After the enormous outpouring by the people of Australia on Sunday 24 August against the ongoing genocide in Palestine it might be forgotten that 25 August, is Rohingya Genocide Day. I recalled my work with the refugees in Ledah Camp in Teknaf Bangladesh and their stories of torture and displacement. Another ongoing tragedy, another reminder of the urgent need for justice, truth, and solidarity.
The plight of the Rohingya, a Muslim minority native to Myanmar’s Rakhine State (formerly Arakan), stands as one of the most sustained campaigns of exclusion and violence in modern history.
Just like Palestine, the Rohingya story is not a recent conflict. The history of Arakan reflects centuries of Muslim presence, dating back to Arab and Persian traders in the 8th century.
Muslim communities were integrated into local society, contributing to Arakan’s rich cultural diversity. Muslim officials held positions in the Arakanese court; Persian titles and Islamic culture flourished under the Bengal Sultanate and during subsequent Mughal influence.
The decisive change occurred with the British conquest in 1824. Just like they did everywhere, over the colonial period until independence in 1948, the British systematically pitted diverse ethnic groups against each other, promoting division and xenophobia. This imperial strategy fostered the stereotype of the Rohingya as “foreigners” and outsiders.
During World War II the Burmese largely supported the Japanese, while many ethnic minorities, including the Rohingya, sided with the British. The non-Muslim Rakhine, however, were among the few minorities to support Japan, directly opposing the Rohingya.
Burma’s independence in 1948 did not bring equality for the Rohingya. The colonial legacy of division persisted, enshrined into law. A series of citizenship laws passed in 1948, 1974, and especially the 1982 Citizenship Law, institutionalized Rohingya exclusion by denying them citizenship rights, rendering them stateless, deprived of basic rights including access to education, healthcare, employment, and freedom of movement.
The government perpetuated a dangerous rhetoric labelling the Rohingya as illegal Bengali immigrants, a discredited narrative that justified severe state violence. This xenophobic framing echoes other global patterns where minority groups are branded as outsiders to legitimise systemic oppression.
This tactic of manipulating history to erase legitimate claims echoes other global instances, such as the dismissal of Palestinian history to justify settler colonialism and the Serbs in Bosnia. Myanmar’s erasure of Arakan’s Muslim heritage underpins the machinery of genocide today.
Violence against the Rohingya escalated through systematic ethnic cleansing campaigns in 1978 and the early 1990s, which displaced hundreds of thousands to Bangladesh amid village destruction, rape, and murder. The 2012 anti-Muslim riots, 2016-2017 military “clearance operations,” and the mass exodus of over 700,000 Rohingya in 2017 culminated decades of orchestrated atrocity, marked by summary executions, wholesale destruction of villages, and sexual violence.
Even social media platforms like Facebook (Meta) have been implicated in amplifying hate speech that fuelled the violence just like they have been in India and manipulating the algorithms to silence criticism of Israel’s genocide. Even Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s former civilian leader, repeatedly invoked the language of counterterrorism used to justify violence.
This global trend was seen in the 1990s Bosnian Serb genocide, the “War on Terror” in Iraq and Libya, Israel’s actions in Palestine and Saudi Arabia’s devastating campaign in Yemen. Just like Israel, Aung San obscured and defended Myanmar’s genocidal campaign against the Rohingya and by branding Rohingya resistance as “terrorism,” she shielded the military from accountability and continued to deny Rohingya recognition and rights.
On 23 January 2020, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) voted unanimously, calling on Myanmar to take all measures in its power to prevent genocide of the remaining 600,000 Rohingya and called for emergency provisional measures in order to respect the requirements of the 1948 Genocide Convention.
Just like Palestine, we need to confront the deep colonial roots of the crisis, demand legal accountability for Myanmar’s military and political leaders, and to reject the global indifference and complicity of the media and governments and political parties that enable the ongoing atrocities.
Recognition, protection, and justice for the Rohingya, just like for the Palestinians, the Yemenis, the Uighur and the Muslims and Christians of India demands sustained commitment—not only to rectify the past but to prevent further suffering and uphold human dignity for all.
