their immobilities and offline constraints, social media has emerged as a “virtual public-square” (Reyaz, 2020 , p. 23) that not only fosters everyday connections but also provides a crucial space for social and political mobilisation. Furthermore, their shared pain, loss and experience of displacement resonates with their urge for self-representation, reclamation of political identities and expression of diasporic agencies. While digital platforms have been the most deterritorialised and globalised space, most Rohingya digital engagements centre on the Rohingyas themselves, as they seek to reterritorialise online political spaces by injecting their narratives and establishing political co-presence (Graham & Khosravi, 2010 ). In the form of ‘leverage politics’, these online mobilisations, with coherent political narratives, facilitate transnational lobbying and agenda setting and influence public opinion and decision-making in their favour (Keck and Sikkink, 1999 , p. 72). With this organised civic activism on virtual platforms, the Rohingya community members manifest “their collective sense of self, who they are and what they stand for” (Gerbaudo and Treré ( 2015 ), p. 865). The practices of concerted civic participation that they cultivate in online forums strengthen not only their sense of rights, justice and community but also unearth injustices committed against them. Therefore, social media platforms have enabled the Rohingyas to mend “ruptures in the social body” and streamline the political and social arguments in their favour through virtual interaction within and beyond their community (Bernal, 2010 , p.124).

Spatiality and access: reflection on the digital divide

While social media activism has made it possible for more people to be heard online, researchers are beginning to draw attention to the disparities in diaspora participation in online communities (Schradie, 2018 ; Bennett and Segerberg, 2012 ). This brings us to yet another crucial debate—the digital divide. Understanding the digital divide requires considering the different contexts in which it might occur. Each context has its own power dynamics, and differentiating attributes can facilitate or stifle digital interactions. In addition, a digital divide does not merely denote a chain of causality in which lack of access to digital communication tools and the internet limits online civic involvement. Instead, the relevance of age, gender, education, host country environment and language, among other factors, are essential drivers in understanding the digital divide among diasporas scattered across heterogeneous spatiality.

As Norris ( 2001 ) argued, the issue of the digital divide can be broken down into three distinct, but interconnected tiers of analysis: the macro-level (economic and technological factors determine Internet access and distribution), the meso-level (political institution and related opportunities), and the micro-level (personal capacity, interest and drive as determinants of online civic participation). While analysing the digital activities of Rohingya diasporas, we found that Norris’s levels of analysis had the highest resonance. To provide more context, seven of the top ten most followed Twitter accounts are run by Rohingya activists based in the Global North. Similarly, eight out of the ten most followed Facebook pages are running from the Global North. In addition, the webinars we followed are exclusively organised by the Rohingya diaspora platforms based in countries such as Germany, the U.K., Canada, the US and Australia. There are, thus, noticeable differences in the levels of participation, capabilities and access to resources in various forms of digital activity across different geographical configurations. On the other hand, in both Malaysia and Bangladesh, in addition to the logistical constraints, refugees face an array of challenges to freedom of expression on digital platforms. This forces many Rohingya activists to remain less assertive, even as the host country’s policies have detrimental consequences on the refugees living there. Footnote 5 Yet, it is important to reiterate the limitations of using English-only search terms, which is perhaps another factor as to why the most prominent accounts we identified were primarily based in countries where English is the first language. Therefore, we do acknowledge that there could be other accounts with more prominence in different languages that did not appear in our research.

Another noteworthy distinction between the Rohingyas in the Global South and the Global North is their settlement pattern. While the Rohingya diaspora communities in the Global North are primarily based in urban metropolises, Rohingyas in the Global South, such as in Bangladesh, Malaysia and Thailand, are primarily settled in the remote borderland, informal settlements and isolated refugee camps with limited digital infrastructure. Inequalities in civil liberties and lack of rights, discrepancies in digital infrastructure and accessibility and variances in the socioeconomic context of the host country are all likely to affect the diasporas’ capacity, interest and motivation for diasporic engagement in cyberspace (Nessi & Bailey, 2019 ; Norris, 2001 ). Thus, the comparison between different countries also illustrates how, to a large extent, digital platforms compensate for the social and spatial hierarchies within the community members. Nevertheless, the scale and scope of such connectedness are conditioned by different intersectional factors, such as access to technology, age, gender, the temporality of membership and other relevant skills and privileges.

This article offers a rudimentary reflection on how Rohingyas in the diaspora engage in social media platforms and how the digital realm has contributed to forming a nascent digital diaspora. In the absence of a reference to a physical homeland and the everyday immobility paradigm they are entangled with, these platforms offer a transformative space to the Rohingyas for self-expression, civic engagements and ethnic reinforcements. Acting as a comfort zone, digital spaces not only provide material and emotional support but also enhance their self-esteem and self-awareness as part of the diaspora. Focusing on their multi-layered identity-building in cyberspace, this paper shows how these engagements constitute a space for togetherness where diasporic experiences and Rohingya political identities are constructed, contested and mediated. They constellate political arguments to engage with wider audiences who are supportive of their protracted struggle in an effort to garner international solidarity. Linking Rohingya identity within the broader socio-political spectrum of Myanmar, particularly of the Rakhine state, they directly oppose the Myanmar government’s persistent policies of referring to them as foreigners and illegal settlers.

Finally, despite social media’s potential to offer a new avenue for social enquiry, we restate its limitations. To ensure an inclusive diaspora representation, it is imperative to consider the pre-existing social hierarchies and asymmetries in a nuanced way. Therefore, future research incorporating both online and offline strategies would be a significant step forward in researching and further understanding cyber ethnographies on dispersed communities across the globe, such as the Rohingyas. Such hybrid methodological conceit, with an additional focus on key geographical locations of Rohingya diaspora settlement, would set an important precedent for future research and add crucial nodes to further unfold their transnational identity.

Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request.

Rohingya language is a spoken dialect almost identical to the local dialect of the Chittagong region of Bangladesh. There is an ongoing effort to incorporate it in the planned upgrade to the Unicode Standard, the global coding system that turns written script into digital characters and numbers. See Abraham & Jaehn (2020) for more details.

For details, please see the following website: https://refugeemalaysia.org last accessed January 08, 2023.

The number of memberships does not indicate the figure of Rohingyas living in the above-listed countries.

The country names indicate the geographic locations where the account holders are currently based.

For Malaysia, see https://www.arabnews.com/node/1673766/world (accessed September 30 2022). For Bangladesh, see https://www.thedailystar.net/news/bangladesh/rights/news/digital-security-act-threatens-press-freedomneeds-reformation-edit (accessed September 30 2022).

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Acknowledgements

We would like to express our gratitude to Musfiq Elahi and Sanzida Hossain at the Bangladesh University of Professionals (BUP) for their enthusiastic assistance with data collection. We are also grateful to Rezwanul Islam for his support in data visualisation.

