Myanmar’s Rohingya Humanitarian Crisis

The persisting humanitarian crisis of the Rohingya minority in Myanmar has been a global concern after two bouts of organised mass violence against them in 2012. While the Rohingya persecution has been going on for nearly four decades, Myanmar’s reforms launched in 2011 facilitated the international media’s coverage of the mass violence.

Myanmar’s treatment of the Rohingya is an unmistakable breach of international human rights laws. Successive Burmese military governments have since early 1970s viewed the Rohingya Muslim minority, who live on their ancestral borderlands between the Islamic country of Bangladesh and Buddhist Myanmar, as “a threat to Myanmar’s national security and local Buddhist culture”.

The Rohingya persecution by the Myanmar military began in 1978 under the pretext of a crackdown on the illegal Bengali immigration into Western Myanmar from the then newly independent Bangladesh. The military used the Rohingya as a proxy population against the extremely nationalistic and anti-Myanmar Rakhine people, who resent Myanmar rule as a colonial occupation of their once sovereign nation. (Courtesy of Inter Press Service)