Rohingya history

A timeline of the Rohingya

Key moments from Arakan to today, in order. This timeline is updated when the facts change.

About this page

Six centuries, documented

The Rohingya are an indigenous people of Arakan, today’s Rakhine State in Myanmar, native to the land between the Naf River and the Arakan Yoma. Their presence is documented at the royal court of Mrauk U in the 15th century, in the name “Rooinga” recorded in print in 1799, and in the Union of Burma’s own recognition of them as citizens, voters, MPs and a minister between 1948 and 1962. After Burma’s 1962 coup and the 1982 Citizenship Law they were stripped of legal recognition, and mass expulsions in 1978, 1991–92 and 2017 drove more than a million people into Bangladesh. Since late 2023, as the Arakan Army took most of Rakhine State, the Rohingya have suffered what they call the second wave of genocide, this time at the hands of the Arakan Army. This page gives 60 dated entries in seven eras. Each has a three-point summary, a fuller account and its sources, so students, journalists and researchers can check and cite every claim. Where figures are disputed, the dispute is stated. This is the summary; the full narrative, chapter by chapter with a complete reference list, is in The Historical Record of the Rohingya.

How to cite this page

Alom, Shofi. “History of the Rohingya: A Timeline.” shofialom.com, updated November 2026, https://www.shofialom.com/rohingya/history/. Primary sources are linked under each entry; please cite those directly for scholarly work.

A note from the author: I am Rohingya and my family lived through the events after 2012. I have written this page from documented sources rather than from memory so that it can be relied on by people who are not. Corrections with sources are welcome through the contact page.

A distinct people

Who the Rohingya are

The Rohingya are a people of their own: not Bengalis, not Chittagonians, not a religious minority of the Rakhine, but an ethnic nation of Arakan with its own name, language, alphabet, history and homeland. Six marks of that identity are set out below, each with its evidence.

A name taken from the land. “Rohingya” comes from Rohang, the Rohingya name for Arakan itself. “Rooinga, or natives of Arakan” is how the people described themselves to Francis Buchanan in 1799, before British rule (Buchanan, 1799).
A language of their own. Rohingya is a distinct Indo-Aryan language with its own ISO 639-3 code, rhg, recognized separately from Bengali and Chittagonian; Buchanan listed its vocabulary as one of the languages of the Burma Empire in 1799 (ISO 639-3; Ethnologue).
An alphabet of their own. Hanifi Rohingya, created in the 1980s by Mohammad Hanif and encoded in Unicode 11.0 in 2018, is written by no other people on earth (Unicode 11.0).
A place in the Kingdom of Arakan. Muslims served the Mrauk U court as ministers and officials, its kings struck coins bearing the Islamic profession of faith and used Muslim titles, the Bengali poet Alaol wrote under Muslim patrons there, and the Santikan mosque in Mrauk U is dated by tradition to the reign of Min Saw Mon (Human Rights Watch; British Library documents).
Recognition by Burma itself. Independent Burma registered Rohingya as citizens, seated Rohingya MPs from 1947, appointed Sultan Mahmud Minister of Health, created the Mayu Frontier District in 1961 and broadcast in Rohingya on state radio from 1961 to 1965 (New Mandala).
Recognition by the world. The United Nations, the UN Fact-Finding Mission, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court and the United States all treat the Rohingya as a distinct ethnic group of Myanmar protected under the Genocide Convention (UN Fact-Finding Mission; ICJ, The Gambia v. Myanmar).

Indigenous to Arakan

Native to the land, and the denial of it

The Rohingya are native to Arakan. The evidence is in the record: a Muslim community at the Mrauk U court from the 15th century, attested by Portuguese and Dutch eyewitnesses and by the poet Alaol (British Library documents); Francis Buchanan’s 1799 report that Muslims “long settled in Arakan” called themselves “Rooinga, or natives of Arakan” (Burma Library); and independent Burma’s own practice, which registered Rohingya as citizens, seated Rohingya MPs from 1947, appointed Sultan Mahmud Minister of Health, created the Mayu Frontier District in 1961 and broadcast a Rohingya-language programme on state radio (New Mandala; Human Rights Watch). Rohingya historians (Ba Tha, Mohammed Yunus) and writers such as Azeem Ibrahim trace the community further back, to Arab traders of the 8th century and Muslim settlement from the 12th (Britannica).

The claim that the Rohingya are foreigners is a political invention, not a historical finding. It took hold after the 1962 coup, when the military began dissolving Rohingya institutions, and it was written into law in 1982 to strip citizenship from a people the Union of Burma had already recognized. The writers who are cited against the Rohingya (Jacques Leider, Derek Tonkin) argue only about how often the name appears in British paperwork of 1826–1948; the British themselves counted a long-settled Muslim population in every census, Buchanan recorded the name “Rooinga” in 1799, before any British rule, and even Tonkin concedes that Rakhine’s Muslims have the right to call themselves Rohingya (Tonkin). Colonial-era movement between Chittagong and Arakan was movement inside one country, British India, and does not make a people who were already there into migrants. The “Bengali” label is rejected by the United Nations, by the UN Fact-Finding Mission and by every court that has examined it; the ICJ, the ICC and the United States all treat the Rohingya as a protected ethnic group native to Rakhine State.

Detailed Timeline · 60 entries · 7 eras

Era 1 of 7

Kingdom of Arakan

8th century – 1784: Rohingya at the heart of Mrauk U

8th–13th century

Islam reaches the Arakan coast

In brief

Arakanese chronicle tradition records Muslim sailors shipwrecked on Ramree Island and settled under King Maha Taing Chandra around 788.
Human Rights Watch dates the first Arab Muslim traders on the Arakan coast to the 8th century.
Rohingya identity grew on this coast for centuries before any Burmese or British power ruled it.

What happened

Rohingya historians and the Arakanese chronicle tradition both place the first Muslims in Arakan in the reign of Maha Taing Chandra (788–810), when ships wrecked on Ramree Island and the survivors settled; Banglapedia notes that Muslim families in southern Arakan still trace their descent to that settlement. Human Rights Watch’s 2000 historical background dates Arab Muslim traders on the coast to the 8th century and further arrivals from Bengal to the 12th and 13th centuries. The Rohingya name for their homeland, Rohang, is the root of the word Rohingya. By the time written court records begin at Mrauk U in the 15th century, the Muslim community was already established.

Human Rights Watch 2000, historical background · ARNO, Rohingya History · Banglapedia, Arakan

1430

Mrauk U founded with Bengal’s help

In brief

Exiled king Min Saw Mon (Narameikhla) regained Arakan’s throne in 1430 with an army from the Bengal Sultanate.
He founded Mrauk U; historian Michael Charney notes the new court’s first religious building was a mosque.
The court relied on a Muslim army, its kings took Muslim titles and their coins carried the Islamic profession of faith.

What happened

After about 24 years of exile in the Bengal Sultanate, Min Saw Mon returned in 1430 with Bengali military help, regained his throne and founded Mrauk U, the capital of Arakan for the next 354 years. Michael Charney of SOAS writes that the new Mrauk U court ‘relied upon a Muslim army to protect it and its first religious building was mosque’, that its kings ‘began using Muslim as well as Buddhist titles and issued coins with the Kalima’, and that Muslim Bengali-speakers were settling in Arakan at the same time as Burmese-speaking Buddhists from the Irrawaddy valley. Even Aye Chan, a hostile historian, accepts that the earliest Muslim settlers were the king’s Bengali retinue who settled near Mrauk U. Charney concludes that the Rohingya ‘are just as indigenous’ to Arakan as the Rakhine, and that a historian who says otherwise commits ‘professional malpractice’.

Charney (SOAS) 2019 lecture · Aye Chan, Suvannabhumi 2012 · Smithsonian Magazine, Mrauk U

c. 1433

The Santikan mosque and a king called Suleiman Shah

In brief

Min Saw Mon’s Muslim soldiers built the Santikan (Sandi Khan) mosque near Mrauk U about 1433; it still stands.
The chronicles give Min Saw Mon the Muslim title Suleiman Shah; his successor Min Khayi reigned as Ali Khan.
Kings of Mrauk U used Muslim titles into the 1630s; their silver coins read ‘There is no God but Allah’.

What happened

The Muslim soldiers who restored Min Saw Mon settled near the capital and built the Santikan mosque, dated by the Arakanese New Chronicle to 1433 and described by Moshe Yegar as still standing. Min Saw Mon is recorded with the title Suleiman Shah, and the chronicle lists nine successors who received Muslim titles from the Sultan of Bengal, including Ali Khan (Min Khayi, 1434–59), Kalima Shah (Ba Saw Phyu, 1459–82) and Ilias Shah (Min Raza); later kings such as Min Bin (Zabauk Shah) and Thiri Thudhamma (Salim Shah II) kept the practice into the 1630s. Coins catalogued by the Oriental Numismatic Society carry the kalima, ‘There is no God but Allah, Muhammad the Messenger of Allah’, on one face and the king’s Muslim title on the other; Persian-only legends run from about 1430 to 1530, followed by trilingual Arakanese, Persian and Bengali coins to 1622. The Rohingya flag’s central device is taken from one of these 16th-century coins. Rohingya organisations cite Col. Ba Shin, former chairman of the Burma Historical Commission, for the statement that Arakan was ‘virtually ruled by Muslims from 1430 to 1531’.

ARNO, Muslim influence in the kingdom of Arakan · Yegar, The Crescent in Arakan (ARNO) · Oriental Numismatic Society Newsletter 81 · Aye Chan, Suvannabhumi 2012

1622–1660s

Daulat Qazi, Alaol and the eyewitnesses

In brief

Daulat Qazi became court poet to King Thiri Thudhamma (1622–38) at the request of war minister Ashraf Khan.
Alaol, patronised by chief minister Magan Thakur, wrote Padmavati at Mrauk U and died there about 1680.
Portuguese friar Manrique (1629–c.1635) and Dutch surgeon Schouten (1660–61) described Muslims at court and across the kingdom.

What happened

Banglapedia records Daulat Qazi (c.1600–1638) as court poet of King Sri Sudharma (Thiri Thudhamma), commissioned by Ashraf Khan, the war minister known as ‘Uzir Laskar’, to write Satimayna O Lorchandrani; he died before finishing it. Alaol (1607–1680), captured by Portuguese pirates and brought to Arakan, completed that poem in 1659 and wrote Padmavati (dated 1648 or 1652) under the patronage of Magan Thakur, the Muslim chief minister who had been guardian of the queen; his later patrons included ministers Sayed Musa, Sulayman, Muhammad Khan and Majlis Nabaraj, at whose court he died. Fray Sebastião Manrique, in Arakan from 1629 for close to six years, wrote of Muslims holding key positions at court, including the king’s influential preceptor who had made the Hajj twice, and of Muslims brought from Bengal as captives; Wouter Schouten’s 1676 travel account and drawings record Muslims in Arakan in 1660–61. A people whose poets, ministers and generals served the Arakan court for two centuries are not newcomers to it.

Banglapedia, Alaol · Banglapedia, Arakan · Banglapedia, Quraishi Magan Thakur · Ek Khaale (British Library documents)

Era 2 of 7

Conquest and British rule

1784–1942: conquered, counted, then turned against their neighbours

1784–1785

Burmese conquest ends the Kingdom of Arakan

In brief

Burma’s King Bodawpaya invaded Arakan in 1784, captured its king and carried off the Mahamuni Buddha image.
He deported more than 20,000 people into Burma as slaves to pagodas, temples and the court at Amarapura.
Refugees, Buddhist and Muslim, poured into Chittagong; Captain Hiram Cox resettled them at the town later named Cox’s Bazar.

What happened

Mrauk U fell to Bodawpaya’s Konbaung army on the last day of 1784, ending 354 years of independent Arakanese rule. Britannica records that Bodawpaya ‘deported more than 20,000 people into Myanmar as slaves’ and that his rule in Arakan was so oppressive that revolt followed in 1794 and ‘large numbers of refugees crossed into British territory’; Aye Chan counts about 35,000 fleeing to Chittagong by 1799. Human Rights Watch notes that Cox’s Bazar takes its name from the British officer sent to organise relief for these Arakanese refugees. With the conquest, the Irish Centre for Human Rights writes, ‘the Muslim influence on the administration of the region was significantly reduced’. The Rohingya, like the Rakhine, were a conquered people of Arakan long before Burma’s modern state claimed them as foreigners.

