Rohingya people began fleeing to nearby Bangladesh in huge numbers. During “Operation King Dragon,” Burmese military forces targeted the Rohingya people, and were accused of human rights abuses including rape, destruction of houses and villages, and mass arrests. When Myanmar became a military state in 1962, the Rohingya became victims of state-sponsored persecution. Myanmar refuses to recognize the term as one that refers to the region’s Muslim minority. Though Myanmar recognizes 135 distinct ethnic groups, the Rohingya are not one of them. No rightsĪs non-citizens, Rohingya people lack basic rights within Myanmar and are considered stateless. In 1982, Myanmar passed a citizenship law that denied the Rohingya people citizenship, too. Instead Myanmar worked to cast out the Rohingya people, excluding them from its constitution.
Nor did it acknowledge the Rohingya-a name adopted by a group of the descendants of both Arakan State Muslims and later migrants to Burma. The government didn’t provide for a Muslim state, either. Myanmar gained its independence from Britain in 1948. But though Muslims had lived in Burma for centuries, and though Britain promised the Rohingya an autonomous state in exchange for their help in WWII, it never followed through, and the Burmese people resented what they saw as an incursion of uninvited workers. During that time, other Muslims from Bengal entered Burma as migrant workers, tripling the country’s Muslim population over a 40-year period. Burma in turn was conquered by Britain in 1824, and until 1948 Britain ruled Burma as part of British India. Muslim settlers came to Arakan State, an independent coastal kingdom in what is now Myanmar, starting in the 1430s, and a small Muslim population lived in Arakan State when it was conquered by the Burmese Empire in 1784. The story of that persecution has its roots in Britain’s colonization of Burma, and modern-day Myanmar’s refusal to recognize the existence of a people who have existed for thousands of years. The ethnic minority is considered “the most persecuted minority in the world” by the United Nations. Myanmar is a majority-Buddhist state, but the Rohingya people are primarily Muslim, though a small number are Hindu.
Most live in Rakhine State on Myanmar’s western coast. The Rohingya people are an ethnic group from Myanmar, once called Burma.
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