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Ansar, A., Khaled, A.F.M. In search of a Rohingya digital diaspora: virtual togetherness, collective identities and political mobilisation. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 10 , 61 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-01553-w

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The rohingya: genocide in the modern era.

By Kate Akkaya

For full text with links, see original webpage

Ethnically and religiously distinct from the majority population, the Rohingya people in Myanmar face state-sponsored discrimination, and mounting evidence of serious human rights abuses, according to numerous recent reports. Increasingly urgent reports – including from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the International State Crime Initiative and Yale Law School – argue that this state-sponsored violence rises to the level of genocide. While the term “genocide” is often wielded in relation to a range of mass atrocities, it is a specifically defined crime under international law. Does the evidence in the case of the Rohingya support the claims of genocide? And perhaps more importantly, if the evidence points to genocide, what actions can or should be taken by the government of Myanmar, or the international community more generally?

Genocide under international law

The definition of genocide can be found in the 1948 Genocide Convention, which refers to “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” with enumerated acts including killings, causing of serious bodily harm, preventing births in the group, and “[d]eliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”[Art. 2]. We can thus establish three core elements: i) prohibited violent acts; ii) made against a specific protected group; iii) done with specific intent to destroy the group, in whole or in part. This post will examine each of these elements in turn in the case of the Rohingya, and then turn to the question of investigation and prosecution.

Do the violent acts against the Rohingya fit the definition of genocide?

The Genocide Convention sets out five specific prohibited categories of violence, any of which may amount to genocide:

(a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

In the context of Myanmar, extensive resources exist detailing numerous acts of violence that would fall under the above categories. The most grievous crimes include the massacre of Rohingya by security forces in 2012, the use of killing squads and state-organized riots, the intolerable condition of camps for displaced persons (which likely amounts to deliberate infliction of conditions calculated to bring about destruction of the group), and mass arrests, raids, torture, and rape of Rohingya by security forces. Furthermore, official policies limiting the ability of the Rohingya to marry, prohibiting non-married individuals from cohabitating, forcing Rohingya to use birth control, and the imposition of a two-child policy that applies only to Rohingya couples are a clear attempts by the state to limit and prevent births in the group. While the state has denied all allegations of abuse, discrimination, and genocide, it is important to note that under the Genocide convention, each act may be committed outright or by omission, meaning that failure to prevent or stop such acts would also fulfill these criteria.

Are the Rohingya an enumerated protected group?

Turning to the second element of genocide under the Convention, any attack set out above would need to be committed against either a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. In this case, the government of Myanmar has consistently refused to acknowledge the existence of the Rohingya as an ethnic group, but has generally classified them as Bengalis or simply illegal immigrants. While there has been some immigration from Bangladesh into the Rakhine province over the past hundred years, both with and without state approval, the Rohingya people have had a recorded presence in the Rakhine state since the late 18th century. They have continuously self-identified as a unique ethnic group, and have a distinct linguistic, cultural, and religious identity. While unique culture, history, and self-identification is generally sufficient to prove ethnic identity under the Genocide Convention, the behavior of the state towards the specific group may also be considered, and provides evidence toward both the classification of the group and the proof of state intent to commit acts amounting to genocide.

Furthermore, Myanmar’s government has clearly distinguished between the Rohingya and other ethnicities though extensive policies and public statements, including a memorable senior diplomat’s letter to the media in 2009 that included statements comparing the Rohingya to ogres, and claiming that, “[i]n reality, Rohingya are neither Myanmar people nor Myanmar’s ethnic group.” Counter intuitively, state officials’ identification of the Rohingya as a non-native ethnic group may be seen as evidence of a pervasive understanding of the Rohingya as a distinct group of people, albeit a persecuted one.

Is there evidence of intent to destroy the Rohingya, in whole or in part?

Turning to the third element, intent to commit genocide is an essential aspect to any determination relating to the possible commission of genocide, yet is also extremely difficult to prove. Due to the inherent challenges and ambiguity of state intent, the search for evidence of intent is often the defining feature of a genocide investigation, rather than evidence of mass atrocities, which alone are not sufficient to prove the existence of genocide. The challenge for establishing intent is simply that, understandably, few modern regimes keep explicit records of their intent to destroy a group of people.

In light of the general lack of conclusive, “smoking gun” evidence, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has held that intent “may be inferred from a number of facts and circumstances, such as the general context, the perpetration of other culpable acts systematically directed against the same group, the scale of atrocities committed, the systematic targeting of victims on account of their membership of a particular group, or the repetition of destructive and discriminatory acts” [Prosecutor v. Jelisic, paragraph 47]. While a formal inquiry would be necessary to conclusively determine the facts and circumstances necessary to prove intent, the public actions and statements of government officials, prejudicial laws, and active enforcement of discriminatory policies including disenfranchisement, displacement, and enforced statelessness are only some examples of the compelling allegations that may provide evidence of the Myanmar government’s deliberate intent to commit genocide. Without a thorough investigation by an impartial commission, however, the allegations cannot be substantiated and no further action may be taken.

Investigation and Prosecution

As outlined above, the recent reports raise serious concerns regarding the existence of genocide in Myanmar. What, then, would it take to trigger domestic or international investigation or prosecution?

On the question of investigation, there is no single evidentiary standard for the creation of a commission of inquiry into suspected war crimes, including genocide. However, the UN, normally through the Secretary General’s office or the Human Rights Council, may decide whether or not to establish such commissions on an ad hoc basis. If a neutral and impartial commission can establish credible evidence relating to genocide, its findings could serve as a strong foundation for eventual prosecution.

With or without a commission of inquiry, however, what steps are available to punish those responsible? It is important to note that the Genocide Convention establishes clear obligation of all states to prosecute: perpetrators of genocide “shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals”[Art. 4].

In terms of individual criminal responsibility, one legal option would be international prosecution at the International Criminal Court (ICC). The Rome Statute grants the ICC jurisdiction over genocide, using the same definition as the Genocide Convention. However, the Court may only exercise jurisdiction if:

The accused is a national of a State Party or a State otherwise accepting the jurisdiction of the Court; The crime took place on the territory of a State Party or a State otherwise accepting the jurisdiction of the Court; or The United Nations Security Council has referred the situation to the Prosecutor, irrespective of the nationality of the accused or the location of the crime. Myanmar is not State Party to the Rome Statute, nor has it otherwise accepted the jurisdiction of the Court. Without this jurisdiction, it is possible for the UN Security Council to refer a situation to the ICC, as occurred in Libya in 2011, though this requires political consensus which is often difficult to achieve within the Council. China, for example, maintains a strategic interest in Myanmar that may cause it to veto any proposed referral.