Human Rights Watch 2000, historical background · Britannica, Bodawpaya · Britannica, Cox’s Bazar

1799

‘Rooinga, or natives of Arakan’: the name in print

In brief

In 1799 Francis Buchanan published that Arakan’s Muslims ‘call themselves Rooinga, or natives of Arakan’.
He also recorded that they ‘call the country Rovingaw’, the Rohingya name for their homeland.
The record predates British rule in Arakan by 27 years; a people already there cannot have arrived with the British.

What happened

Francis Buchanan, surgeon to the 1795 British embassy to Ava, published ‘A Comparative Vocabulary of Some of the Languages Spoken in the Burma Empire’ in Asiatick Researches vol. 5 (1799). He wrote: ‘The first is that spoken by the Mohammedans, who have long settled in Arakan, and who call themselves Rooinga, or natives of Arakan’, and elsewhere: ‘The Mahommedans settled at Arakan, call the country Rovingaw.’ His word list (sun bel, moon sawn, water pannae, man manush) is recognisably the Rohingya language spoken today. The text, reprinted by Michael Charney in the SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research in 2003, records a settled Muslim people of Arakan using their own name for themselves and their country a generation before the Treaty of Yandabo. The claim that the Rohingya are ‘Bengali’ migrants of the colonial period cannot be reconciled with it; even Derek Tonkin, a critic, calls it a documented pre-1948 reference and concedes the Rohingya ‘belong there’.

Buchanan 1799, SOAS reprint (PDF) · Online Burma/Myanmar Library, Buchanan record · Ek Khaale (British Library documents)

24 February 1826

Treaty of Yandabo makes Arakan British

In brief

The Treaty of Yandabo (24 February 1826) ended the First Anglo-Burmese War and ceded Arakan to British India.
For 122 years Arakan and Chittagong lay inside one British territory, so movement between them was internal.
Myanmar now recasts that internal movement as ‘illegal immigration’, a label applied generations after the fact.

What happened

Burma ceded Arakan and Tenasserim and paid an indemnity of one million pounds sterling under the Treaty of Yandabo. Arakan was governed as part of British India until Burma’s separation in 1937 and independence in 1948, and the Rohingya who had fled Bodawpaya’s rule returned to their land as British subjects. Seasonal and permanent labour movement between Chittagong and Akyab in the colonial rice boom was movement within one administration, not migration into a foreign state. Human Rights Watch notes that the 1982 Citizenship Law later set 1823, the year before the war, as the cut-off for ‘national race’ ancestry, so that every Rohingya had to prove descent from before British rule to be counted as a native.

Britannica, Treaty of Yandabo · Human Rights Watch 2000, historical background · Tonkin, TOAEP Occasional Paper 10 (2019)

1826–1931

Paton counts ‘three-tenths Musselmans’; censuses record ‘Arakan Mahomedans’

In brief

Weeks after the conquest, sub-commissioner Charles Paton reported Arakan’s 100,000 people as six-tenths Mugs and three-tenths Musselmans.
The 1872 census called Muslims ‘indigenous only in Arakan’; the 1911 census spoke of ‘indigenous Mahomedans’ there.
Censuses from 1891 to 1931 kept a separate ‘Arakan Mahomedan’ category, 51,615 strong in 1931, apart from ‘Chittagonians’.

What happened

Charles Paton’s 1826 ‘Short Report on Arakan’ gave the population as ‘Mugs six-tenths, Musselmans three-tenths, Burmese one-tenth: Total 100,000 souls’, about 30,000 Muslims at the very start of British rule and before any colonial labour migration. The 1872 Census of British Burma said Muslims ‘are indigenous only in Arakan, where two-thirds of the total number for the province reside’, counting 58,255 Arakanese Muslims; the 1911 census described ‘indigenous Mahomedans, scarcely differentiated from the neighbouring Arakanese’. From 1891 the census tabulated ‘Arakan Mahomedans’ (Yakhaing-kala) separately from Chittagonian and Bengali migrants: 466 in 1891, 23,775 in 1921 and 51,615 in 1931, alongside 252,152 ‘Chittagonians’. Enumerators were told to record as Arakan Mahomedan only Muslims ‘domiciled in Burma’ with a dress ‘neither Arakanese nor Indian’, and the Rohingya Language Foundation argues the true native figure was at least 300,000. Michael Charney’s conclusion is that ‘the Rohingya not being recorded in the British colonial censuses’ was ‘a political choice by a state, not by the Rohingya’.

Tonkin, TOAEP Occasional Paper 10 (2019) · Rohingya Language Foundation on Paton 1826 · Tonkin, British experience in Arakan 1826-1948 · Charney (SOAS) 2019 lecture

March 1942

The 1942 massacres divide Arakan

In brief

When British rule collapsed in March–April 1942, Rakhine militias and the Burma Independence Army attacked Muslim villages across central Arakan.
Rohingya historian A.F.K. Jilani records 307 villages destroyed, more than 100,000 Muslims killed and 80,000 driven into Bengal camps.
Leider, citing a 1944 British report, puts the dead at about 15,000; Muslims fled north and Buddhists south, partitioning Arakan.

What happened

As the British withdrew before the Japanese advance, armed Rakhine groups and the Burma Independence Army attacked Muslim villages in Minbya (Chanbili, late March), Myebon, Pauktaw, Kyauktaw and Mrauk U; Muslims retaliated against Buddhist villages in Maungdaw and Buthidaung. The Rohingya historian A.F.K. Jilani records 307 villages destroyed, over 100,000 killed and 80,000 refugees in the Chittagong and Rangpur camps; Mohammed Ashraf Alam counts 294 villages. Jacques Leider, who disputes Jilani’s totals, cites a 1944 British report of about 15,000 Muslim dead and a 1947 Maungdaw petition giving 40,000, and agrees that ‘ethnic cleansing’ is the right modern term; Rakhine sources count more than 20,000 of their own dead. Arakan emerged from the war divided into a Muslim north and a Buddhist south, and the 1942 refugees who had fled to India were later refused the right to return and lost their land, a grievance that fed the Mujahid movement after independence.

Jilani, The Muslim massacre of 1942 (ARNO) · Leider, TOAEP Policy Brief 101 · Human Rights Watch 2000, historical background

Era 3 of 7

Independence and recognition

1947–1961: citizens, MPs, a minister and a radio programme

7 March 1947

Jamiat-ul-Ulama (founded 1932) demands a Rohingya homeland

In brief

Jamiat-ul-Ulama of North Arakan, the first Rohingya political organisation, was founded in 1932 under Moulana Abdus Subhan Mazaheri.
On 7 March 1947 its delegation asked the Ross William Commission for a Rohingya state between the Kaladan and Naf rivers.
Rohingya were not invited to Panglong in February 1947; a request to join Pakistan was turned down by Jinnah.

What happened

Rohingya historian Aman Ullah dates the founding of Jamiat-ul-Ulama to 1932, with Moulana Abdus Subhan Mazaheri as leader, and its student wing, Jamiate Khuddamul Islam, to 1937. After the 1942 massacres its leaders organised peace committees and the return of refugees from the Rangpur camps. The Panglong conference of 12 February 1947 was held without the Rohingya; a two-member Jamiat delegation arrived after it ended. On 7 March 1947 a delegation led by Barrister Maulana Sana Ullah presented a memorandum to the Ross William Commission at Maymyo seeking a Rohingya state between the Kaladan and Naf rivers, and in 1946–47 leaders also sounded out Muhammad Ali Jinnah about joining Pakistan, which he declined. Jamiat’s president Sultan Ahmad and Abdul Ghaffar were elected to the Legislative Council, and its members won seats in both houses after independence.

Aman Ullah, Jamiatul Ulama (2016) · ARNO, The Traditional Demand of the Rohingya · Leider, TOAEP Policy Brief 123 · Nay San Lwin, New Mandala 2012

4 January 1948

Independence: Rohingya are citizens of the Union

In brief

Burma became independent on 4 January 1948; the 1947 Constitution and 1948 Union Citizenship Act made Rohingya citizens.
From 1949 Rohingya received National Registration Cards like every other citizen, voted and stood for parliament.
A Mujahid movement demanding citizenship, return of the 1942 refugees and local autonomy fought from 1948 to 1961.

What happened

Under Article 11 of the 1947 Constitution and the Union Citizenship Act of 1948, people settled in Burma for two generations were citizens, and the Rohingya of Arakan registered, voted and were issued National Registration Cards under the 1949 Residents of Burma Registration Act; one refugee told Ek Khaale, ‘My parents were issued National Registration Cards in 1957.’ Human Rights Watch records that Rohingya held the same cards as other citizens for more than two decades. At the same time the new AFPFL government dismissed Muslim officers, restricted movement between northern Arakan and Akyab, and refused to let the 1942 refugees return to their confiscated land. Mohammad Jafar (‘Jafar Kawal’) organised the Mujahid movement, whose demands, listed in a June 1948 letter, were citizenship for all Arakan Muslims, a Muslim homeland north of the Kaladan, return of the refugees and amnesty; ARNO stresses that it ‘never demanded separatism’ and ended its struggle in 1961 in return for the concessions below.

Hung, New Mandala 2021 · Human Rights Watch 1996 · Ek Khaale, chapter 5 (NRCs) · Aman Ullah, Resistance Movement 1948-61

25 September 1954

U Nu: ‘Rohingya nationals’ recognised by the prime minister

In brief

In a radio address on 25 September 1954, Prime Minister U Nu called the people of Buthidaung and Maungdaw ‘Rohingya nationals’.
Zura Begum was elected to parliament in 1951; Sultan Mahmud, MP for Buthidaung, became Minister of Health on 18 June 1958.
Rohingya members sat in every parliament of the democratic era from 1947 to 1962.

What happened

U Nu’s broadcast of 25 September 1954 declared: ‘The nationals of the Union living in these two townships are Rohingya nationals and they are Muslims.’ In February 1950 he had travelled to Maungdaw with his minorities minister to discuss the Mujahid demands, and in 1959 he and defence minister U Ba Swe again promised the people of Buthidaung and Maungdaw recognition as an indigenous community with equal rights. Zura Begum (Daw Aye Nyunt), wife of MP Sultan Ahmed, was among the first women elected to Burma’s parliament in 1951; Sultan Mahmud won the Buthidaung by-election of 1957 and joined the cabinet as Minister of Health on 18 June 1958, the first Rohingya minister. Burma’s first president, Sao Shwe Thaik, is quoted by Rohingya organisations as saying ‘Muslims of Arakan certainly belong to one of the indigenous races of Burma.’ Recognition was not a favour: it was the state acknowledging a people already there.

Ek Khaale (British Library documents) · Nay San Lwin, New Mandala 2012 · Aman Ullah, Resistance Movement 1948-61

1 May 1961

Mayu Frontier, Aung Gyi’s speeches and Rohingya on state radio

In brief

On 1 May 1961 the Mayu Frontier Administration placed Maungdaw, Buthidaung and western Rathedaung under direct rule from Rangoon.
At the Mujahid surrenders of 4 and 8 July 1961, Brigadier General Aung Gyi named the people of Mayu ‘Rohingya’, an ethnic minority of the Union.
Burma Broadcasting Service aired a Rohingya programme from 15 May 1961; the 1964 Myanma Encyclopedia put Mayu’s population at 75% Rohingya.

