Rohingya walk through rice fields after fleeing across the border from Myanmar to Bangladesh near Teknaf, September 1, 2017. © 2017 AP Photo/Bernat Armangue |
On August 25, 2017, Myanmar’s military began a sweeping campaign of massacres, rape, and arson in northern Rakhine State. Five years later, Rohingya Muslims are still awaiting justice.
In the wake of these attacks, more than 730,000 Rohingya fled to dangerous, flood-prone camps in Bangladesh, while about 600,000 remain under oppressive rule in Myanmar. |
Human Rights Watch has interviewed hundreds of Rohingya in Bangladesh who fled the Myanmar military’s atrocities. They described soldiers killing and raping villagers before torching their homes. Altogether, security forces killed thousands and burned down nearly 400 villages.
Satellite imagery and other analysis from 2017 shows the military’s burning in Rakhine State, where they wiped whole villages from the map. But these pictures don’t begin to describe the full extent of suffering of those who fled Myanmar, many after seeing their families killed and lives destroyed. |
About one million Rohingya who fled the violence now live as refugees in sprawling, overcrowded camps in Cox’s Bazar and the isolated silt island of Bhasan Char in Bangladesh, where many lack adequate medical supplies, clean water, and food.
Authorities there impose restrictions on work, movement, and education, making many refugees feel unwelcome and at risk. Authorities have destroyed shops, restricted travel and closed schools in the camps, denying many refugees an education. |
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But the Rohingya who stayed behind in Myanmar’s Rakhine State are similarly trapped. They are confined to camps and villages without freedom of movement, cut off from adequate food, health care, education, and work. “Since we were children…we never had any freedom,” said Abdul Halim, a Rohingya refugee who fled to Bangladesh from Myanmar in 2017.
The 2017 atrocities were the bloody culmination of decades of state repression and discrimination against the Rohingya Muslims who Myanmar authorities had long sought to remove from daily life in the predominantly Buddhist country. In 2012, when violence broke out in Rakhine State’s capital city Sittwe, authorities enacted policies to even more fully segregate and confine the Rohingya in Rakhine States.
In February 2021, the generals who had orchestrated atrocities against the Rohingya staged a coup. Since then, the junta has imposed new restrictions on Rohingya camps and villages, increasing water and food shortages, along with disease and malnutrition. Since the coup, security forces have arrested an estimated 2,000 Rohingya for “unauthorized travel.” |
No one has been held accountable for the crimes against humanity and acts of genocide committed against the Rohingya population.
Despite some promising steps toward justice, international action around the 2017 violence and the situation for the Rohingya in Myanmar and Bangladesh has been stunted. This anniversary should finally prompt concrete action.
Abdul’s request is simple: “We hope that, with help from foreign governments and Bangladesh, we will be able to get back our rights,” he said. “That is what we want.”
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