Short of international prosecution at the ICC, United States courts could provide an avenue for domestic legal action in the form of a civil suit under the US Alien Tort statute (ATS), which has previously been used to prosecute human rights violations that occurred outside of the US. Successful ATS cases, however, are notoriously complex, expensive, and rare; among other requirements, the defendant must be a former foreign government official responsible for the human rights violation, and must be served while in the United States. Despite these onerous conditions, a coalition of Muslim groups is currently pursuing an ATS case against Myanmar’s former President Thein Sein in New York state court. As ATS cases are civil suits, the coalition may only seek compensatory and punitive damages, and even if the plaintiffs win the case, the damages will be awarded only if the defendant has sufficient assets in the United States that may be seized by the court. Ultimately, the pursuit of an ATS case appears to be more useful as a tool to generate publicity and political will, rather than to bring about justice for the victims. Moreover, domestic prosecution of course remains a possibility in other states.

Ways forward

The presidential elections on November 8 seem, at the time of this writing, to be a cause for hope. Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi has worked for decades to improve democracy and human rights in Myanmar, and her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), won a significant parliamentary majority. If the United Nations heeds the call for an inquiry into the allegations of genocide against the Rohingya people, it would fall to Suu Kyi and the NLD to fully cooperate with the investigation, cease violations of international law, including discriminatory and possible genocidal acts, resolve the conflict, and make restitution with the Rohingya people. This is a tall order for any new leader, let alone one in a country as fractiously partisan as Myanmar; Suu Kyi has thus far remained noticeably silent on the issue of the Rohingya. Encouragement of and cooperation with a commission of inquiry into the case of the Rohingya could be a first step towards reform and restitution, and Suu Kyi’s broad support as evidenced by the recent elections presents a unique opportunity for a change in state policy. It is crucial to keep the spotlight of international attention and diplomatic pressure directly on the government of Myanmar in order to force policy change and stop what very likely amounts to grave violations of human rights, if not outright genocide, of the Rohingya people.

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Gangs, kidnappings, murders: why thousands of Rohingya are desperately trying to escape refugee camps by boats

Senior research fellow, Psychiatry and Mental Health, UNSW Sydney

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Late last week, a boat crammed with Rohingya refugees fleeing a squalid camp in Bangladesh capsized off the coast of Indonesia. Around 75 people were rescued, including nine children, but more than 70 are missing and presumed dead .

This tragedy isn’t an isolated incident. The number of Rohingya people trying to escape refugee camps by boat has skyrocketed in recent months.

According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees , 1,783 Rohingya refugees boarded boats from Bangladesh from January to October 1, 2023. Since then, around 3,100 people have embarked on these treacherous journeys – an increase of nearly 74%.

Since January 2023, around 490 Rohingya have been reported dead or missing , including 280 since October 1.

Their attempts to reach countries like Malaysia and most recently Indonesia are being met with refusals and pushbacks , leaving many Rohingya stranded at sea and vulnerable to exploitation, trafficking and even death.

Why are so many Rohingya trying to flee in recent months? And how should the international community respond to this increasingly desperate humanitarian crisis?

In a new article recently submitted for peer review, we (two Australian academics and six anonymous Rohingya activists) describe the “push factors” that have been identified in community-based research in the camps, which are forcing many people to board boats to try to reach safety.

Living with constant tension

The nearly 1 million Rohingya refugees now living in Bangladesh are survivors of a massive Myanmar military operation in 2017 aimed at driving them from their homes in western Rakhine state.

Estimates of the number of people killed during the operation range from around 7,800 to 24,000 . The United Nations has called it a “ textbook example of ethnic cleansing ” and genocide .

Even before they were forced across the border, the Rohingya people had been subjected to decades of discrimination, denial of citizenship, exclusion from schools and work, restrictions on freedom of movement and violence from authorities.

Now, trapped in limbo in the refugee camps in Cox’s Bazaar, Bangladesh, they are experiencing many of the same things.

In 2019, we conducted on-the-ground interviews with 27 Rohingya community experts living in Cox’s Bazaar, including teachers, mothers, religious leaders, spiritual healers, youths and activists. We wanted to know how Rohingya people understand and describe the psychological impacts of genocide and displacement.

This understanding is important because most mental health services are based on Western terminology like “depression”, “anxiety” or “stress”. But these may not properly fit the Rohingya experience. Instead, we found the English word “tension” (in Rohingya, sinta ) was used by many refugees, which conveys feelings of worry, concern and anxiety and captures the experience of being stateless.

As two anonymous adolescent Rohingya women described it to us:

There is no opportunity to do anything, all we do is stay inside. Tension is loss. We’ve lost land, children, husband, that’s why we feel tension. Tension is neck pain. Tension is throat, shoulders and head pain.

After conducting our interviews, we then developed a pictorial model of “tension”, as Rohingya is an oral language. The model (below) showed how being “opportunity-less” – from lack of work, education or freedom of movement – sits at the centre of tension.

Our interview subjects told us lack of opportunity leads to thinking too much, pain in the body and conflict in the family, between families and with the Bangladeshi community.

Why the situation has become even more dire

The six Rohingya activists who helped us to conduct this research have since described to us how these sources of tension have worsened since 2019.

Like so many in their communities, they have personally experienced arbitrary arrest, fabricated legal cases and imprisonment by the Bangladeshi authorities.

After dark, the “night government” (armed groups) roam the camps, kidnapping and demanding ransoms from families, threatening people in their homes , trafficking drugs and killing anyone who tries to speak up . Women and girls are targeted for assault and trafficking .

The camps are also fenced off, like open-air prisons. This means the refugees are trapped when fires break out, which happens frequently. In January, a huge fire spread quickly in the congested encampments, destroying some 800 shelters and leaving 7,000 people homeless.

And with civil war raging inside Myanmar across the border, some Rohingya in Bangladesh have even been killed by stray mortar shells .

Bangladesh, one of the most densely populated and poorest countries in the world, cannot address these push factors in the camps without support. International aid for the Rohingya, meanwhile, continues to rapidly decline .

What Australia and regional partners should do

What can – and should – the international community do to find a durable solution to this problem?

As a well-resourced regional partner, Australia can play a much bigger humanitarian role not focused solely on punishing people smugglers or the refugees themselves through boat turnbacks .

When people are faced with such dire conditions, they will move, no matter the cost. As recent refugee boat arrivals in Australia and Indonesia demonstrate, boat turnbacks and arrests fail to address the root causes of forced migration. They do not “stop the boats”.