What happened

The Mayu Frontier Administration, proposed by Health Minister Sultan Mahmud as a safeguard for the Rohingya, took the three northern townships out of Rakhine-run Akyab district on 1 May 1961 and ran them from the capital. At the surrender of 290 Mujahids in southern Maungdaw on 4 July 1961, and again on 8 July, Vice-Chief of Staff Aung Gyi said: ‘We consider the people of Mayu District an ethnic minority integral to the Union of Burma’ and ‘We named these people living in this district as Rohingyas’, distinguishing them from ‘Pakistani’ people west of the border. The army’s own journal Tatmadaw Khit Yay wrote on 18 July 1961 that the majority in the three townships ‘are ethnic Rohingya’; the Frontier Areas Administration said the same on 20 November 1961. The Burma Broadcasting Service carried a Rohingya-language programme three times a week from 15 May 1961 to 30 October 1965, and volume 9 of the state-published Myanma Encyclopedia (1964) recorded that about 75% of the Mayu Frontier’s roughly 500,000 people ‘are the Rohingya ethnic people’. Burma’s government, army and encyclopedia had all named the Rohingya before the 1962 coup.

Nay San Lwin, New Mandala 2012 · Free Rohingya Coalition on Aung Gyi 1961 · U Ne Oo on Aung Gyi’s 1961 speech · Leider, TOAEP Policy Brief 123

Era 4 of 7

Statelessness

1962–2011: a native people written out of their own country

2 March 1962 – 1974

Ne Win’s coup dismantles recognition

In brief

General Ne Win seized power on 2 March 1962 and banned Rohingya organisations.
The Mayu Frontier Administration was abolished on 1 February 1964; the Rohingya radio programme ended on 30 October 1965.
The 1974 Emergency Immigration Act began the confiscation of Rohingya National Registration Cards, replaced by Foreign Registration Cards.

What happened

The Revolutionary Council dissolved Rohingya social and political bodies, abolished the Mayu Frontier Administration on 1 February 1964 and merged the area into Akyab district under the Home Ministry, and cancelled the Rohingya broadcasts in 1965. The 1974 Constitution created Arakan State without mention of the Rohingya, and the 1974 Emergency Immigration Act limited the rights of people treated as ‘foreigners’; immigration officers began stamping and confiscating Rohingya National Registration Cards and offering Foreign Registration Cards instead, the first administrative step toward calling a native people ‘Bengali’. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum timeline dates the start of card confiscation to 1974. A 1974 petition from the Mayu townships for a separate administrative zone was rejected. What a democratic government had recognised, a military one began to erase.

Nay San Lwin, New Mandala 2012 · Human Rights Watch 1996 · US Holocaust Memorial Museum timeline · US INS Resource Information Center 1999

1977–1979

Operation Nagamin drives 200,000 into Bangladesh

In brief

Operation Nagamin (‘Dragon King’), announced 16 November 1977 to ‘screen out foreigners’, became army terror in Arakan: arrests, rape, murder, arson.
By May 1978 more than 200,000 Rohingya had fled into Bangladesh.
About 10,000 died in the Bangladesh camps (MSF); most survivors were sent back under a July 1978 agreement.

What happened

Nagamin was announced as a nationwide check of citizens and foreigners before a census, but Human Rights Watch records that in Arakan ‘it degenerated into abusive attacks on Rohingyas by both the army and local Rakhines’, with forced eviction, rape and murder, and that ‘by May 1978, over 200,000 Rohingyas had fled to Bangladesh’. Amnesty International adds the destruction of mosques. MSF-Holland, which worked in the camps, estimated about 10,000 deaths there, many from hunger and disease during the repatriation that followed the agreement of 31 July 1978; roughly 180,000 were returned by 1979. Rohingya historian Aman Ullah describes the 1982 Citizenship Law as Ne Win’s ‘Plan B’ after the expulsion failed to remove the Rohingya for good.

Human Rights Watch 2000, historical background · Amnesty International 2004 · MSF-Holland 2002

8 October 1982

Ne Win: ‘only pure-blooded nationals will be called citizens’

In brief

On 8 October 1982 Ne Win told the nation: ‘Racially, only pure-blooded nationals will be called citizens.’
The speech introduced a law that would re-sort Burma’s people into full, associate and naturalised citizens.
Rohingya historian Aman Ullah describes the law as Ne Win’s ‘Plan B’ after Nagamin failed to expel the Rohingya.

What happened

Introducing the new citizenship bill to the Council of State, Ne Win said that ‘racially, only pure-blooded nationals will be called citizens’ and that ‘we cannot look on with folded arms’ at grants of citizenship to those who arrived after independence, while claiming ‘there will be only one type of citizen’ and asking officials not to treat long-settled people ‘arrogantly, saying they came from abroad or they are guests’. The translation was printed in the Working People’s Daily of 9 October 1982. Aman Ullah points out that the Rohingya were citizens by birth under Article 11 of the 1947 Constitution, so the speech’s reliance on the 1948 Act’s election procedure was misplaced. The ‘Bengali’ claim, absent from U Nu’s and Aung Gyi’s Burma, was being prepared as state doctrine.

U Ne Oo, Ne Win’s 1982 speech · Aman Ullah, Ne Win and the 1982 law · Southwick, Tilburg Law Review 2014

15 October 1982

The Citizenship Law makes a native people stateless

In brief

The 1982 Citizenship Law, promulgated 15 October, tied full citizenship to ‘national races’ settled before 1823.
The ‘Bengali’ claim became law: Rohingya, citizens since 1948, were reclassified as foreigners by the state that had recognised them.
The ‘135 national races’ figure first appeared in August 1991; UNHCR counts 1.8 million stateless Rohingya today.

What happened

The law created three tiers: full citizens (members of a ‘national race’ or descendants of residents before 1823), associate citizens (applicants under the 1948 Act) and naturalised citizens (conclusive evidence of residence before 4 January 1948 plus fluency in a national language). Human Rights Watch judged in 1996 that ‘both the timing and content of the 1982 law indicate that it was deliberately targeted at the Rohingyas’. Bertil Lintner traces the number ‘135 national races’ to an unsigned army officer’s article of 7 August 1991 and the first published list to about 2014; Nick Cheesman observes that under this system ‘national races trump citizenship’. Fortify Rights counted all but about 40,000 of at least 1.33 million Rohingya in Myanmar as stateless in 2014, and UNHCR’s Global Trends report records 1.8 million stateless Rohingya at the end of 2025, 41% of the world’s reported stateless people. The UN Fact-Finding Mission concluded that their statelessness ‘cannot be resolved through the 1982 Citizenship Law’.

Human Rights Watch 2000, ch. III · Human Rights Watch 1996 · Lintner, Golden Land Ablaze (excerpt) · UNHCR Global Trends 2025

May 1990

Rohingya vote; the result is never honoured

In brief

After the 1988 uprising, the SLORC junta let Rohingya vote in the May 1990 general election.
Rohingya-based parties won about 80% of the vote in their constituencies, Human Rights Watch recorded.
The junta never convened the parliament and later banned the Rohingya party.

What happened

Rohingya candidates stood and won in Buthidaung and Maungdaw in May 1990, with Rohingya-based parties taking around 80% of votes in their constituencies, according to Human Rights Watch’s 1996 report. The State Law and Order Restoration Council refused to seat the elected parliament nationwide and later banned the National Democratic Party for Human Rights. Within a year the army was pouring troops into northern Arakan, and Human Rights Watch concluded that the regime ‘needed a scapegoat, a distraction and common enemy to unite a disillusioned and angry populace. They chose the Rohingyas.’

Human Rights Watch 1996 · Human Rights Watch 2000, historical background

1991–1997

Second exodus: forced labour, rape and the creation of NaSaKa

In brief

Forced labour, rape and summary executions by the army drove more than 250,000 Rohingya into Bangladesh between 1991 and March 1992.
The SLORC claimed only 4,000 had left while Bangladesh counted over 250,000; it created the NaSaKa border force in 1992.
UNHCR-supervised returns of some 230,000 followed between 1993 and 1997, about 50,000 of them forced.

What happened

From early 1991 refugees reported a dramatic army build-up in northern Arakan; by March 1992 more than 270,000 were in camps along the Cox’s Bazar–Teknaf road, telling of summary execution, rape and torture, mostly while being forced to porter, build barracks, roads and bridges, dig prawn ponds and cut bamboo. In February 1992 the junta said 4,000 people had left, when Bangladesh and aid workers were counting over 250,000. The NaSaKa border force, created in 1992 from police, military intelligence, riot police, customs and immigration, became in the Irish Centre for Human Rights’ words ‘the primary perpetrator of crimes against the Rohingyas’; villagers were made to build its barracks and then guard them at night. Under a UNHCR programme about 230,000 returned by 1997, some 50,000 of them forcibly, while 20,000–30,000 registered refugees stayed at Kutupalong and Nayapara.

Human Rights Watch 1996 · Human Rights Watch 2000, historical background · Amnesty International 2004

31 January 1993 – 1 May 2005

Permission to marry: one to three years

In brief

NaSaKa letter 56/U4 of 31 January 1993 ordered Rohingya in northern Arakan to obtain state permission before marrying.
Regional Order 1/2005 (1 May 2005) added a pledge to ‘limit the number of children’, a strict two-child rule in practice.
Couples waited six months to three years and paid 30,000–450,000 kyat; men married without permission were jailed under Penal Code s.493.

What happened

Until the 1990s Rohingya married by nikah with no state involvement; the Irish Centre for Human Rights found the 1993 order ‘was not backed up by any statutory act’ and ‘only been implemented with respect to the Muslims in North Arakan State’. Leaked documents obtained by Fortify Rights show the 1993 and 2005 orders are ‘nearly verbatim copies’, both citing a ‘population explosion’ without data, and that the 2005 order’s section 1(c) applies only to people who marry ‘as per the Islamic religion’. Applicants had to file eight forms, photographs with the man clean-shaven and the woman unveiled, a pledge of monogamy and of no more than two children; NaSaKa officers demanded pregnancy tests, touched women’s stomachs and beat fathers. Amnesty International recorded waits of ‘two to three years’ and fees of 50,000–300,000 kyat; ICHR recorded six months to three years and 30,000–450,000 kyat, three months’ wages at best. Men who married religiously without permission were prosecuted under Penal Code section 493 for ‘four to five years’ on average, many for the maximum ten; children born outside permitted marriages were ‘blacklisted’ off household lists, about 40,000 by the Arakan Project’s count and 60,000 by the Rakhine Inquiry Commission’s, and women resorted to unsafe abortions. The orders were abolished on paper on 13 August 2018, after the people they governed had been driven out.

Fortify Rights, Policies of Persecution 2014 · Amnesty International 2004 · Irish Centre for Human Rights 2010 · UN FFM detailed findings A/HRC/39/CRP.2

July 1995

White cards, forced labour and NaTaLa ‘model villages’

In brief

From July 1995 Rohingya received Temporary Registration Certificates, ‘white cards’, which state they are not proof of citizenship.
NaSaKa forced Rohingya to build its barracks, roads and 26 ‘model villages’ for Buddhist settlers on confiscated Rohingya land.
Arbitrary taxes on rice, chillies, fishing and bamboo, plus bribes at every checkpoint, bled households dry.

What happened

The white card, issued from July 1995, gave Rohingya a document to show at checkpoints while recording on its face that it was no proof of citizenship. UNHCR’s 1995 agreement limited compulsory labour to four days per family per month, but Human Rights Watch found Rohingya working a week to two weeks a month in the dry season as porters, sentries and builders; children as young as seven were seen on labour teams and Rakhine villagers were exempt. Amnesty International counted 26 ‘model villages’ in Maungdaw and Buthidaung, built largely by Rohingya forced labour on land confiscated from Rohingya without compensation and given to Rakhine, Burman, ex-convict and ex-soldier settlers under the NaTaLa border-development ministry; the Irish Centre for Human Rights put the total at over 40 villages and 12,000 acres since 1990. A rice tax of a quarter of the crop was collected even after the 1995 cyclone, a chilli tax was levied on families who grew none, and only Rohingya paid to fish or cut bamboo. Mosque building and repair were forbidden while pagodas rose on the hills.

