Rohingya Genocide Information

The following website page contains sensitive content. Parental guidance is advised.

The Rohingya are a primarily Muslim ethnic minority group in predominantly Buddhist Myanmar. They have lived in the area now known as Rakhine for hundreds of years; it only became part of Myanmar, then Burma, in the 1700s. 

Until recently, about 1.1 million Rohingya called the northern Rakhine state their home.

Many Burmese, as the citizens of Myanmar are called, consider the Rohingya to be illegal “Bengali” immigrants — despite the fact that they have lived in Myanmar for generations. They have been denied citizenship since 1982. 

While the Rohingya have experienced varying degrees of discrimination for many decades, prejudices against them started to crystallize in the 1960s when the government, controlled by the military, took a hardline against them and began scapegoating the Rohingya for the government’s failed economic programs. 

Conflicts started once three Rohingya individuals were accused of raping and murdering a Buddhist girl in May 2012, and in response a mob killed 10 Rohingya Muslims in a “revenge” attack, the Guardian reports. 

On June 8, 2012, thousands of Muslims rioted and Rakhine residents — including Rohingya Muslims and Burmese Buddhists — begin attacking each other. The government declared a state of emergency and then attempted to (unsuccessfully) quell the violence. 

By June 12, 100,000 Rohingya were displaced and housed in camps, according to Human Rights Watch.  

By April 2013, tens of thousands of people were internally displaced in Myanmar. Human Rights Watch stated that thousands of Rohingya had fled to Bangladesh, Thailand, and Malaysia since the first violent clashes in 2012, but many of them did not survive the journey.

In October of 2016, there was an attack on border police posts by what the government called “insurgent terrorists” that killed nine officers, the Guardian reported. The government said the perpetrators were Rohingya, but the International Crisis Group reported that there was no evidence to support these claims. 

The military began conducting “targeted sweeps” against the terrorists, yet they also began forcibly removing thousands of villagers from their homes.

In August 2017, 27,000 Rohingya left Myanmar, walking and taking boats to neighboring Bangladesh as security forces continued their “clearing operation.” 

By September 2017, approximately 400,000 Rohingya refugees had fled to Bangladesh since Aug. 25. The UN estimated that over half of this population was comprised of child refugees.

The world slowly began to take notice of the movement of the Rohingya refugees as other world leaders put pressure on Myanmar’s de facto leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, to act. Canadian president Justin Trudeau, wrote an open letter to Suu Kyi, urging her to take notice of the Rohingya refugees saying; “As the de facto democratic leader of Myanmar and as a renowned advocate for human rights, you have a particular moral and political obligation to speak out against this appalling cruelty, and to do whatever is in your power to stop it.”

Other international figures such as Malala Yousafzai and Desmond Tutu have urged Suu Kyi to take action as well.

By October 2017, the Rohingya crisis became the world’s fastest developing refugee emergency.

The Rohingya refugee count reaches half a million, with more arriving in Bangladesh daily. The Myanmar government admits that nearly 200 Rohingya villages in Rakhine were abandoned, and the UN Secretary-General called the crisis “the world’s fastest developing refugee emergency and a humanitarian and human rights nightmare.”

Bangladesh, a developing country, struggles to address the needs of more than half a million refugees, and the UN warns that the situation in the country’s overflowing refugee camps is “dire.” The government of Bangladesh proposed building a “mega-refugee camp” on an island prone to flooding, but this “solution” has been met with great opposition.

World leaders and international organizations have pledged $344 million to fund mostly UN-ran humanitarian relief programs to aid the Rohingya — but the figure is still $90 million less than what the UN needs to adequately address the crisis. The US has also threatened to sanction Myanmar, stating that US aid cannot be used to fund the Burmese military’s campaign against the Rohingya.

607,000 Rohingya refugees have fled to Bangladesh since Aug. 25, according to the International Organization for Migration, and more arrive daily. They join the thousands of Rohingya refugees who have lived in Bangladesh’s camps for decades, having fled previous bouts of violence.

Myanmar was home to 1.1 million Rohingya people — today there are more Rohingya in Bangladesh than in their native Myanmar.

For more detailed information, visit our source on the Global Citizen.