The Fate of the Rohingyas Is Crucial for Myanmar’s Future
The military dictatorship in Myanmar has lost control over much of the country to rebel forces. The status of the Rohingya people, victims of genocide, will be a crucial test of the new political order that appears to be taking shape.
Nine years ago, the Myanmar state expelled the Rohingya in a genocidal campaign. That state is now falling apart in the face of armed rebellion, but the Rohingya are still waiting to learn whether anything different is being built in its place. (Abdul Goni / Anadolu via Getty Images)
In August 2024, Rohingya families gathered on the banks of the Naf River in Maungdaw, waiting to cross into Bangladesh as the fighting closed in. Drones and mortars found them there. Roughly two hundred people were killed, another entry in a catalogue of atrocity the Rohingya have been forced to keep for decades.
What made this massacre different was who stood accused of it. The killing was attributed not to the Myanmar military, the army that drove three-quarters of a million Rohingya into exile in 2017, but to the Arakan Army, the ethnic Rakhine force that has spent the past two years dismantling that same military’s grip on the state. The genocidaire was in retreat but the Rohingya were dying anyway.
That is the contradiction at the heart of Myanmar today, and it is why we should mark the ninth anniversary of the 2017 genocide as something other than a humanitarian remembrance. The Rohingya are usually cast as victims of a specific army and a specific campaign of expulsion. But the genocide was never only a crime committed by soldiers.
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