Amnesty International 2004 · Human Rights Watch 1996 · Human Rights Watch 2000, historical background · Irish Centre for Human Rights 2010

June 1997

Form 4: a pass to leave the village, 45 days to leave the state

In brief

A June 1997 immigration instruction required ‘Bengali races’ across Rakhine State to carry a ‘Form 4’ permit to travel between townships.
Leaving one’s own village needed a Village Departure Certificate (500–1,000 kyat); Form 4 validity fell from 30 days to seven after 2012.
Travel outside Rakhine needed state approval, two guarantors and a 45-day limit; checkpoints in the north rose from 126 to 161 in 2016–17.

What happened

The Rakhine State immigration instruction of June 1997, ‘relating to traveling of foreigners, persons who are doubted as foreigners and Bengali races’, required a temporary travel permit, Form 4, between and within townships, with penalties under Penal Code section 188 and the Residents Registration Act. In the 1990s a pass was normally for a twelve-hour round trip; Rohingya told Human Rights Watch ‘it is much easier to travel to Cox’s Bazaar than to Sittwe’. A Form 4 took days to months, two photographs, letters from the village administrator and two neighbours, surrender of the white-card receipt and payments at each office; a Village Departure Certificate was needed even to visit the next village. Permission to leave Rakhine State required the state government’s approval, two guarantors liable to punishment if the traveller did not return, a 45-day limit and, in one case recorded by Amnesty International, one million kyat per person; the Kaman, who are citizens, were also made to carry Form 4, showing the rule targeted Muslims. UN investigators counted 126 checkpoints in northern Rakhine in October 2016 and 161 by August 2017, where ‘you will not find a single person who did not pay money to the authorities’. Confinement to the village was the daily condition of Rohingya life for a generation before 2017.

Amnesty International, Caged without a roof (2017) · UN FFM detailed findings A/HRC/39/CRP.2 · Fortify Rights, Policies of Persecution 2014 · Human Rights Watch 1996

November 2010 – March 2011

White-card holders vote; the junta hands over

In brief

White-card holders voted in the 2008 constitutional referendum and the November 2010 election.
About 150,000 Muslims voted in Buthidaung, seating Rohingya MP U Shwe Maung for the military-backed USDP.
On 30 March 2011 the junta dissolved itself and Thein Sein became president of a nominally civilian government.

What happened

The military used Rohingya votes when it needed them: white-card holders were enrolled for the 2008 referendum and the 2010 election, and around 150,000 Muslims voted in Buthidaung, mostly for the Union Solidarity and Development Party, which seated U Shwe Maung as a Rohingya member of parliament. On 30 March 2011 the State Peace and Development Council dissolved and former general Thein Sein was sworn in as president. The same white cards would be cancelled in 2015 to take the vote away again.

The New Humanitarian 2015 · VOA, March 2011

Era 5 of 7

Camps and lost rights

2012–2017: burned out, fenced in, struck from the census

28 May – 12 June 2012

How 2012 began: Taungup, Maungdaw and the burning of Narzi

In brief

On 3 June 2012 a crowd of about 300 at Taungup dragged ten Muslim travellers off a bus and beat them to death while police watched.
On 8 June security forces fired on Rohingya protesting in Maungdaw after Friday prayers, killing a 10-year-old boy among others; a curfew followed.
On 12 June Rakhine mobs, with police and Lon Thein shooting at those fighting the fires, burned Sittwe’s Narzi quarter, home to 10,000 Muslims.

What happened

On 28 May 2012 Ma Thida Htwe, a Rakhine Buddhist woman, was murdered at Kyauknimaw, Ramree; photographs of her body circulated with incendiary captions blaming ‘kalars’, and on 1 June the president’s spokesman Zaw Htay posted that troops would ‘completely destroy’ ‘Rohingya terrorists’. On 3 June the Wunthanu Rakkhita Association handed out leaflets at Taungup, and a crowd stopped a bus and beat ten Muslim travellers to death at a government checkpoint while police and soldiers ‘did not intervene’; the UN Fact-Finding Mission found the attack ‘appears to have been pre-planned’, and no one was convicted. On 8 June, as Maungdaw’s Muslims honoured the dead at Friday prayers, stones were thrown from the Myoma monastery, the crowd protested, and security forces opened fire; a Section 144 curfew imposed that day has never been lifted in Maungdaw and Buthidaung, and President Thein Sein declared a state of emergency on 10 June that lasted until 28 March 2016. In Sittwe a Rakhine participant told Human Rights Watch of a meeting that ‘decided to burn down’ Muslim villages; on 12 June Narzi, the city’s largest Muslim quarter, was burned to the ground while Lon Thein riot police shot Rohingya trying to put out the fires, and security forces, the UN found, ‘actively participated in the burning of Muslim houses’ and used fire launchers on those not yet burned. Sittwe’s 73,000 Muslims, half the city, were reduced to about 4,000 confined in the Aung Mingalar ghetto; the Rakhine Inquiry Commission counted 192 dead and 8,614 houses destroyed in 2012, figures the UN believes ‘well below the actual scale’.

Human Rights Watch, August 2012 · Human Rights Watch, All You Can Do Is Pray (2013) · UN FFM detailed findings A/HRC/39/CRP.2 · Radio Free Asia, 8 June 2012

June 2012 onward

Barred from Sittwe University: education shut down

In brief

Even before 2012, ‘non-citizens’ were barred from medicine, dentistry, engineering and law, and from study beyond a bachelor’s degree.
After June 2012 authorities barred Rohingya from Sittwe University, Rakhine’s only university, citing ‘security’; madrasas were closed.
In 2017 only 28 Muslim students were given distance courses in history and Burmese; a partial readmission was reported in May 2022.

What happened

Human Rights Watch recorded in 1996 that ‘university admission guidelines prevent all but full citizens from studying medicine, dentistry and engineering’, and the UN Fact-Finding Mission found Rohingya could not study law, computer science, engineering or medicine, could not go beyond a bachelor’s degree, and were sometimes refused their certificates after three years of study. Since 2012 Muslim students have been stopped from travelling to Sittwe University; a Maungdaw student told Amnesty International, ‘The Immigration Department here told me that I couldn’t go… Since then I have not been able to finish my degree.’ Madrasas in Rakhine State have been closed since June 2012, and the curfew orders banned gatherings of more than five people in mosques and public schools but not monasteries. In 2015 primary teacher-student ratios were 83:1 in Buthidaung and 123:1 in Maungdaw, government teachers rarely attended, and volunteers ran a parallel system; the one high school open to Muslims in central Rakhine served about 3,500 camp pupils, and the Arakan Project found over 60% of Rohingya children aged 5–17 had never attended school. The Kofi Annan commission recommended reversing the ban; the government’s answer was 28 distance-learning places, which the UN called ‘totally inadequate’, and DVB reported a limited readmission to Sittwe University in May 2022.

Human Rights Watch 1996 · Amnesty International 2017 (full report PDF) · Al Jazeera, 4 August 2014 · DVB, 12 May 2022

11–12 July 2012

‘We will send them away’: Thein Sein proposes expulsion

In brief

On 11 July 2012 President Thein Sein told UNHCR chief António Guterres the Rohingya were ‘illegal migrants’ who belonged in camps or a third country.
‘We will send them away if any third country would accept them,’ he said; UNHCR replied it does not ‘participate in creating refugees’.
Monks’ pamphlets of 29 June and 9 July told Rakhine not to trade with ‘Bengalis’; the RNDP called for a ‘final solution’.

What happened

Meeting the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Naypyidaw on 11 July 2012, Thein Sein described people who ‘sneaked into’ Myanmar and ‘later took the name Rohingya’, said he could not take responsibility for them, and proposed UNHCR-run camps or deportation: ‘We will send them away if any third country would accept them. This is what we are thinking is the solution to the issue.’ UNHCR answered, ‘As a refugee agency we do not usually participate in creating refugees.’ In the same weeks the Association of Young Monks in Sittwe ordered Rakhine to ‘not do business with Bengalis’, Mrauk-U monks declared that ‘Bengalis want to destroy the land of Arakan’, and the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party, which held 18 of 45 state seats, called the ‘present Bengali population’ a threat, urged their ‘temporary’ relocation away from Rakhine people and their ‘transfer’ to third countries, and in November 2012 praised Hitler as a model of ‘inhumane acts’ needed to ‘maintain a race’. Home Affairs Minister Ko Ko told parliament on 31 July that regulations on ‘travelling, birth, death, immigration, migration, marriage, construction of new religious buildings’ of ‘Bengalis’ were being tightened. The head of state had told the UN that a native people should be removed from the country.

Human Rights Watch, August 2012 · ReliefWeb, UN rejects Thein Sein’s plan (2012) · Dawn, 13 July 2012 · UN FFM detailed findings A/HRC/39/CRP.2

22–23 October 2012

Coordinated attacks in nine townships; the camps begin

In brief

From 22 October 2012 Rakhine mobs attacked Muslims in nine townships at once; at Yan Thei, Mrauk-U, at least 70 Rohingya died, 28 of them children.
Satellite imagery showed at least 4,862 structures destroyed; Human Rights Watch counted at least 125,000 displaced and OCHA 140,000.
More than 130,000 Rohingya and Kaman remain confined in Sittwe-area camps, which HRW calls ‘an open prison without end’.

What happened

After an all-Arakanese monks’ conference on 18 October and a 2,000-strong Rakhine public meeting in Rathedaung, attacks began on 22 October in Minbya, Myebon, Mrauk-U, Pauktaw, Kyaukpyu, Ramree, Kyauktaw, Rathedaung and Thandwe, ‘often the same time of day’ in townships far apart, which Human Rights Watch took as proof of planning. At Yan Thei on 23 October several thousand Rakhine with swords, spears and petrol bombs killed at least 70 Rohingya, including 28 children hacked to death, after riot police had disarmed the villagers of their sticks. In Kyaukpyu’s Paik Seik ward soldiers fired on Kaman and Rohingya gathered near the mosque, four of five mosques were destroyed and villagers fled on fishing boats; a soldier told one Kaman man, ‘The only thing you can do is pray to save your lives.’ Human Rights Watch concluded the June and October violence ‘amount to crimes against humanity carried out as part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing’, planned by Rakhine political and religious leaders with the security forces’ collusion. The displaced Rakhine went home; the displaced Muslims never did: 131,907 were held in 24 camps in June 2020 and more than 135,000 in 2022, behind barbed wire and checkpoints, where more than 40,000 children have been born and 99.6% of residents reported being barred from leaving their township.

Human Rights Watch, All You Can Do Is Pray (2013) · UN OCHA via ReliefWeb, August 2013 · Human Rights Watch, An Open Prison without End (2020) · Human Rights Watch, Decade of Detention (2022)

30 March 2014 – 31 March 2015

The census erases the name; the vote is taken away

In brief

In the 2014 census enumerators skipped any household that answered ‘Rohingya’ instead of ‘Bengali’; UNFPA protested the decision.
Hundreds of thousands of people were left uncounted in the first census in three decades.
White cards were cancelled on 31 March 2015, so most Rohingya could not vote in November 2015, the first election to exclude them.

What happened

The government had promised UNFPA that ‘each person would be able to declare what ethnicity they belong to’, then announced days before enumeration that ‘Rohingya’ would not be accepted; UNFPA said it was ‘deeply concerned’ and warned the decision could ‘heighten tensions’. The Immigration Ministry insisted people must be listed as in ‘previous censuses’, meaning ‘Bengali’, and enumerators passed over households that refused. In June 2016 the Ministry of Information went further and banned officials from using either word, and in December 2016 the Ministry of Religious Affairs announced a ‘true history’ in which the word Rohingya ‘was never used’. On 11 February 2015, after Buddhist nationalist protests, President Thein Sein ordered white cards to expire on 31 March 2015; their 500,000 to one million holders, overwhelmingly Rohingya, lost the vote, and no Muslim was elected from Rakhine in November 2015. From 2014 the state began issuing National Verification Cards that required Rohingya to register as ‘Bengali’; Fortify Rights found 99.8% of refugees surveyed had been pressured to accept them, some at gunpoint.

