Rohingya people

• 1. Introduction

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  The Rohingya people are a stateless Indo-Aryan ethnolinguistic group from Rakhine State in western Myanmar, and by one measure, they are among the most persecuted minorities anywhere on earth. Before a wave of catastrophic violence in 2017, an estimated 1.4 million Rohingya lived in Myanmar. In that year alone, over 740,000 fled across the border into Bangladesh. The questions that define them are not merely political. They are fundamental: Who are these people? Where do they come from? And how did a community rooted in one place for generations come to be denied the most basic legal proof that they exist?

  Those questions have no simple answers. The Rohingya maintain they are indigenous to western Myanmar, with a heritage of over a millennium shaped by contact with Arabs, Mughals, and Portuguese. The Myanmar government, meanwhile, has insisted for decades that they are Bengali migrants from Chittagong, calling them illegal interlopers with no claim to citizenship. The argument over their origins is not an academic debate. It has been used to justify stripping them of their documents, confining them in camps, and driving them out of the country entirely. The International Criminal Court is investigating crimes against humanity. The International Court of Justice has heard a case alleging genocide. What follows is the story of a people caught between a disputed past and a present-day catastrophe.

• 2. A Name Contested

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  The word Rohingya has a history older than most people realize. In 1799, a British physician named Francis Buchanan wrote an article titled "A Comparative Vocabulary of Some of the Languages Spoken in the Burma Empire". In that document, he recorded that among the native groups of Arakan were Mohammedans "who have long settled in Arakan, and who call themselves Rooinga, or natives of Arakan." A publication called the Classical Journal of 1811 further identified Rooinga as one of the languages spoken in the "Burmah Empire". In 1815, the scholar Johann Severin Vater listed Ruinga as a distinct ethnic group with its own language in a compendium published in German.

  Those early references are load-bearing evidence for the Rohingya community, which argues that its name and its presence in Arakan predate British colonial rule. The term itself may derive from Rakhanga or Roshanga, old names for the state of Arakan. It would then mean something like "inhabitant of Rohang," which was the early Muslim name for the same region. Yet scholars are divided on what that continuity proves. Historian Jacques Leider notes that the Rohingya were widely called "Chittagonians" during the British period, and it was not considered controversial to call them "Bengalis" until the 1990s. He also points out that there is no international consensus on the term's usage.

  The government of Burma used the word in a very different spirit. Prime Minister U Nu referred to Rohingya Muslims in a radio address on the 25th of September 1954, as part of a peace-building effort in the Mayu Frontier Region. The term was broadcast on Burmese radio and used in speeches by Burmese rulers. By 1962, that openness had ended. Since the military coup of that year, the Myanmar government has refused to accept the category at all, preferring instead to call the community "Bengali". In the 2014 census, the government forced Rohingya to identify themselves under that label. Journalist Shafiur Rahman has argued that the name "Bengali" is deployed to brand Rohingya as recent arrivals, erasing their historical ties to the region. For many Rohingya, being denied the use of their own name is inseparable from being denied their basic rights.

• 3. Arakan and the Arrival of Islam

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  By the 4th century, the coastal region of Arakan had become one of the earliest Indianised kingdoms in Southeast Asia. The first Arakanese state flourished in Dhanyawadi; power later shifted to the city of Waithali. Sanskrit inscriptions in the region indicate that the founders of these early states were Indian, and the British historian Daniel George Edward Hall noted that the Burmese do not appear to have settled in Arakan until possibly as late as the tenth century CE. The earlier dynasties are thought to have been Indian, ruling a population similar to that of Bengal.

  Arakan's position on the Bay of Bengal made it a hub of maritime trade reaching back at least to the time of the Indian Maurya Empire. Political science scholar Syed Islam has argued that Arab merchants were in contact with Arakan from the third century onward. Arab traders are documented in the coastal areas of southeast Bengal, bordering Arakan, from the 9th century. The Rohingya trace their history to this period, though that claim is disputed. Other historians, including Ashon Nyanuttara, a scholar of Southeast Asian Buddhism, note that there is scant archaeological evidence for the early political and religious history of the region, and that Buddhism under the Candra dynasty appears well established by the 4th century, with Islam arriving much later via Bengali Muslims from what is now Bangladesh.

  What is not disputed is the role of the Kingdom of Mrauk U in bringing Muslim settlers to Arakan. Early evidence of Bengali Muslim settlements dates to the reign of Min Saw Mon, who ruled from 1430 to 1434. After 24 years of exile in Bengal, he regained the Arakanese throne in 1430 with military assistance from the Bengal Sultanate. The Bengalis who came with him established their own communities in the region. Among the monuments of that era is the Santikan Mosque, built in the 1430s, its courtyard measuring 65 feet from north to south and 82 feet from east to west. Arakan's vassalage to Bengal proved brief, but the cultural exchange that followed left a deep imprint: the Buddhist kings of Arakan continued to maintain Muslim titles, employed Muslims in the royal administration, and welcomed Bengali, Persian, and Arabic scribes to their courts.