Read more: Amid a worsening refugee crisis, public support is high in both Australia and NZ to accept more Rohingya

Here are our recommendations for what Australia, New Zealand and their regional partners should do instead to help the Rohingya people:

1. Exert diplomatic pressure on the Myanmar junta to recognise Rohingya citizenship and facilitate a peaceful resolution to the ongoing conflict in Rakhine state so the refugees can return home.

2. Address the shortfall in funding to humanitarian organisations working in Bangladesh to address the immediate needs of Rohingya refugees, including food, shelter, health care, proper education and psychosocial support. Invest in the resilience of refugees.

3. Increase pressure on Bangladesh to improve conditions in the refugee camps and provide livelihood opportunities for Rohingya refugees. This includes advocating for policies that allow refugees to work legally and contribute to the local economy .

4. Prioritise resettlement opportunities for Rohingya refugees in third countries, especially those who have been displaced since the 1990s. Resettlement offers a durable solution for those in need of international protection, providing them with the opportunity to rebuild their lives in safety and with dignity.

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The Mass Rape of Rohingya Muslim Women: An All-Out War Against All Women

Djaouida Siaci

This essay is part of a series that explores the human costs and policy challenges associated with forced displacement crises in the Middle East and Asia. The essays explore the myths or misconceptions that have pervaded discussions about these crises, as well as the constraints or capacity deficiencies that have hampered the responses to them. See  more ...  

In far too many conflicts around the world, rape and sexual violence — primarily targeted against women and girls — have been, and continue to be used as a strategic and tactical instrument of war. [1] The past 20 years have shown that accountability for wartime rape and sexual violence victims has been the exception, not the rule. [2] Despite the passage in April 2019 of UN Security Council Resolution 2467, which aims to strengthen justice and accountability in cases of wartime rape, governments are still failing to act. [3]

Rape has been a central component of the genocidal campaign waged by Myanmar’s military and security forces against the Rohingya ethnic minority, in which Rohingya Muslim women and girls have suffered unspeakable sexual violence at the hand of powerful men, many wearing military or police uniforms. [4] Yet, there has been little accountability, as those responsible for what the UN, U.S. elected officials [5] , the government of Canada and other governments have called genocide, [6]  have gone largely unpunished.  Even those acting under explicit state authority, as is the case of Myanmar’s military and security forces, have been reassured and are confident that their government and their borders will shelter them. 

The mass rapes of Rohingya women and girls “were not just the sum of individual sexual assaults by disparate, coincidental decisions of individual soldiers.” [7]  They were used by Myanmar with the specific intent to destroy the Rohingya as a group, at least in part. Those acts fit squarely within the definition of the crime of genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention for the Prevention and the Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Genocide Convention). And, while a state such as Myanmar cannot incur criminal responsibility for the commission of genocide, it can and must be held accountable for its failure to comply with its obligations under the Genocide Convention.

It has been two years since the unfathomable violence unleashed for decades by Myanmar’s authorities against the Rohingya Muslims of Rakhine State in northwest Myanmar took a brutal turn. This latest explosion of violence has consisted of a campaign of systematic and widespread extermination through mass killings; extensive and continuing destruction and burning of Rohingya homes and villages; and rampant and endemic sexual violence.  The deliberate campaign of violence has caused an estimated 10,000 deaths and led to more than 700,000 Rohingya Muslims to flee from Myanmar across international borders into Bangladesh, joining in their tumultuous rush 300,000 Rohingya who were forced out during previous waves of state-sponsored violence, making the influx one of the largest and fastest-growing refugee crises since the Rwanda genocide. [8]  

Over a million Rohingya Muslim, half of whom are women and children, have been forcibly displaced from Myanmar under circumstances in which it is clear that the perpetrators’ intent was to evict them permanently from their homeland. [9] Dependent completely on the kindness, compassion and empathy of the world while they wait for a place to call home, Rohingya refugees have been left to drift in abjectly inhuman conditions in the largest refugee encampments in the world. Indeed, by most assessments, conditions in the makeshift camps fall well short of international standards. Camp residents occupy unstable structures in low-lying areas susceptible to cyclones, monsoons and flooding; and generally have poor access to clean water, latrines, or healthcare. [10] Each one of these encampments stands today as a symbol of humanity betrayed.

There is every indication that the official policy of Myanmar’s government was primarily to rely upon massive displacements and forcible population transfers that have taken place as a result of serious violations by Myanmar’s military and security forces of international human rights law and international humanitarian law, including and specifically the use of rape and other form of sexual violence. Rape and mass rape of Rohingya Muslim women and girls was more than a casualty or a by-product of the conflict, or the madness of a war; it was part of the Myanmar’s military policy, planned at the highest echelon of the state and used as a strategic instrument intended on destroying a targeted group. [11]  

In the United States in 2017, Americans were transfixed by the accounts of multiple women who bravely came forward to denounce sexual harassment and assaults, including rape by powerful men. [12] Half away across the globe, other women — not the white, educated, outspoken, relatively affluent women who were able to retain lawyers to claim their rights but mostly illiterate, voiceless, stateless and poor women, some of them girls as young as seven — were tied by their hair and hands to trees and gang raped, for no other reason than being Rohingya Muslims. Their horrific accounts are reminiscent of those of the Tutsi women of Rwanda [13] and the Bosnian Muslim and Croatian women of the Former Yugoslavia. [14]

Rohingya men and older boys were disproportionately targeted for mass killing, [15] while Rohingya women and girls were subjected to many other violations, including and specifically mass rape, which has been for long a prominent feature of the extreme brutality and scale of atrocities carried out by Myanmar’s military against the Rohingya Muslim ethnic minority. Rohingya Muslim women suffered excruciating physical and psychological pain. Many survived their horrific ordeals and have been left to bear the burden of telling the world the story of why, where, how and when of the war perpetrated against them.

Any war is ugly, but the level of injustice, massive criminality and impunity in the Rohingya conflict is breathtaking. Perhaps the darkest side of the Rohingya carnage is the innumerable women and girls who have been violated, tortured, mutilated, degraded, and traumatized. [16] The taboo and social stigma associated with rape is so potent in the Muslim culture and tradition, that these victim-survivors are ostracized — cast out and cut off from their families and communities. Their tormentors knew too well that rape would be worse than death for its victims and would come at a very low cost for its perpetrators. Their tormentors also knew that the rape of Rohingya women would humiliate and subordinate their men.

The true test for the international community’s commitment to ending impunity for international crimes perpetrated against the Rohingya ethnic minority and bringing to book their tormentors, would be to ensure first and foremost accountability for wartime rape committed against the Rohingya Muslim women. Full accountability for these crimes requires that they be investigated, charged and prosecuted as genocidal acts. [17] Acknowledging that mass rape perpetrated against Rohingya women and girls fits squarely within the requirements of Lemkinian genocide will draw attention to the vicious nature of the crime, will afford to women the protection of international human rights law and international humanitarian law in armed conflicts, and will provide symbolic vindication for the Muslim women of Rakhine.   