Al Jazeera, 14 April 2014 · UNFPA Myanmar statement, 1 April 2014 · The Diplomat, March 2015 · Amnesty International, Caged without a roof (2017)

May 2015

Andaman Sea crisis and the traffickers’ mass graves

In brief

Thai police uncovered more than 200 graves at jungle trafficking camps near the Malaysian border in May 2015.
Traffickers abandoned at least 5,000 Rohingya and Bangladeshis at sea on at least eight boats; about 70 died.
UNHCR estimated 94,000 people had left Bangladesh and Myanmar by boat since 2014 and more than 1,100 had died at sea.

What happened

Confined, stateless and barred from work and study, tens of thousands of Rohingya paid smugglers to reach Malaysia. When Thailand cracked down on trafficking camps in May 2015, crews abandoned their passengers at sea; UNHCR’s regional office counted at least 5,000 people adrift on at least eight vessels and around 70 deaths, while mass graves were found at camps in southern Thailand and at Wang Kelian in Malaysia. UNHCR’s 2015 estimate was that 94,000 people had left by boat since the start of 2014 and more than 1,100 had died. The sea route has since killed thousands more: about 5,000 Rohingya are believed to have drowned over the past decade.

UNHCR, Mixed Maritime Movements 2015 · Council on Foreign Relations backgrounder

September 2016 – 24 August 2017

The Kofi Annan commission

In brief

In September 2016 Aung San Suu Kyi appointed an Advisory Commission on Rakhine State chaired by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
Its March 2017 interim report urged the government to reverse policies barring Muslim students from higher education.
Its final report came on 24 August 2017; the military’s long-prepared ‘clearance operations’ began the next day.

What happened

The Advisory Commission on Rakhine State, set up by the State Counsellor’s office in September 2016 with Kofi Annan as chair, was the civilian government’s main answer to international pressure. Its interim report of March 2017 recommended that the government ‘reverse discriminatory policies that bar Muslim students from higher education’; the response was 28 distance-learning places. The final report of 24 August 2017 was delivered less than a day before the attacks of 25 August and the army’s response. The UN Fact-Finding Mission later found that ‘a large build-up of troops and other military assets across northern Rakhine began in early August 2017’, with the 33rd and 99th Light Infantry Divisions airlifted in and local Rakhine men armed, so that the operations ‘were foreseeable and planned’ whatever the commission reported.

Council on Foreign Relations backgrounder · Amnesty International 2017 (full report PDF) · UN Fact-Finding Mission report A/HRC/39/64

Era 6 of 7

Genocide

2016–2023: clearance operations and the road to the World Court

9 October 2016 – February 2017

First ‘clearance operations’ in the north

In brief

On 9 October 2016 Harakah al-Yaqin (later ARSA) attacked three border police posts, killing nine officers.
The army sealed off northern Rakhine: suspects shot on sight, at least 1,500 buildings burned, women and girls raped; 66,000–87,000 fled.
A UN mission that interviewed 204 refugees found ‘the very likely commission of crimes against humanity’.

What happened

The International Crisis Group reported that the group, formed after 2012 and led by Ata Ullah, had until then ‘patrolled villages with bamboo sticks’, had ‘not attacked civilians or religious targets’, and that its ‘stated aim is to secure the rights of the Rohingya as citizens within Burma’; ICG stressed the Rohingya ‘have never been a radicalized population’. The army’s response was collective: satellite imagery showed at least 1,500 buildings burned, about 30,000 newly displaced within weeks and, by February 2017, 66,000 to 87,000 refugees in Bangladesh. OHCHR’s flash report of 3 February 2017, based on 204 interviews, documented killings including of children, mass burnings and rape of more than half the 101 women and girls interviewed, and concluded that crimes against humanity were ‘very likely’. Travel permits for Rohingya were suspended again and curfew hours extended; the state answered an attack on police posts with punishment of a whole people.

Frontier Myanmar on the ICG report, December 2016 · OHCHR Flash Report, 3 February 2017 · International Crisis Group, 15 December 2016

29 March 2017 – 9 September 2017

ARSA in its own words: ‘to defend, salvage and protect’

In brief

ARSA’s first statement, 29 March 2017, said it ‘came forward to defend, salvage and protect’ Rohingya and disavowed terrorism against any civilian.
On 9 September 2017 it declared a one-month unilateral ceasefire to let aid in; the government said it does not ‘negotiate with terrorists’.
The UN Fact-Finding Mission found the military’s response ‘immediate, brutal and grossly disproportionate’ and planned in advance.

What happened

In its first public statement ARSA asserted ‘the legitimate right under international law to defend ourselves in line with the principle of self-defence’, said it ‘does not associate with any terrorist group in the world’ and ‘do[es] not commit any form of terrorism against any civilian regardless of their religious and ethnic origin’, and listed 20 demands for the rights of people who identify as Rohingya; in January 2018 it said it had ‘no other option but to combat Burmese state-sponsored terrorism’. The UN Fact-Finding Mission described its 25 August 2017 attackers as ‘a small number of minimally-trained leaders’ with some arms and ‘a significant number of untrained villagers wielding sticks and knives’, who killed twelve security personnel; the army’s answer within hours was ‘grossly disproportionate’, ‘foreseeable and planned’, and Commander-in-Chief Min Aung Hlaing called the ‘Bengali problem’ an ‘unfinished job’. The Mission also recorded ARSA abuses, including the killing of dozens of suspected informants, and Amnesty International documented ARSA fighters killing up to 99 Hindu villagers at Kha Maung Seik on 25–26 August 2017, which ARSA ‘categorically denies’; the Mission found the evidence on the perpetrator ‘inconclusive’ and found no indication that ARSA burned Rohingya villages. In the Bangladesh camps Fortify Rights later recorded 219 killings by camp-based militants in 2021–24, and ARSA leader Ataullah was arrested in Bangladesh on 18 March 2025. The Rohingya people are not ARSA, and the state that punished 700,000 civilians for the acts of a few hundred fighters knew it.

Frontier Myanmar/AP, ARSA first statement · Al Jazeera, 9 September 2017 · UN Fact-Finding Mission report A/HRC/39/64 · Al Jazeera on Amnesty, 22 May 2018

25 August 2017

The genocide: 740,000 flee in months

In brief

From 25 August 2017 the military’s ‘clearance operations’ burned at least 392 villages, 40% of all settlements in northern Rakhine.
More than 740,000 Rohingya fled to Bangladesh, over 300,000 in the first three weeks; the UN called it ‘a textbook example of ethnic cleansing’.
MSF estimated at least 6,700 killed by violence in the first month, 730 of them children under five; the UN called 10,000 deaths ‘conservative’.

What happened

Within hours of ARSA’s attacks on about 30 police posts and an army base, troops of the 33rd and 99th Light Infantry Divisions, border police and armed Rakhine civilians moved through hundreds of villages in Maungdaw, Buthidaung and Rathedaung, shooting, raping and burning. The UN Fact-Finding Mission found ‘at least 392 villages (40 per cent of all settlements in northern Rakhine) were partially or totally destroyed, encompassing at least 37,700 individual structures’, that sexual violence was ‘commanded, orchestrated and carried out by armed forces’, and that the operations were ‘foreseeable and planned’. MSF’s household surveys estimated at least 6,700 Rohingya killed by violence between 25 August and 24 September alone, 730 of them under five, against a government figure of about 400; the Mission called an estimate of up to 10,000 deaths ‘conservative’. UNHCR counted more than 740,000 arrivals in Bangladesh, ‘the largest and swiftest forced movement in the region in decades’, and UN human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein told the Human Rights Council on 11 September that the operation ‘seems a textbook example of ethnic cleansing’. The villages were later bulldozed and the land given to security structures and settlers.

GoB–UNHCR population dashboard, 30 Sep 2026 · MSF survey, 12 December 2017 · UN Fact-Finding Mission report A/HRC/39/64 · UN News, 11 September 2017

30 August – 2 September 2017

Tula Toli and Inn Din

In brief

On 30 August 2017 soldiers and armed Rakhine villagers trapped Tula Toli’s people on a riverbank, shot and hacked the men and burned bodies in pits.
Women and girls were raped in huts that were then set alight; HRW documented hundreds killed and 746 buildings destroyed.
On 2 September ten Rohingya men were executed at Inn Din; the Reuters reporters who exposed it were jailed for seven years.

What happened

At Tula Toli (Min Gyi) in Maungdaw, Human Rights Watch documented a ‘methodical massacre’: villagers were gathered on the riverbank, men and boys were shot and hacked, women and girls were raped and locked in houses that were burned, and bodies were burned in pits; satellite imagery showed 746 buildings destroyed. Similar massacres took place at Chut Pyin on 26–27 August, Maung Nu on 27 August and Gu Dar Pyin. At Inn Din on 2 September soldiers and Rakhine villagers executed ten Rohingya men and buried them in a mass grave; Reuters journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, who documented it, were arrested on 12 December 2017 and sentenced on 3 September 2018 to seven years under the Official Secrets Act, winning a Pulitzer Prize before their release on 7 May 2019.

Human Rights Watch, Tula Toli (2017) · Amnesty International on the Reuters journalists (2018) · UN Fact-Finding Mission report A/HRC/39/64

21–23 November 2017

‘Apartheid’ finding and a hollow repatriation deal

In brief

On 21 November 2017 Amnesty International concluded that Rakhine’s system of segregation and restrictions amounted to the crime of apartheid.
Two days later Bangladesh and Myanmar signed a repatriation arrangement requiring documents most Rohingya were never given.
Satellite imagery showed 354 villages burned since 25 August, 40 of them in October–November; no organised returns followed.

What happened

Amnesty’s ‘Caged without a roof’ found that Rohingya in Rakhine were held in ‘a system of apartheid’: confined to villages, ghettos and camps, denied citizenship, education, healthcare and movement by ‘state-sponsored, institutionalised discrimination’. The repatriation arrangement of 23 November 2017 made return conditional on Myanmar-issued proof of residence that the state had spent decades refusing to issue. Human Rights Watch’s imagery showed burning continued long after the government said operations had ended on 5 September: 40 more villages were destroyed in October and November, 354 in all. Attempted repatriations in 2018 and August 2019 found not one refugee willing to return without citizenship and safety guarantees.

Amnesty International, Caged without a roof (2017) · Human Rights Watch, 40 villages burned (2017) · UN Fact-Finding Mission report A/HRC/39/64

5 June 2018

Hanifi Rohingya enters Unicode

In brief

Unicode 11.0 (5 June 2018) added Hanifi Rohingya, the alphabet created in the 1980s by Mohammad Hanif and colleagues for the Rohingya language.
The language had received its own ISO 639-3 code, rhg, on 18 July 2007, separate from Bengali and Chittagonian.
For the first time Rohingya could be typed, texted and published in its own script on ordinary phones and computers.

What happened

Rohingya is an Eastern Indo-Aryan language with about three million speakers; SIL approved the ISO 639-3 code rhg on 18 July 2007, after Rohingya had earlier been lumped under Chittagonian. Hanifi Rohingya, a right-to-left script of 28 consonants, vowel signs and tone marks based on Arabic letters, was devised by Maulana Mohammad Hanif and colleagues in the 1980s when the Myanmar state banned Rohingya writing. Anshuman Pandey’s proposal of October 2015 led to its encoding in Unicode 11.0 as block U+10D00–10D3F, one of seven new scripts, with Google’s Noto Sans Hanifi Rohingya font following. In the Bangladesh camps, mother-tongue lessons in Hanifi that began in January 2024 with 800 children reached more than 6,000 pupils within two years, who scored 78–82% higher than peers taught in Burmese; a 14-year-old called the script ‘a beacon of hope’. A people with its own language and alphabet is a people.

Unicode 11.0.0 · Unicode blog, 5 June 2018 · ISO 639-3: rhg · Omniglot, Hanifi Rohingya

27 August – 18 September 2018

UN mission names six generals for genocide

In brief

The UN Fact-Finding Mission’s findings (27 August 2018) called for Min Aung Hlaing and five other generals to be prosecuted for genocide.
Its 440-page report of 18 September, based on 875 interviews, found ‘genocidal intent’ and a ‘foreseeable and planned catastrophe’.
It found Facebook had been ‘a useful instrument for those seeking to spread hate’ and that civilian leaders had failed to act.