• 4. Colonial Migrations and the Census

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  Following the Konbaung Dynasty's conquest of Arakan in 1785, as many as 35,000 people from Rakhine State fled to the neighbouring Chittagong region of British Bengal in 1799 to escape persecution by the Bamar. The Bamar executed thousands of men and deported a significant portion of the population to central Burma, leaving Arakan scarcely populated by the time the British arrived.

  British colonial policy then actively encouraged Bengali inhabitants from adjacent regions to migrate into the newly acquired and lightly populated valleys of Arakan to work as farm labourers. The East India Company extended the Bengal Presidency to cover Arakan, and with no international boundary separating Bengal from Arakan, movement between the regions was unrestricted. The British census of 1872 recorded 58,255 Muslims in Akyab District alone. By 1911, that figure had risen to 178,647. Historian Thant Myint-U, adviser to President Thein Sein, put the broader immigration picture in stark terms: at the beginning of the 20th century, Indians were arriving in Burma at the rate of no less than a quarter million per year. The peak year was 1927, when immigration reached 480,000 people, with Rangoon surpassing New York City as the world's largest immigration port, in a country of only 13 million people.

  The 1931 census found 584,839 Muslims in Burma, making up 4% of the total population of 14,647,470. Of those, 396,504 were Indian Muslims and 186,861 were Burmese Muslims. Forty-one percent of Burma's Muslims lived in Arakan at that time. In the port city of Akyab, which was one of the leading rice ports in the world hosting ship fleets from Europe and China, the 1931 census found 500,000 Indians. Local Arakanese deeply resented this transformation of their towns. According to historian Clive J. Christie, the issue became a focal point of Burmese nationalism, producing serious anti-Indian disturbances in 1930-31 and riots specifically targeting the Indian Muslim community in 1938. Those tensions would detonate violently when war came.

• 5. War, Violence, and Division

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  When the Imperial Japanese Army invaded British-controlled Burma during World War II, the British retreated and left behind a power vacuum that ignited communal violence between Arakanese Buddhists and Muslim villagers. The British made a fateful decision: they armed Muslims in northern Arakan to create a buffer zone against Japanese advance, and to counteract the largely pro-Japanese ethnic Rakhines. The result was a polarisation of Arakan along ethnic lines that has never fully healed.

  The Arakan massacres of 1942 brought the worst of that violence to the surface. Historian Aye Chan, writing from Kanda University in Japan, has documented that Rohingyas from northern Arakan killed around 20,000 Arakanese in March 1942. In return, around 5,000 Muslims in the Minbya and Mrauk-U townships were killed by Rakhines and Red Karens. Some 22,000 Muslims in Arakan were believed to have crossed the border into Bengal to escape the violence. As in the rest of Burma, the Japanese army also committed acts of rape, murder, and torture against Muslims in Arakan.

  The British formed Volunteer Forces using Rohingya recruits, the V-Force, to facilitate their eventual re-entry into Burma. Over three years, the Allies and Japanese fought over the Mayu peninsula. According to the secretary of the British governor, the V-Force, rather than fighting the Japanese, destroyed Buddhist monasteries, pagodas, and houses, and committed atrocities in northern Arakan. The British Army's liaison officer, Anthony Irwin, gave a contradicting account, praising the V-Force's role. When Burma moved toward independence, some Rohingya leaders addressed Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, asking that the Mayu region be incorporated into East Pakistan. Jinnah reportedly turned the proposal down, saying he was not in a position to interfere in Burmese matters. In 1947, Rohingya elders founded the Mujahid party in northern Arakan, aiming to create an autonomous Islamic state, a movement that set the stage for armed insurrections over the following decades.

• 6. Stateless by Law

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  In the early years of Burmese independence, Rohingya political participation was visible and sometimes significant. Two Rohingyas, M. A. Gaffar and Sultan Ahmed, were elected to the Constituent Assembly of Burma in 1947. After independence in 1948, five Rohingyas were elected to parliament in 1951, including Zura Begum, one of the country's first two female MPs. Six MPs were elected during the 1956 general election and subsequent by-elections. Sultan Mahmud, a former politician in British India, served as Minister of Health in the cabinet of Prime Minister U Nu.