[1] See Dara Kay Cohen et al. , “Wartime Sexual Violence: Misconceptions, Implications and Ways Forward,” US Institute of Peace, Special Report 323 (2013), https://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/resources/SR323.pdf ; Elisabeth Jean Wood, “Rape as a Practice of War: Toward a Typology of Political Violence,” Politics & Society 46, 4 (2018): 513-537, https://www.un.org/sexualviolenceinconflict/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/report/rape-as-a-practice-of-war-toward-a-typology-of-political-violence/wood-PS-2018-rape-as-a-practice-of-war.pdf ; Elvan Isikozlu and Ananda S. Millard, “Towards a Typology of Wartime Rape,” BICC Brief 23 (2010), https://www.bicc.de/uploads/tx_bicctools/brief43.pdf ; Dara Kay Cohen, “Explaining Rape During Civil War,” American Political Science Review 107, 3 (August 2013): 461-477, https://wappp.hks.harvard.edu/files/wappp/files/explaining_rape_during_civil_war.pdf ; and Jeanne Ward and Mendy Marsh, “Sexual Violence Against Women and Girls in War and Its Aftermath: Realities, Responses, and Required Resources,” Briefing Paper Prepared for Symposium on Sexual Violence in Conflict and Beyond, June 21-23, 2006, Brussels, Belgium, http://www.operationspaix.net/DATA/DOCUMENT/1045~v~Sexual_Violence_Against_Women_and_Girls_in_War_and_Its_Aftermath___Realities_Responses_and_Required_Resources.pdf ; and Jean Franco, “Rape: a Weapon of War,” Social Text 2, 91 (June 2007): 1662-1664.  

[2] Lisa Boswell Sharlach, “What Will It Take to Punish Perpetrators of Mass War-Time Rapes,” Scholars Strategy Network, May 25, 2018, https://scholars.org/contribution/what-will-it-take-punish-perpetrators-mass-war-time-rapes .  

[3] See UN Security Council, S/RES/2467 (2019), https://undocs.org/S/RES/2467(2019) .  

[4] “Sexual and gender-based violence in Myanmar and the gendered impact of its ethnic conflict,” The Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, August 22, 2019, A/HRC/42/CRP.4, https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/HRCouncil/FFM-Myanmar/sexualviolence/A_HRC_CRP_4.pdf ; “‘All my Body was in Pain:’ Sexual Violence against Rohingya Women and Girls in Burma,” Human Rights Watch, November 16, 2017, https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/02/06/burma-security-forces-raped-rohingyawomen-girls ; “Burma: Security Forced Raped Rohingya Women, Girls,” Human Rights Watch, February 6, 2017, https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/02/06/burma-securiy-forcesraped-rohingya-women-girls ; Fiona MacGregor, “Rohingya Girls under 10 Raped While Fleeing Myanmar, Charity Says,” The Guardian , October 25, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/25/rohingya-children-fledmyanmar-violence-charity ; and Razia Sultana, “Rape By Command. Sexual Violence as a Weapon Against the Rohingya,” Kaladan Press Network, February 2018,  http://www.kaladanpress.org/images/document/2018/RapebyCommandWeb3.pdf .  

[5] See BURMA Act of 2019 (H.R. 3190.); https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/3190?q=%7B%22search%22%3A%5B%22burma%22%5D%7D&s=1&r=2 .  

[6] Report of the detailed findings of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, September 17, 2018, A/HRC/39/CRP.2,  https://undocs.org/A/HRC/39/CRP.2 .  

[7] John Packer, “Genocide is an act of state, and demands a response by other states”; May 10, 2019, OpenGlobalRights, https://www.rohingyatoday.com/en/genocide-act-state-and-demands-response-other-states .  

[8] “Myanmar: Two years since Rohingya exodus, impunity reigns supreme for military,” Amnesty International, August 21, 2019, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2019/08/myanmar-two-years-since-rohingya-crisis/ .  

[9] Ewelina U. Ochab, “Are Rohingya Muslims On the Path to Extinction?” World Affairs/International Affairs, Forbes, Aug 31, 2017,  https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewelinaochab/2017/08/31/are-rohingya-muslims-on-the-path-to-extinction/#771e1806a88a .  

[10] Victoria Miko, “‘Conditions here are inhumane’: Rohingya in Bangladeshi camps,” Al Jazeera , August 21, 2019, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/08/rohingya-refugees-bangladesh-face-hope-repatriation-190821062348499.html ; Lisa Schlein, “Major Effort Launched to Aid Rohingyas Hit by Monsoon Rains,” VOA News , September 14, 2019, https://www.voanews.com/south-central-asia/major-effort-launched-aid-rohingyas-hit-monsoon-rains ; and Simon Ming, “One year on, Rohingya refugees live in dire camps, facing an uncertain future and legal limbo,” Medecins sans Frontieres, August 28, 2018, https://www.msf.org/one-year-rohingya-refugees-live-dire-camps-facing-uncertain-future-and-legal-limbo .

[11] The 2018 report by the UN Secretary-General on conflict-related sexual violence included Myanmar’s armed forces on an annual list of groups that are “credibly suspected of committing or being responsible for rape or other forms of sexual violence.” See Report of the Secretary-General on Conflict-related Sexual Violence, March 23, 2018, UN Security Council, S/2018/25, https://undocs.org/S/2018/250 .  

[12] Audrey Carlsen et al., “#MeToo Brought Down 201 Powerful Men. Nearly Half of Their Replacements Are Women,” The New York Times , October 29, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/23/us/metoo-replacements.html .  

[13] See for example, Nicole Itano, “How Rwanda’s Genocide Lingers on for Women,” The Christian Science Monitor , November 27, 2002, https://www.csmonitor.com/2002/1127/p08s01-woaf.html ; and Peter Landesman, “A Woman’s Work,” The New York Times , September 15, 2002,  https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/15/magazine/a-woman-s-work.html .  

[14] Inger Skjelsbaek, “Victim and Survivor: Narrated Social Identities of Women Who Experienced Rape During the War in Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Feminism & Psychology 16, 4 (2006): 373-403, https://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/missing-peace/Inger-Skjelsbaek.pdf .  

[15] A 2018 report also documents sexual violence against Rohingya men and boys. See “‘It’s Happening to Our Men as Well’: Sexual Violence Against Rohingya Men and Boys,” Women’s Refugee Commission (November 2018), https://wrc.ms/2JOExqi .   

[16] “‘All of My Body Was Pain’: Sexual Violence Against Rohingya Women and Girls,” Human Rights Watch, November 16, 2017, https://www.hrw.org/report/2017/11/16/all-my-body-was-pain/sexual-violence-against-rohingya-women-and-girls-burma .  

