Modern Day Ethnic Cleansing: The Rohingya Muslim Minority of Myanmar

The state military of Myanmar has continuously been launching a violent offensive against the Rohingya Muslim ethnic minority group in a Buddhist majority country, by killing, raping, and setting their villages on fire since the 1970s. Such acts have been deemed as part of an ethnic cleansing initiative by the international community. Ultimately, within the constructs of International Human Rights Law, ethnic cleansing is the purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violence and terror the civil population of another ethnic or religious group from a geographic area. The Rohingya are a Muslim minority group living in Myanmar’s Rakhine state; they have their own language and culture and say that they are descendants of Arab traders and other groups who have been in the region for generations. Myanmar’s state police and government have utilized violent tactics that have forced tens of thousands of Rohingya to flee their homes as refugees to Malaysia, Thailand, and Bangladesh. 

The recent wave of violence is the latest in a pattern of state discrimination and violence against the Rohingya population that started over 50 years ago. In 1962, Myanmar, then called Burma, was taken over by the military in the coup, creating a military junta by demolishing the constitution. Like many dictatorships, they promoted fierce nationalism based on the country’s Buddhist identity, singling out the Rohingya Muslim minority. Although the lineage of the Rohingya in Myanmar can be traced back to the 15th century, the government has been forcing them out, claiming that they are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.

The displacement of the Rohingya first started in 1978 after Operation Dragon King, which forced about 200,000 Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh. The Burmese military used violence and rape to force the Rohingya to flee. Following these hostilities, in 1982, the Burmese government passed the Citizenship Act recognizing 135 ethnic groups, in which the Rohingya, with a population of about 1 million, were not on the list. Thus, with this act, the Rohingya became a stateless people. Later, in 1991, Myanmar’s military launched another campaign called the Operation Clean and Beautiful Nation, provoking over 250,000 Rohingya to flee from Myanmar to Bangladesh again. Tensions arose again in the 2000s, with massive violence breaking out in 2012 when four Muslim men were accused of assaulting and killing a Buddhist woman in Rakhine. In 2016, the Rohingya militant group, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, emerged and coordinated small-scale attacks on border police stations, which sparked the current crisis against the Rohingya, resulting in brutal retaliations by the state and a mass exodus of about 1.5 million Rohingya out of Myanmar to this day. Since 2017, more than a million Rohingya refugees from Myanmar have sought refuge in Bangladesh, with 69% of them women and children. This Rohingya refugee crisis is among the largest, fastest movements of people in recent history.