The Rohingya are a Muslim ethnic minority that have lived in Myanmar for centuries, mostly within Rakhine state, a province in the west of the country that borders Bangladesh. Under British colonial rule of India and Bangladesh, large numbers of Muslims migrated to Myanmar as labourers. The influx of these labourers, in addition to the Rohingya who were already present, was viewed negatively by the Buddhist majority in Myanmar. Following independence from Britain, Myanmar’s government viewed the past migration as illegal, as well as not recognising the Rohingya as a distinct ethnic group. Despite this, there were still provisions in place in Myanmar to allow Muslim minorities to gain identification and citizenship credentials.

This all changed with the military coup in 1962, and in the subsequent decades the rights of the Rohingya within Myanmar would gradually curtailed. In 1982 under newly drafted laws Myanmar officially recognised 135 different ethnicities in Myanmar, of which the Rohingya were not a part of. This effectively rendered the Rohingya minority stateless and, without proper citizenship, they were unable to properly access education and health services, employment opportunities and needed special permits to travel and to marry. 

Coordinated policies by Myanmar’s government and military saw systematic persecution of the Rohingya in an effort to remove them from Myanmar, including forced eviction and relocation from their land and destruction of their property (including mosques and schools). This also saw acts of arbitrary arrest and detention, torture, extrajudicial killings, rape and forced labour by Myanmar’s military forces. 

International human rights groups, activists, media organisations and UN representatives issued reports on the situation of the Rohingya in Myanmar and documenting widespread abuses and acts of violence. The latest escalation of the violence came in 2017, when a Rohingya militant group (the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army) launched attacks on police and military outposts in Rakhine state. In response to these attacks, the Myanmar government undertook large-scale operations to remove the Rohingya population from Rakhine state through violence and widespread human rights abuses. This saw a large influx of Rohingya refugees fleeing Myanmar or being internally displaced, along with accusations of ethnic cleansing and genocide levelled at Myanmar’s government by the international community.

The decades of systematic persecution and abuse of the Rohingya have unfortunately made them the world’s most persecuted minority, and their current plight forms Southeast Asia’s worst humanitarian crisis.

Links to official UN reports about the persecution of the Rohingya are available below.