What happened

The Mission named Commander-in-Chief Min Aung Hlaing, Soe Win, Aung Kyaw Zaw, Maung Maung Soe, Aung Aung and Than Oo, finding ‘sufficient information to warrant the investigation and prosecution of senior officials’ for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Rakhine, Kachin and Shan States. It recorded Min Aung Hlaing’s statement that ‘the Bengali problem was a longstanding one which has become an unfinished job’, found the Tatmadaw’s tactics ‘consistently and grossly disproportionate to actual security threats’ with ‘a level of preplanning and design’, and faulted Aung San Suu Kyi’s government for failing to act. On identity, it ruled that use of the name Rohingya ‘comports with the right to self-identify’ and that government rhetoric ‘has insisted that Rohingya do not exist in Myanmar, including by denying use of the term’. The Mission’s detailed findings documented the marriage orders, Form 4, the curfews, the camps, the university ban and the two-child rule as a single system built to break a people.

UN News, 27 August 2018 · UN Fact-Finding Mission report A/HRC/39/64 · UN FFM detailed findings A/HRC/39/CRP.2 · OHCHR press release, 18 September 2018

6 September 2018 – 14 November 2019

The ICC claims jurisdiction and opens an investigation

In brief

On 6 September 2018 ICC judges ruled the Court could act because the crime of deportation was completed in Bangladesh, a member state.
On 14 November 2019 judges authorised a full investigation into deportation, persecution and other crimes since 1 June 2010.
The judges cited estimates that 600,000 to one million Rohingya had been forcibly displaced.

What happened

Myanmar is not a party to the Rome Statute, but Pre-Trial Chamber I accepted the Prosecutor’s argument that deportation across the border into Bangladesh, which is a party, falls within the Court’s jurisdiction. Pre-Trial Chamber III’s decision of 14 November 2019 (ICC-01/19-27) authorised an investigation into crimes within the Court’s jurisdiction committed at least in part in Bangladesh since 1 June 2010, noting estimates of 600,000 to one million people forcibly displaced. On 27 November 2024 Prosecutor Karim Khan applied for an arrest warrant for Min Aung Hlaing for deportation and persecution; as of November 2026 the judges have announced no decision. Fortify Rights has asked the Court to extend its investigation to the Arakan Army’s crimes against the Rohingya.

ICC, 6 September 2018 · ICC decision ICC-01/19-27, 14 November 2019 · ICC, Bangladesh/Myanmar situation

5 November 2018

Facebook admits: ‘we weren’t doing enough’

In brief

The UN Fact-Finding Mission found Facebook had been ‘a useful instrument for those seeking to spread hate’ against the Rohingya.
On 5 November 2018 Facebook published an independent human-rights assessment of its role in Myanmar.
It admitted: ‘prior to this year, we weren’t doing enough to help prevent our platform from being used to foment division and incite offline violence.’

What happened

Facebook commissioned Business for Social Responsibility to assess its impact in Myanmar after the UN Fact-Finding Mission had singled out the platform; publishing the assessment, Facebook wrote that ‘prior to this year, we weren’t doing enough to help prevent our platform from being used to foment division and incite offline violence’ and that it ‘can and should do more’. The hate had been official from the start: on 1 June 2012 the presidential spokesman Zaw Htay posted on Facebook that troops would ‘completely destroy’ ‘Rohingya terrorists’ and did not want to hear ‘humanitarian or human rights excuses’; the 969 movement and MaBaTha spread boycott calls and rape rumours, and in 2016 MaBaTha released a video re-enacting the 2012 murder that had been used to incite the violence. The Mission also noted the 2014 Mandalay riot that followed a rumour ‘quickly spread by 969’. Platforms built on engagement carried a state’s propaganda to villages without internet.

Meta Newsroom, 5 November 2018 · UN Fact-Finding Mission report A/HRC/39/64 · UN FFM detailed findings A/HRC/39/CRP.2

25 August 2019

Mohib Ullah: 200,000 rally for rights; a leader assassinated

In brief

On 25 August 2019 about 200,000 Rohingya rallied peacefully at Kutupalong for ‘Genocide Remembrance Day’, Bangladesh police said.
Organiser Mohib Ullah, who had addressed the UN Human Rights Council in March, said: ‘Myanmar is our country. We are Rohingya.’
On 29 September 2021 gunmen shot him dead at his office; Bangladesh police charged ARSA members with the killing.

What happened

Mohib Ullah, a teacher from Maungdaw with a science degree from Sittwe University, co-founded the Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights in the camps to document killings, rapes and burnings house by house and to prepare the Rohingya to go home; the community called him ‘Peace Father’. He spoke to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva in March 2019 and met the US president in July. Three days after a second attempted repatriation on 22 August 2019 in which ‘not one agreed to return voluntarily’, he led a rally of almost 200,000 under banners reading ‘Never again! Rohingya genocide remembrance day’ and ‘Restore our citizenship’, telling AP: ‘We want to tell the world that we want our rights back, we want citizenship, we want our homes and land back.’ On 29 September 2021 he was shot dead at his office in Kutupalong; police charged 29 people and said ARSA killed him because he refused to shut his organisation and join them, and a court report named ARSA leader Ataullah as having ordered it. Fortify Rights has since documented 219 killings by camp-based militants between 2021 and 2024; Ataullah was arrested in Bangladesh on 18 March 2025.

Al Jazeera/AFP, 25 August 2019 · BenarNews/RFA, 23 March 2025 · Fortify Rights, 18 March 2025

11 November 2019

The Gambia sues Myanmar for genocide

In brief

On 11 November 2019 The Gambia filed The Gambia v. Myanmar at the International Court of Justice under the Genocide Convention.
It was the first genocide case brought by a state not directly affected, backed by the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation.
At hearings on 10–12 December Aung San Suu Kyi defended the military in person, calling the 2017 operations an ‘internal conflict’.

What happened

The Gambia’s justice minister Abubacarr Tambadou brought the case after visiting the Cox’s Bazar camps, asking the Court to declare that Myanmar had breached the Genocide Convention and to order reparations and guarantees of non-repetition. Aung San Suu Kyi led Myanmar’s delegation at the provisional-measures hearings in December 2019, called the application ‘incomplete and misleading’ and defended the army’s conduct as a response to ARSA. Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Denmark, the Maldives, Slovenia, Ireland and the Democratic Republic of the Congo were later authorised to intervene.

ICJ, case 178 page · Al Jazeera, 11 December 2019 · Council on Foreign Relations backgrounder

23 January 2020 – 4 December 2020

ICJ orders protection; Bhasan Char opens

In brief

On 23 January 2020 the ICJ unanimously ordered Myanmar to prevent genocidal acts against the Rohingya and preserve evidence.
The Court found the Rohingya ‘appear to constitute a protected group’ under the Genocide Convention and required reports every six months.
On 4 December 2020 Bangladesh moved the first 1,642 refugees to Bhasan Char, a silt island in the Bay of Bengal.

What happened

The Court’s order, adopted unanimously, found that ‘the Rohingya in Myanmar remain extremely vulnerable’, that they ‘appear to constitute a protected group within the meaning of Article II of the Genocide Convention’ (paragraph 52), and required Myanmar to prevent killing, serious harm and conditions of life calculated to destroy the group, to ensure its military did the same, to preserve evidence and to report within four months and then every six months. Myanmar has filed twelve compliance reports; The Gambia has told the Court there is ‘no reason to conclude’ it has complied. Bangladesh’s relocation of refugees to Bhasan Char began over the objections of rights groups; 33,819 people lived there by June 2026.

ICJ Order, 23 January 2020 · ICJ, case 178 page · Dhaka Tribune, 4 December 2020

1 February 2021 – 3 June 2021

Coup; the opposition pledges Rohingya citizenship

In brief

The military seized power on 1 February 2021, detained Aung San Suu Kyi and plunged Myanmar into nationwide civil war.
On 3 June 2021 the opposition National Unity Government pledged to repeal the 1982 Citizenship Law and grant Rohingya citizenship.
The NUG promised safe, voluntary and dignified return and to recognise the Rohingya as a people of Myanmar.

What happened

Min Aung Hlaing, the general the UN had named for genocide, took the state by force on 1 February 2021 after an election in which monitors found no evidence of mass fraud. The National Unity Government formed by ousted legislators issued a policy position on 3 June 2021 that recognised the atrocities committed against the Rohingya, pledged to repeal the 1982 law and grant the Rohingya citizenship, and promised the Rohingya’s safe return and inclusion. Its first alarm at the Arakan Army’s burning of Buthidaung in May 2024 was later revised to blame the junta, a sign of how far Rohingya rights still depend on others’ politics.

National Unity Government policy, 3 June 2021 · Reuters via The Star, 21 March 2022

21 March – 22 July 2022

The United States declares genocide; the ICJ case proceeds

In brief

On 21 March 2022 Secretary of State Antony Blinken determined that Myanmar’s military committed genocide and crimes against humanity against the Rohingya.
On 22 July 2022 the ICJ rejected all four of Myanmar’s preliminary objections, 15–1 on jurisdiction and unanimously on the others.
The Court held The Gambia ‘has standing to invoke the responsibility of Myanmar’ and cleared the case for the merits.

What happened

Speaking at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Blinken said: ‘Beyond the Holocaust, the United States has concluded that genocide was committed seven times. Today marks the eighth, as I’ve determined that members of the Burmese military committed genocide and crimes against humanity against Rohingya.’ On 22 July 2022 the ICJ dismissed all four of Myanmar’s preliminary objections, three of them unanimously and the fourth, with jurisdiction and admissibility, by 15 votes to 1, Judge Xue dissenting. Both decisions rest on the same evidence base the Rohingya themselves assembled in the camps.

US State Department, Blinken speech 21 March 2022 · Human Rights Watch, 21 March 2022 · ICJ press release, 22 July 2022

March – June 2023

Stalled ‘pilot’ return, ration cuts and Cyclone Mocha

In brief

A China-brokered plan to return about 1,000 refugees produced junta verification visits but no returns.
Cyclone Mocha struck Rakhine on 14 May 2023 and devastated the Sittwe camps; RFA sources reported about 460 Rohingya dead, a disputed figure.
WFP cut camp rations from $12 to $10 in March and $8 in June 2023, and malnutrition rose sharply.

What happened

The China-brokered ‘pilot’ repatriation of about 1,000 refugees produced junta verification visits to the camps but no returns, because it offered neither citizenship nor safety. Cyclone Mocha, with winds above 220 km/h, flattened shelters in the camps around Sittwe where Rohingya had been confined since 2012 and barred from moving to safer ground; the junta reported 145 deaths nationally while RFA’s sources counted about 460 Rohingya dead, a figure that remains unverified. In Bangladesh the World Food Programme cut the monthly food voucher from $12 to $10 in March and $8 in June 2023 for lack of funds, restoring $10 in January 2024 and $12 later that year.

Radio Free Asia, 17 May 2023 · UN Bangladesh/WFP, 31 December 2023 · NPR via GPB, 25 August 2026

Era 7 of 7

The second wave of genocide

2023–2026: the perpetrator changed; the persecution did not

13 November 2023

The second wave of genocide begins: the Arakan Army goes to war; 569 die at sea

In brief

On 13 November 2023 the Arakan Army attacked junta posts in Rathedaung and Kyauktaw, ending a year-long ceasefire.
For the Rohingya it began the second wave of genocide, this time by the Arakan Army, which by 2026 held 14 of Rakhine’s 17 townships.
In 2023, 569 Rohingya died or went missing at sea out of about 4,500 who attempted the journey, one in eight.

What happened

The Arakan Army, founded in 2009 with its political wing the United League of Arakan, joined the Three Brotherhood Alliance’s Operation 1027 and took Paletwa on 14 January 2024, Rathedaung on 17 March, Buthidaung on 18 May, Maungdaw on 8 December and the Western Command at Ann on 20 December 2024. The UN counts the military as having lost 14 of 17 Rakhine townships; the AA’s own claim of about 90% of the state is its territorial estimate, not a UN figure. For the Rohingya trapped between the two armies, UN human rights chief Volker Türk said in April 2024, both ‘have a track record of killing them’. UNHCR recorded 569 Rohingya dead or missing at sea in 2023, the highest toll since 2014.