  That participation came to an abrupt end with the 1962 military coup led by General Ne Win. Ne Win launched a Nationalist agenda rooted in racial discrimination. In 1978, his government launched Operation Nagamin to separate nationals from non-nationals, the first large-scale violent assault on the Rohingya. National Registration Cards were confiscated and never replaced. Around 200,000 Rohingya fled to Bangladesh, which initially denied them entry and blocked food rations, leading to the deaths of 12,000 people. After bilateral negotiations, the refugees were eventually repatriated.

  The decisive legal blow came in 1982. The citizenship law enacted by the Burmese military junta did not list the Rohingya among the 135 "national races" of Burma. It denied citizenship to any community not recorded in a British survey conducted in 1823. Scholars like Maung Zarni have argued that the 1982 Citizenship Act encodes anti-Indian and anti-Muslim racism directly into law, serving as the legal foundation for what he describes as state-sanctioned violence and the gradual destruction of the Rohingya as a group. In 2005, Rohingya politician Shamsul Anwarul Huq, who had been elected to parliament in 1990, was charged under the controversial 1982 law and sentenced to 47 years in prison. By 2017, Burma had no Rohingya MPs and the Rohingya population had no voting rights.

• 7. Genocide and Exodus

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  Starting in early August 2017, Myanmar security forces began what they called "clearance operations" in northern Rakhine State. Following coordinated attacks by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army on the 25th of August against 30 police outposts and border guards, the operations escalated radically. In December 2017, following a detailed survey of Rohingya refugees, the medical humanitarian organisation Medecins Sans Frontieres calculated that at least 6,700 Rohingya men, women, and children were killed in the first month of the major attacks. That figure included at least 1,000 children. MSF estimated that 69% were killed by gunshots, 9% were burnt to death, and 5% were beaten to death.

  A study released in August 2018 estimated that more than 24,000 Rohingya were killed by the Myanmar military and local Buddhists since the clearance operations began on the 25th of August 2017. The same study estimated that 18,000 Rohingya women and girls were raped, 116,000 were beaten, and 36,000 were thrown into fire. Myanmar's presidential spokesman reported that 176 out of 471 Rohingya villages in three townships had become empty. Over 400,000 Rohingya fled in the first four weeks alone, approximately 40% of those remaining in Myanmar. By December 2017, an estimated 625,000 refugees from Rakhine had crossed into Bangladesh since August of that year.

  Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar's de facto civilian leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, faced intense international criticism for her public defence of the military's actions. In a televised speech on the 19th of September 2017, she condemned "all human rights violations and unlawful violence" but denied that any armed clashes or clearance operations had taken place after the 5th of September and expressed no criticism of the military. The UN Secretary General described the situation as "the world's fastest-developing refugee emergency" and "a humanitarian nightmare". A Yale Law School assessment in 2015 had already concluded that Myanmar's campaign against the Rohingya could be classified as genocide under international law. The International Criminal Court has since opened an investigation into crimes against humanity, and the International Court of Justice has heard a case alleging genocide brought by another state.

• 8. Displacement Without End

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  More than 100,000 Rohingya confined within Myanmar remain in camps for internally displaced persons, unable to return to villages that no longer exist. Since 2015, over 900,000 Rohingya have fled to south-eastern Bangladesh alone, in addition to those who have reached other surrounding countries and major Muslim nations.

  In Bangladesh, the government initiated a plan in January 2016 to relocate tens of thousands of displaced Rohingya to the island of Bhasan Char. Human rights groups have described the plan as a forced relocation. The island is low-lying, prone to flooding, accessible only in winter, and described as a haven for pirates. It lies nine hours from the camps where Rohingya currently live. On the 9th of July 2020, Human Rights Watch urged Bangladeshi authorities to move over 300 Rohingya from Bhasan Char immediately, citing relatives' reports of people being held without freedom of movement or adequate food, medical care, or safe drinking water. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina later stated that 35,000 Rohingya had been transferred to Bhasan Char to keep Rohingya youth away from criminal activities.

  Since the 2021 Myanmar coup, new dynamics have emerged. The underground National Unity Government, formed in opposition to the military council, issued recognition for the first time of war crimes committed against the Rohingya, a step hailed as a milestone toward reconciliation. Since February 2024, the Tatmadaw has reportedly conscripted young Rohingya men between the ages of 18 and 35, despite the law applying only to citizens, offering them an ID card, a bag of rice, and a monthly salary of US$41. Those who refuse service are fined half a million kyats. On the 26th of March 2024, Arakan Army leader Twan Mrat Naing posted that calling Rohingya living in Myanmar "Bengali" is not malicious in itself, and called on the international community to move past the naming dispute and pursue reconciliation. For a people who have been fighting over the right to their own name for nearly a century, that call represents both a small opening and a reminder of how much remains unresolved.