[17]  Report of the independent international fact-finding mission on Myanmar, August 9, 2019, A/HRC/42/50, https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G19/236/74/PDF/G1923674.pdf?OpenElement ; and “DISCRIMINATION TO DESTRUCTION:  A Legal Analysis of Gender Crimes Against the Rohingya,” September 2018, Global Justice Center, http://globaljusticecenter.net/files/Discrimination-to-Destruction.pdf ; Sareta Ashraph, “BEYOND KILLING: Gender, Genocide, & Obligations  Under International Law,” December 2018, Global Justice Center, http://www.globaljusticecenter.net/files/Gender-and-Genocide-Whitepaper… ; Beth Van Schaack, “Determining the Commission of Genocide in Myanmar: Legal and Policy Considerations,” September 28, 2018, Stanford Public Law Working Paper, https://ssrn.com/abstract=3256591 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3256591 ; Larissa Peltola, “Rape and Sexual Violence Used as a Weapon of War and Genocide” (2018). CMC Senior Theses. 1965, https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/1965 ; Sherrie L. Russell-Brown, “Rape as an Act of Genocide,” Berkeley J. Int'l Law. 350 (2003), http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/bjil/vol21/iss2/5 ; Courtney McCausland, “From Tolerance to Tactic: Understanding Rape in Armed Conflict as Genocide,” Michigan State University College of Law International Law Review  25 (2017): 149, https://ssrn.com/abstract=2921186 ; Shayna Rogers, “Sexual Violence or Rape as a Constituent Act of genocide: Lessons from the Ad Hoc Tribunals and a Prescription for the International Criminal Court”; George. Washington Int'l L. Rev. 48, 2 (2016): 265-314, https://www.law.upenn.edu/live/files/5926-articlepdf ; Jonathan M. Short, “Sexual Violence as Genocide: The Developing Law of the International Criminal Tribunals and the International Criminal Court,” Mich.J. Race & L. 503 (2003), https://repository.law.umich.edu/mjrl/vol8/iss2/5 ; and Laura Smith - Spark “How did Rape Become a Weapon of War,” Global Policy Forum, December 8, 2004, https://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/163-general/28294.html .

The Middle East Institute (MEI) is an independent, non-partisan, non-for-profit, educational organization. It does not engage in advocacy and its scholars’ opinions are their own. MEI welcomes financial donations, but retains sole editorial control over its work and its publications reflect only the authors’ views. For a listing of MEI donors, please click her e .

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Join us on April 30 to celebrate the impact of Refugees International and our vision of rights and refuge for all.

​​​Remembering the Rohingya Genocide: Six Years ​​​On, Survivors​​​ ​​​Remain Resilient,​​​ ​​​Still ​​​​Seeking Safety and​​​ Justice

By Ali Johar | August 23, 2023

Statement from Refugees International Fellow Ali Johar :

“This week marks six years since the horrific acts of ​​​​ genocide against the Rohingya people. My people were subjected to a campaign of brutality, exodus, and systemic discrimination. Yet Rohingya survivors remain resilient and continue to strive for justice and a better life. The international community must rise to the occasion, acknowledging the urgency and gravity of the situation.  August 25th is a reminder of the ruthless genocide Myanmar’s military forces inflicted upon the Rohingya people. However, our plight is not the story of a single day, or even one violent crackdown. The roots of the genocide lie in the decades of state-sponsored crimes to erase our existence. The atrocities shattered our collective conscience and tested the very essence of the world’s shared humanity. In 2017, the genocidal onslaught forced more than 740,000 Rohingya to flee to refuge in neighbouring Bangladesh. An independent ​​​​ UN fact finding mission reported more than 392 Rohingya villages were razed to the ground in 2017 alone. Rohingya groups estimated more than 30,000 people, including children, were killed, and tens of thousands were raped. Today, 1 million Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh and tens of thousands more in other countries in the region face aid cuts, restrictions of basic rights, and even the threat of forced return to Myanmar. Meanwhile, more than 600,000 continue to face violence in Myanmar. Of this number, ​​​​ more than 140,000  souls remained trapped in internally displaced concentration camps.        ​​​​​The gravity of these crimes has been acknowledged by the UN Independent Fact Finding Mission, the United States government, and independent organizations as crimes against humanity and genocide .        Despite widespread condemnation, those responsible for the plight of the  Rohingya  are yet to be held accountable. Rohingya  and human rights groups continue to call for justice in the face of this impunity. Being a Rohingya myself, when I pause to reflect upon the pain and resilience of my fellow Rohingya victims, it becomes evident that the strides made towards justice remain insufficient. While survivors await the reckoning of justice, the perpetrators roam free—a bitter injustice that stains the collective conscience of the international justice system.  In the camps in Bangladesh, Rohingya refugees endure life in overcrowded and fenced enclosures, stripped of even the most basic needs. A dire consequence is the denial of formal education to half a million Rohingya children, dooming their potential to a nightmarish darkness. Refugees are denied opportunities to earn an income and have been forced into a life of nutritional deprivation—an ordeal exacerbated by ​​​​ recent reductions in food support by the World Food Program.  ​​​This year, let us not merely grieve the lives lost, but amplify the resilient voices of the Rohingya survivors. We demand accountability, seeking not only justice but a lasting solution that restores our human rights and dignity.   Amid the commemorations of this painful anniversary, let us also acknowledge the unyielding fortitude of the Rohingya. Despite unfathomable hardships, the Rohingya people have displayed courage, resilience, and determination. It is incumbent upon the international community to honor the memory of the victims by securing justice and providing access to education, livelihoods, and safety to allow our community to rebuild.  We call upon the international community to unite in remembrance, healing, and decisive action, ensuring that the legacy of the Rohingya genocide compels everyone to shoulder the responsibility that lies ahead.   Justice delayed is justice denied.” 

​​​​​ For more information or to schedule an interview, contact Refugees International Vice President for Strategic Outreach Sarah Sheffer at ​ [email protected] . ​​ 

Featured Image: A Rohingya refugee man makes a bamboo basket at a Hindu Rohingya camp in Ukhia, Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh on August 24, 2022. Photo by Munir uz Zaman/AFP via Getty Images.

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The ‘Night Government’ Expands Its Violent Reach in Rohingya Camps

Gunfights, kidnappings and homicides have become widespread in the refugee settlements in Bangladesh, as armed groups and criminal gangs have become more brazen.

By Verena Hölzl

Reporting from Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh

They could not worship freely. The authorities denied their very existence and razed evidence of their historical communities. Then came a campaign of ethnic cleansing that forced them to flee to a foreign country where they crowded into bamboo-and-tarp shelters. There they have waited years for a better life.