Radio Free Asia, 14 November 2023 · Al Jazeera, 24 January 2024 · UNHCR, January 2024

February – April 2024

The junta conscripts the people it persecuted

In brief

After activating a conscription law on 10 February 2024, the military abducted more than 1,000 Rohingya men and boys in night raids.
Recruits were promised citizenship cards and given two weeks’ training; seven bodies returned to Sittwe families ‘have no limbs’.
The RSO and other Rohingya armed groups forcibly recruited at least 1,800 refugees from the Bangladesh camps for the junta.

What happened

The People’s Military Service Law applies only to citizens, yet the army that had denied Rohingya citizenship for forty years began seizing them from the Sittwe camps and Buthidaung villages within days of activating it, HRW recorded, promising pink citizenship cards, 4,800 kyat a day and rice; about 300 camp residents were trained for two weeks (‘Those 12 days felt like 12 years of our lives’) and about 100 sent to the Rathedaung front, where five were killed and their bodies never returned. On 22 March 2024 police returned seven conscripts’ bodies in a truck, saying landmines had killed them as they ran away. Between mid-March and early June 2024 the Rohingya Solidarity Organisation and other groups forcibly recruited and smuggled at least 1,800 refugees out of the Bangladesh camps to fight for the junta against the Arakan Army. The UN’s 2026 report records 1,981 Rohingya conscripted from Sittwe in 2025–26 and more than 125,000 forced conscripts nationwide, of all ethnicities, by May 2026. Each Rohingya village around Sittwe was made to supply up to 30 recruits a month, and the AA used their presence to brand whole villages as junta collaborators.

Human Rights Watch, 9 April 2024 · Human Rights Watch, 12 August 2024 · Radio Free Asia, 22 March 2024

2 May 2024

Hoyyar Siri: the Arakan Army’s massacre

In brief

On 2 May 2024 Arakan Army fighters fired on unarmed villagers fleeing Hoyyar Siri (Htan Shauk Khan), Buthidaung, some waving white flags.
Human Rights Watch named over 170 villagers killed or missing, about 90 of them children, and says the true toll is ‘likely much higher’.
The Arakan Rohingya National Council counts 500–600 or more dead; the AA denies a massacre and says about 200 soldiers died.

What happened

On 1 May the AA announced by loudspeaker that villagers should leave; on 2 May, after the group advanced on two nearby military bases, its fighters stopped families heading west, divided them into groups in paddy fields beside the mosque and ‘opened fire at us randomly’, a woman told HRW; Rashid Ahmed, who lost seven of nine family members, heard the radio order ‘kill them all’. HRW’s 56-page report, built on dozens of interviews, satellite imagery, verified video of remains and forensic analysis of gunshot wounds to skulls, lists more than 170 killed or missing, including some 90 children, and says the AA killed and wounded ‘hundreds’; survivors returning months later found ‘heaps of skeletons and skulls scattered everywhere’. The junta had earlier demanded 20 recruits from the village, and the AA has said its fighters shot only soldiers and ‘Bengali’ militants, admits no massacre and claims about 200 soldiers died; the Rohingya National League counts 111 dead and the ARNC more than 600. In February 2025 the AA ordered survivors into a camp where, HRW says, they are ‘effectively detained’, and in August 2025 staged a press visit at which survivors say they were made to blame the junta. Meenakshi Ganguly of HRW: the killings took the war ‘to a new level of depravity’. ARNC: ‘Genocide is genocide, no matter who commits it.’

Human Rights Watch, Hoyyar Siri report (18 May 2026) · Human Rights Watch, 18 May 2026 · Fortify Rights, 9 April 2026 · Arakan Rohingya National Council, May 2026

17–21 May 2024

The burning of Buthidaung

In brief

On 17 May 2024, two days after the junta retreated, Arakan Army fighters shelled, looted and burned Buthidaung’s Rohingya wards, some with people locked inside.
The UN confirmed four beheadings and about 45,000 people fleeing toward the Naf; ASPI counted some 8,500 structures burned across 50 villages.
Rohingya organisations say more than 2,000 were killed in the Buthidaung campaign; the AA says it ‘never targets non-military objects’.

What happened

Witnesses told HRW the AA ordered residents out by 10 a.m. on 18 May and began burning on the evening of the 17th: ‘They didn’t hesitate to torch our houses, even with people inside’; Fatema, 22, lost six relatives including her 70-year-old father-in-law trapped upstairs. OHCHR said ‘Buthidaung town has been largely burned’, that burning began two days after the military’s retreat, that at least four beheadings were confirmed and that about 45,000 people fled toward the Naf River, where they were blocked, abused and extorted; the UN gave no death toll. ASPI’s satellite analysis found the junta burned about 2,400 structures in Buddhist and Hindu wards in April, after which the AA burned ‘a further 8,500 structures across around 50 villages’ between 24 April and 21 May in ‘a systematic pattern’, each burning following the fall of a nearby junta battalion; a mosque at Na Khine Daung burned while a monastery 200 metres away was spared. Displacement estimates run from UNOCHA’s 70,000 to Nay San Lwin’s 200,000; the joint statement of 28 Rohingya organisations says the AA killed more than 2,000 during the campaign. The AA told HRW ‘we do not condone or engage in unlawful attacks or arson attacks against civilians’, and its commander told Rohingya activists to ‘stop selfish grumpiness’. The perpetrator changed; the persecution did not.

Human Rights Watch, 12 August 2024 · OHCHR briefing, 24 May 2024 (ReliefWeb) · ASPI Strategist, 13 June 2024 · Joint statement of 28 Rohingya organisations, 23 August 2024

5 August 2024

Naf River: drones and shells on families waiting for boats

In brief

On 5 August 2024 Rohingya families waiting on the Naf riverbank at Maungdaw for boats to Bangladesh were hit by drones, artillery and gunfire.
Fortify Rights documented ‘over one hundred’ killed; 28 Rohingya organisations and The Guardian put the toll at 200 or more.
The UN confirmed 46 dead on 5 August and 38 on a boat on 6 August; survivors blame the AA, which denied responsibility on 17 August.

What happened

Mohammed Eleyas, 35, heard ‘the deafening sound of shelling multiple times’ as his pregnant wife and two-year-old daughter were killed; Hasan, 24, said one strike killed 30 people and a second left 50 dead. Fortify Rights, from 23 interviews including 13 survivors, found that ‘AA drones, artillery, and gunfire killed over one hundred Rohingya men, women, and children’; OHCHR confirmed 46 civilians including three children killed on 5 August and 38 on a boat on 6 August, with interviewees saying the drones came from AA-held ground; the AA blamed ‘extremist Muslim armed groups’ and said the area was not under its control. The joint statement of 28 Rohingya organisations, endorsed by 115 more, counted ‘at least 200’ dead, mostly women and children, said ‘the AA knew what and where their targets were’, and demanded a UN-led investigation and sanctions on AA leaders. On 4 August, at Maung Ni, 36 people sheltering in an imam’s house, ten women and 18 children among them, were never seen again. Nay San Lwin estimated at least 400 Rohingya killed in Maungdaw since June; when the town fell in December the UN reported the AA burned captured Rohingya recruits alive and executed over 50 at a school at Ka Nyin Tan.

Fortify Rights, 27 August 2024 · Joint statement of 28 Rohingya organisations, 23 August 2024 · OHCHR report A/HRC/60/20, 29 August 2025 · The Guardian, 12 August 2024

27 November – 8 December 2024

AA takes Maungdaw and the border; ICC prosecutor seeks a warrant

In brief

On 8 December 2024 the Arakan Army overran the last junta base in Maungdaw, taking the entire 271-km Bangladesh border.
The UN counts the military as having lost 14 of 17 Rakhine townships; ‘about 90%’ is the AA’s own territorial claim.
On 27 November 2024 ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan applied for an arrest warrant for Min Aung Hlaing; no decision has been announced.

What happened

After a two-month siege of the BGP5 base, where junta troops and Rohingya militia conscripts were trapped, the AA took it on 7–8 December and on 9 December declared control of Maungdaw and the whole border with Bangladesh; Ann’s Western Command fell on 20 December. OHCHR reported that at Ka Nyin Tan on 8 December the AA ‘reportedly burned captured soldiers and Rohingya recruits alive’ and beat and executed more than 50 Rohingya hors de combat at a school. The Prosecutor’s application of 27 November 2024 accuses Min Aung Hlaing of the crimes against humanity of deportation and persecution of the Rohingya; the judges have published no ruling. Roughly 150,000 Rohingya fled to Bangladesh in 2024–25, and Bellingcat’s 2026 survey found 115 villages destroyed across Rakhine and about 500,000 people displaced within the state.

AP via The Star, 10 December 2024 · ICC Prosecutor statement, 27 November 2024 · OHCHR report A/HRC/60/20, 29 August 2025 · Bellingcat, 27 May 2026

13 February – 27 March 2025

Argentine arrest warrants; a ration collapse averted

In brief

On 13 February 2025 Judge María Servini in Buenos Aires issued arrest warrants for 25 people, including Min Aung Hlaing, Soe Win and Suu Kyi.
The universal-jurisdiction case was brought by the Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK in 2019; six Rohingya women survivors are parties.
WFP warned rations would fall to $6 a month in April; donors, led by a US $73 million pledge, kept them at $12 in March.

What happened

The Argentine federal court, applying universal jurisdiction over genocide, ordered warrants for 25 Myanmar officials, military and civilian, over an attack of 27 August 2017 in Rathedaung and the wider campaign; BROUK’s president Tun Khin called it ‘a historic step towards justice for Rohingya and everyone in Burma suffering under the Burmese military’. (RFA reported 23 names; Verfassungsblog, ND-Burma and BROUK report 25.) In the same weeks the World Food Programme announced that without new funds the monthly food voucher for more than one million refugees would halve to $6 from April; after a US pledge of $73 million the cut was limited to $12.50 to $12. The warrants cannot yet be executed, and the rations still depend on donors’ goodwill year by year.

Radio Free Asia, 14 February 2025 · Verfassungsblog, 27 February 2025 · BROUK, 14 February 2025 · Reuters via The Star, 27 March 2025

3 June 2025

6,400 learning centres closed: a generation out of school

In brief

On 3 June 2025 UNICEF and Save the Children shut more than 6,400 learning centres in the Cox’s Bazar camps for lack of funds.
Save the Children put about 300,000 children at risk and UNICEF 230,000; the IRC counted some 500,000 Rohingya children without schooling.
US funding for the response fell from about $300 million in 2024 to $12 million by June 2025; Bangladesh bars camp children from its schools.

What happened

A letter of 3 June 2025 from UNICEF and Save the Children to Bangladesh’s refugee commissioner closed the centres ‘with immediate effect’; Save the Children’s area director called it ‘the incredibly difficult decision to shut thousands of learning centres’. Human Rights Watch found that roughly 304,000 of 437,000 targeted school-age children had been enrolled in centres that closed, that the education sector held about $22 million of its $72 million budget, and that before the cuts only 57 students in all of Cox’s Bazar were in class 11, the highest offered. Bangladesh bars children who arrived since 2017 from public and private schools, from learning Bangla and from formal curricula, and limits Rohingya teachers to unpaid ‘volunteer’ roles; more than 100 community-led schools survive on fees of 50 cents to $5 a month without recognition. In Myanmar the same generation had been barred from Sittwe University; in exile its younger siblings lost even primary school.

Save the Children, 5 June 2025 · UNICEF Bangladesh, 31 May 2025 · Human Rights Watch, 25 June 2025 · International Rescue Committee, 14 July 2025

23 July – 30 September 2025

AA abuses documented; the UN names it ‘main perpetrator’

In brief

Fortify Rights (23 July 2025) documented AA abductions, torture, killings and five apparent beheadings of Rohingya; the AA called this ‘false and defamatory’.
OHCHR’s August 2025 report found the AA ‘became the main perpetrator of human rights abuses against the Rohingya’ in northern Rakhine.
At the UN High-Level Conference of 30 September 2025 Volker Türk said Rohingya life ‘may be the worst it has ever been’.