Instead, a new threat is stalking the roughly one million Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar who have resettled in refugee camps in Bangladesh: a surge in deadly violence from some of their own people.

Armed Rohingya groups and criminal gangs involved in the drug trade are so entrenched in the camps, aid groups and refugees said, that they are known as the “night government,” a moniker that signified their power and the time that they typically operated. In recent months, they have become more brazen, terrorizing their fellow Rohingya and battling one another in gunfights in broad daylight as they fight for control of the camps.

The escalating violence has become another scourge in the camps, which were already rife with disease and malnutrition, and prone to floods and landslides. Doctors working in the camps say that the number of gunshot wounds they are treating soared in the past year. Accounts in local news media show the number of killings in the camps doubled to more than 90 over the same period. Abductions increased fourfold .

“Security is now our number one concern in the camps,” said Sumbul Rizvi, who represents the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Bangladesh. By the agency’s count, so-called serious security incidents have nearly tripled in the past year, prompting more and more Rohingya to take treacherous boat journeys to flee the camps.

In interviews, residents of the camp widely accused the local police of being ineffective, complicit, or both.

Police officials reject those complaints.

“The security situation is totally under control,” said Mohammad Abdullahil Baki, the deputy inspector general of police in Cox’s Bazar, who is in charge of the Rohingya camps.

But that assessment does not align with the situation in the camps.

One afternoon last April, a resident of the camps heard gunshots and had a sense of foreboding. “I felt blood rushing to my head,” S.R., whom The New York Times is identifying by only his initials to protect his safety, recently recalled in a house outside the camps.

S.R.’s intuition was right. His father, who was playing with some children in a nearby tea shop, had been fatally shot in the throat.

The gunmen, he said, belonged to the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, or ARSA, which was unhappy that his father, a camp liaison to the Bangladeshi government, assisted victims and shared information about the groups, including ARSA.

Like the Rohingya Solidarity Organization, or R.S.O., the other main armed group operating in the camps, ARSA has its roots in opposing the junta in Myanmar.

In interviews with more than a dozen refugees, some were afraid to utter the names of the two groups. Even away from the camps, they lowered their voices and referred to the groups by the length of their acronyms: the “four-letters” and the “three-letters.”

They said members of the groups beat, kill, kidnap, rape and extort them for money they don’t have — claims that both groups deny.

While the number of armed groups is hard to pin down, analysts believe there are between five and 15 more or less well-organized groups and gangs operating in the camps now. Most are allied against ARSA, which has lost significant ground over the past year.

R.S.O. was started in the 1980s and lay dormant for years before re-emerging after the 2021 coup in Myanmar. By then, ARSA had become known for abuses against its own community in the refugee camps.

It was ARSA’s attacks on Myanmar security forces in 2016 and 2017 that were used as a pretext for a violent security operation that killed at least 24,000 people and forced hundreds of thousands of others to flee across the border into Bangladesh. The United States has accused Myanmar of committing genocide against the Rohingya.

ARSA, initially known as Harakah al-Yaqin, or Faith Movement, had vowed to liberate the Rohingya people from oppression in Myanmar when it emerged in 2013. Now both ARSA and R.S.O. are trying to force their own people under their control.

“There is a disconnect between what these groups say and what they are doing on the ground, particularly when it comes to ARSA,” said Thomas Kean, an analyst with the International Crisis Group, a think tank. “There is little incentive for them to fight when they can instead stay inside Bangladesh territory, control the camps and make money from illicit activities such as trafficking drugs.“

Bangladesh prohibits Rohingya refugees from working and moving freely. Their predicament has been made worse by the decline in international funding for the Rohingya crisis, with current levels of aid equating to roughly 30 cents a day per refugee.

“Most people don’t want to get involved in these groups or their activities, but if the alternative is for their family to go hungry, then some will feel like they have little option,” Mr. Kean said.

Fortify Rights, a rights group, said that by its count of reports in Bangladeshi media, killings in the camps doubled to more than 90 in 2023 from the previous year. In the first eight months of 2023, the number of gunshot wounds treated by Doctors Without Borders had already doubled from 2022.

“Arms have become a lot more visible in the camps over the past year,” said Wendy McCance, country director of the Norwegian Refugee Council.

Her teams have seen them firsthand. A government building in the camps that some of them were in was locked down last year after armed men entered it.

Now, when Ms. McCance lobbies to fortify schools and learning centers, she worries not just about flash floods but also bullets.

In the camps, Rohingya women said gunmen have pushed their conservative Muslim ideology on them and pressured them to dress conservatively and not work.

One woman, who asked not to be identified over safety concerns, said she believed her husband worked with ARSA. He was also angry with her, she said, because she was making money sewing clothes. One night he became so violent that he bit her breast and she had to get a tetanus shot. She has also found herself caught in the middle of gang rivalries.

For Ms. McCance, the situation in the camps was predictable. “Restrict the movement of one million people, and they will find ways to release pressure. You can’t just keep people cattled, surrounded by wire and CCTV,” she said.

One man, who also asked not to be identified for fear of his safety, said he had been warned several times to stop his human rights work in the camps.

Then he and his family members were attacked, leaving his brother with gunshot wounds and his father hospitalized. The man said he had tried to talk his younger compatriots out of taking up arms.

“As long as Bangladesh is sheltering us, we need to abide by the law,” he said.

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The Genocide of the Rohingya People

Throughout history there have always been people who look, think, or act differently than the majority of others. When people feel threatened by the group of people who are different than them they become hateful and associate them as being “others” who do not deserve to be held up to the same standard as everyone else because they are different. The most well known example of this is anti-semitism that led to the killing of millions of Jewish people in our history. We like to think that things have changed since then and that we have learned from history, but this type of hate and genocide still happens to certain groups of people today. There are a few examples of current mistreatment of certain groups of people, but after research The Rohingya people of Myanmar really stood out. They are the perfect example of the genocide and mistreatment that is still happening even in 2018. In this essay we will look into the history of anti-semitism which lead to the mass killing of millions of Jews and how it relates to the genocide of the Rohingya people that has happened more recently.

Anti-Semitism has been an issue for a very long time. Looking throughout Jewish history there have always been people who have been against them. The popularity of anti-semitism really started to happen when the Jews would not convert to Christianity like everyone else was doing during the middle ages. Because of this the Christians believed that the Jews were evil, worshiped the devil, and were overall just up to no good. Anti-semites began spreading rumors that the Jews would kidnap children and use their blood for satanic rituals known as blood libels. When these lies were spread everyone believed that they were true and developed hate for the Jewish community, even though none of it was true. From there things just got more difficult for the Jewish people. From the 19th century to the early 1900’s, Jews were no longer seen as people who deserved rights and were treated terribly. They were no longer allowed to own homes or land, they were limited to where they could work, and had all of their basic rights taken away from them.

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Around this time is when pogroms, which involved killing and the destruction of the Jewish communities, was occuring as well. This forced them out of where they were living and into terrible living conditions instead. Anti-semites blamed the Jews for every single problem that they had faced even though they had nothing to do with it. At this time anti-semitism had become a worldwide issue and no countries wanted to take in Jewish refugees. After World War II is when anti-semitism was at its worst and the Holocaust had begun. The Nazis had enough of the Jews at this point and put even more restrictions on Jews and eventually believed that they were just too much of a problem so they needed to all be killed. This lead to concentration camps opening across Europe that tortured and killed millions of Jews. Although anti-semitism is not as common today as it was in the past, and there are no longer mass killings of the Jews, there are still those who have hatred towards the Jewish community. Now that we have went over the history of anti-semitism a bit, we move on to a current example of othering a group of people.

The Rohingya people of Myanmar are those that follow Islam and are Muslims that were mostly located in Burma or the Rakhine State. They were able to live peacefully with the rest of the people in Myanmar until 1978 when the government was switching from a military ran government into a democracy. The Myanmar military, known as the Tatamadaw, feared of losing all of their power and wanted to fight back (Bi). Because the military craved power they needed to attack the weakest people of Myanmar which included: the Rohingya, Kokang, and Kachin people. However, the Tatamadaw did not have much success with getting rid of the Kokang or Kachin people because they had the support of other countries that the military did not want to upset. The Kachins are Christians so the Tatamadaw didn’t want to mess with them and get hate from the western world and both the Kokang and Kachins share a border with China, so China supported them to avoid conflict moving into their side of the border (Bi). That leaves the Rohingya people. The Rohingya are muslim, they don’t share a border with China, and didn’t have the support of other countries like the Kokang and Kachins do. They became the perfect targets for the Tatamadaw to go after. “In 1978, General Ne Win’s socialist military dictatorship launched the first large-scale campaign against the Rohingya in Rakhine State with the intent first of expelling them en masse from Western Burma and subsequently legalizing the systematic erasure of Rohingya group identity and legitimizing their physical destruction.”(Zarni). The military did not like people that were different so they decided to spread lies about them to get the rest of the country on board with getting rid of this group of people because they are just too different. The military started pogroms which destroyed the Rohingya homes and communities and started murdering them, which is still happening. Rohingya started to escape and became refugees in their neighboring country, Bangladesh (Einbinder). The Rohingya people are not from Bangladesh so the people there were upset and did not like that the Rohingya were now living in their country, because of this they are forced to live in terrible refugee camps and are still terribly mistreated today.

When we look back on the history of the mistreatment of Jews and the genocide that they faced, it is very similar to what has, and is still happening to the Rohingya people. According to Gregory H. Stanton, there are 10 stages of genocide that happen, so we will look into how some of these stages relate to both the Jewish and Rohingya people. The first stage is classification. At first, both Jews and the Rohingya were accepted or did not have any issues with the other people in their countries. It wasn’t until changes started happening, mostly with religion, and neither group was willing to convert. This is when people started seeing them as different or others. The Jews and the Rohingya are very religious people. Jews were first seen as others when they would not convert to Christianity like most were doing at the time. Religion was very important to them and they would rather be treated differently than switching to a religion they didn’t believe in.

The Rohingya people also would not convert to Christianity or other religions because they are proud muslims. “Rohingyas are very religious, that’s one thing I can tell you….after so much destruction of houses and homes, being kicked out of the country, of poverty, no education, no living standards, no hospitals, no school, nothing – I still can proudly say, not a single Rohingya has actually converted to Christianity or Hinduism. That is how strong we are.” (Wong). This shows that they believe so much in their religion that they would rather be mistreated and killed rather than convert. This now leads us into the second stage, symbolization. This step was used as a way to further separate and show how different a group of people is from everyone else. The Jews were forced to carry around IDs to show that they were Jewish and also have to wear a Star of David at all times. They also had to deal with many untrue stereotypes. It seems that the Rohingya people did not have as much symbols as the Jews had, but other people in the country did refer to them as racist terms, such as Bengalis (Zarni). The third step is discrimination.

This is when a group of people no longer deserves having the same rights as everyone else and makes them a weaker target. Both groups of people had laws made against them and even lost their citizenships. The Rohingya people no longer have citizenship in Myanmar and are now the largest stateless population (United Nations). The fourth step is dehumanization. Dehumanization was a big issue for the Jewish community. They were always being compared to animals in the media to make them seem like these people were not human and didn’t deserve to be treated as such. That takes us into the next step, organization. For the mass killing of people you need to execute a plan to accomplish that. The pogroms that occurred to both the Jews and Rohingya are a great example. Anti-semites would ruin everything the Jews had and would kill them because they wanted them gone. The same thing has happened to the Rohingya. “The State and the predominantly Buddhist society have collaborated with the intent to deindigenize, illegalize, dehumanize, and destroy a people whose ancestral home is in Myanmar. The evidence of the intent to destroy the Rohingya people over the past thirty-five years through assaults on their identity, killings during multiple pogroms, physical and mental harm, deliberate infliction of conditions of life designed to bring about the group’s destruction, and measures to prevent births, lead the authors to conclude that Myanmar’s Rohingya are the victims of genocide carried out jointly by the central political state and anti-Muslim ultra-nationalists among the Buddhist Rakhine peoples.” (Zarni). Eventually it became completely legal to torture and kill both groups of people. A big step is number nine, which is extermination.

The Nazis were able to start the Holocaust which was the mass killing and genocide of the Jewish people. The Jews that the Nazis could find were sent to concentration camps, which were terrible living conditions and were eventually killed in large numbers. The Rohingya had the same fate. If they were able to escape into Bangladesh they are now living in terrible conditions and treated terribly from the people of Myanmar, and also the people in Bangladesh because they did not want them there. If they couldn’t escape those people were then killed. “They survived what the United Nations and the United States have called ethnic cleansing. Now, the nearly 700,000 Rohingya people who have fled the military-led violence in Myanmar to neighboring Bangladesh face an uncertain future. In Myanmar, the government continues to deny the mass killings, and is building what human rights groups describe as prisons for Rohingya who return.” (Einbinder). This now leads us into the final step, denial. This is a step that will almost always happen after a genocide has occurred. It happened after the Holocaust and it is happening now to the Rohingya people.

In conclusion, it is important to be aware of the othering that is happening around us. This terrible separation that so many people like to do between them others continues to lead to genocide. As humans we need to accept and acknowledge the differences of the people around us in a positive way. We also need to all be aware of the steps of genocide so that it can be prevented in the future.

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