What happened

Fortify Rights’ interviews with 39 survivors recorded five men abducted from Abuja hamlet and four beheaded, a man found decapitated ‘packed in a rice sack’, detainees shackled for seven months and five dead carried out of Buthidaung prison; in October 2025 it documented forced labour in Buthidaung, Maungdaw and Kyauktaw, with hundreds held at gunpoint in Hpon Nyo Leik mosque and a fine of 50,000 kyat a day for refusing. HRW in July 2025 described AA ‘policies of oppression’: one-day travel permits, a curfew, confiscation of farmland, cattle and cemeteries, children recruited as ‘human shields’. OHCHR’s report A/HRC/60/20 found the AA ‘became the main perpetrator of human rights abuses against the Rohingya’ and that ‘all parties acted with near complete impunity’. At the UN General Assembly’s conference, UNHCR’s Filippo Grandi said the Rohingya are trapped in a war between two forces ‘neither of which represents them’; in September BROUK asked the Argentine court to add the AA’s crimes to its case, and in October nearly 100 Rohingya organisations called the AA’s conduct ‘that of a perpetrator, not a protector’. 2025 ended with 892 Rohingya dead or missing at sea out of about 6,500 who sailed, the deadliest year on record.

Fortify Rights, 23 July 2025 · Fortify Rights, 22 October 2025 · OHCHR report A/HRC/60/20, 29 August 2025 · UN PGA conference summary, 30 September 2025

12–29 January 2026

The ICJ hears the genocide case on the merits

In brief

Public merits hearings in The Gambia v. Myanmar ran at the Peace Palace in The Hague from 12 to 29 January 2026.
Rohingya witnesses testified in closed session; eleven states had been authorised to intervene on the Convention’s interpretation.
Myanmar’s junta-appointed team argued the 2017 operations were counter-terrorism against ARSA and disputed genocidal intent.

What happened

The Gambia relied on three eyewitnesses, expert testimony and the UN Fact-Finding Mission’s record; Myanmar, now represented by Min Aung Hlaing’s regime, argued that the army had answered ARSA attacks and that no intent to destroy the Rohingya had been shown. The eleven intervening states (Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Denmark, the Maldives, Slovenia, Ireland and the Democratic Republic of the Congo among them) addressed only the construction of the Genocide Convention and did not take part in the merits hearings. For Rohingya in the camps the hearings were the first time their own testimony was heard by the World Court on whether what was done to them was genocide.

Impunity Watch, 27 February 2026 · Legal Action Worldwide, January 2026 · ICJ, case 178 page

28 February – April 2026

1.18 million in the camps; rations fall to $7

In brief

UNHCR counted 1,184,864 Rohingya in Cox’s Bazar on 28 February 2026, up 178,757 in one year from new arrivals and 34,301 births.
From April 2026 WFP paid tiered rations of $12, $10 or $7 a month; about 17% of refugees received $7.
Record deaths at sea: 892 dead or missing in 2025, and some 280 of 4,665 who sailed in the first months of 2026.

What happened

Fleeing the Arakan Army and the junta, 144,456 new arrivals reached the camps between December 2024 and February 2026, joining a population that is 52% children living on about 24 square kilometres; by 30 September 2026 the joint government–UNHCR count was 1,206,528. The World Food Programme’s tiered rations from 1 April 2026 gave refugees $12, $10 or $7 a month depending on an assessment, with about 17% on the lowest tier, and the 2026 Joint Response Plan appeal of $710.5 million was 26% smaller than 2025’s. UNHCR’s Babar Baloch said 2025 was ‘the deadliest year on record for maritime movements in South and South-East Asia’, with 892 Rohingya dead or missing out of about 6,500, more than one in seven, and called the sea ‘an unmarked graveyard for thousands of desperate Rohingya refugees’; a capsizing in the Andaman Sea in April 2026 left about 270 missing. About 5,000 Rohingya are believed to have drowned over the decade.

BNI/Kaladan Press, 18 March 2026 · NPR via GPB, 25 August 2026 · UNHCR, 17 April 2026 · UN News, 17 April 2026

3 April 2026

A junta ‘election’ makes Min Aung Hlaing president

In brief

Junta-run elections in December 2025 and January 2026 covered only 263 of 330 townships; in Rakhine, voting was held in just three.
On 3 April 2026 the new parliament elected Min Aung Hlaing president with 429 of 584 votes.
No change in policy toward the Rohingya has followed; the regime still calls them ‘Bengali’.

What happened

Voting took place only in Kyaukpyu, Sittwe and Manaung, the three Rakhine townships the army still held, and the Rohingya, disenfranchised since 2015, were not voters. Min Aung Hlaing handed the commander-in-chief post to General Ye Win Oo and took the presidency; AP summed up the moment as ‘I’m the boss now’. At the UN conference in 2025 Volker Türk had asked of this process, ‘Frankly, how can such elections be supported?’ The general named by the UN for genocide, sought by the ICC prosecutor and wanted in Argentina became head of state of the country the Rohingya come from.

Al Jazeera, 3 April 2026 · AP via The Star, 5 April 2026 · Bellingcat, 27 May 2026

April 2026

Universal jurisdiction widens: Indonesia, and the Arakan Army named

In brief

In April 2026 an Indonesian court accepted a universal-jurisdiction genocide case against Min Aung Hlaing.
Human Rights Watch lists further civil-society filings in Timor-Leste, Türkiye, the Philippines and Denmark alongside Argentina’s warrants.
In September 2025 BROUK asked the Argentine court to add Arakan Army crimes, including Hoyyar Siri, to its case.

What happened

Rohingya organisations have carried the search for justice to national courts wherever the law allows: the Argentine case, now with 25 warrants, was followed by filings in Indonesia and other countries, which Human Rights Watch lists among universal-jurisdiction claims pending alongside the ICC and ICJ proceedings. Fortify Rights, publishing new evidence on Hoyyar Siri in April 2026, asked the ICC to add the Arakan Army’s crimes to its investigation and governments to impose targeted sanctions on AA commanders, while BROUK’s September 2025 petition asked the Buenos Aires court to do the same. The AA’s response to every finding has been denial: ‘false and defamatory’, ‘fake news and disinformation’. Rohingya demands are the same in every forum: recognition by name, citizenship, return to their own villages, and accountability for every perpetrator, military or Arakan Army.

Human Rights Watch Q&A, 3 November 2026 · Fortify Rights, 9 April 2026 · BROUK, 14 February 2025 · Global Justice Center, universal-jurisdiction case update

25 August – 25 September 2026

UN: ‘systematic discrimination by all parties, with absolute impunity’

In brief

UN report A/HRC/63/21 found the Arakan Army seized about 2,000 acres of Rohingya land and settled non-Rohingya in 11 former Rohingya villages in Maungdaw.
It recorded 2,353 instances of Rohingya forced labour in January 2026 alone, children as young as six among them.
Fifteen detainees died in one cell at San Go Taung; women and girls aged 12–23 were marched to an ‘AP Battalion’ and raped.

What happened

The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, reporting on June 2025 to May 2026, found that the Arakan Army has ‘seized land, forced Rohingyas to build their own prison-like detention camps’, set up ten resettlement sites and eight new non-Rohingya villages on Rohingya land in Buthidaung, and holds about 600 Hoyyar Siri survivors under guard; detainees were beaten with bamboo, rubber pipes and belts, burned with matches and cigarettes, hung upside down and had fingernails removed, a child was forced to clear bones and skulls, recruiters demanded ‘one boy or one girl’ per family, and those fleeing paid US$300–500 for exit passes. The AA calls Rohingya ‘Bengali’ and is renaming their villages, ‘mirroring military policy’; the report found ‘systematic discrimination by all parties, with absolute impunity’, and Volker Türk called the findings ‘heartbreaking’. The Burma Human Rights Network documented in June 2026 that the AA is ‘seizing Rohingya land, handing it to Rakhine settlers, and forcing the dispossessed Rohingya to build the new settlements with their own hands’. The Secretary-General’s report counts almost 225,000 Rohingya in confined camps inside Rakhine, 400,000–600,000 remaining in Myanmar by various estimates, and 1,206,528 in Bangladesh; on the community’s own count of 3.5–3.7 million worldwide, only about one Rohingya in ten still lives in Arakan. As Azeem Ibrahim wrote, ‘the actors have changed, but the victims remain the same’.

UN OHCHR report A/HRC/63/21 (advance version, 2026) · UN News, 25 August 2026 · UN Secretary-General report A/81/302, 3 August 2026 · Burma Human Rights Network, 15 June 2026

19 November 2026

The World Court rules: judgment in The Gambia v. Myanmar

In brief

On 3 November 2026 the ICJ announced it will deliver its final judgment in The Gambia v. Myanmar on 19 November at The Hague.
It will be the World Court’s first ruling on whether a state committed genocide against the Rohingya.
The judgment is binding and cannot be appealed, though the Court has no enforcement arm of its own.

What happened

Press release 2026/27 set the public sitting for Thursday 19 November 2026, when President Iwasawa Yuji will read the judgment. The Gambia asks the Court to find Myanmar responsible for genocide, to order punishment of those responsible, reparations for the victims and guarantees against repetition. Seven years after the case was filed and nine years after 740,000 people were driven from their homes, the Rohingya will hear a court say whether the law recognises what was done to them; whatever the ruling, the Arakan Army now holds their villages, the junta’s president is the general the UN named, and 1.2 million remain in the camps. Rohingya organisations have said the judgment must be followed by citizenship, return and accountability for every perpetrator, or it will remain words.

ICJ press release 2026/27, 3 November 2026 · Human Rights Watch Q&A, 3 November 2026 · IIMM, The Gambia v. Myanmar · ICJ, case 178 page

Current situation · November 2026

Where things stand today

About 1.18–1.2 million Rohingya live in Bangladesh, roughly 1 million of them in the 33 Cox’s Bazar camps that form the world’s largest refugee settlement, plus Bhasan Char and other sites; more than half are children, and food rations stand at $7–12 per person per month with the 2026 appeal about two-thirds funded (UNHCR; BNI Online; NPR via GPB). Inside Myanmar, HRW estimated about 630,000 Rohingya remained in Rakhine in mid-2024 before a further ~150,000 fled; nearly 500,000 people of all ethnicities were displaced within Rakhine as of March 2026, including about 120,000 Rohingya confined in Sittwe-area camps since 2012, and a junta blockade has cut food and medicine to AA-held territory (Human Rights Watch; Bellingcat). The Arakan Army controls 14 of 17 townships and the entire Bangladesh border, and Bangladesh now negotiates repatriation with both the junta and the AA, conditional on a ceasefire that does not exist (Daily Star). Malaysia hosts the largest diaspora group; AP reports about 126,000 UNHCR-registered Rohingya there (February 2026), while a Malaysian press figure of 193,824 likely counts all Myanmar nationals (AP via KSAT). Roughly 5,000 Rohingya are thought to have drowned at sea over the past decade (UN News). Three accountability tracks remain open: the ICJ judgment due 19 November 2026, the ICC prosecutor’s pending arrest-warrant application against Min Aung Hlaing, and the Argentine universal-jurisdiction warrants.

The official numbers are not the whole people. Every figure above counts registered refugees or people a government has chosen to count. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya live without documents in Myanmar, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Malaysia, India and elsewhere and appear in no official total. A Rohingya Solidarity Organisation survey reported by Anadolu Agency in 2019 counted about 3.7 million Rohingya worldwide (Anadolu Agency), and Rohingya community estimates today put the nation at about 4 million people. After the 2017 genocide and the 2024 expulsions, only about one in ten Rohingya, roughly 400,000–500,000 people, remain inside Myanmar, most of them confined to camps or to territory held by the Arakan Army. The Rohingya are now a people whose great majority lives outside its own homeland.