In a world of ongoing humanitarian crises, many things go without mass coverage, such as the situation in Myanmar. Muslims in Myanmar are being systematically killed, and it has been ongoing since 2016, with a death toll of over 25,000 by 2018. It has been titled a genocide by the United States government, giving it the name “Burma Genocide.” Religious persecution is nothing new in Myanmar, but the scale that people are being killed over there is large. Camps have been set up to keep Rohingya people, who are mainly Muslim, Indo-Aryan people, confined. According to UNHCR, hundreds of thousands of people are being forced to flee their homes to neighboring countries such as Bangladesh. In contrast, others are kept in mass detention camps, according to Human Rights Watch.
Rohingya Refugee Camp in Bangladesh
The acts that have been committed in Myanmar include but are not limited to mass killings, genocidal rape, and arson. On August 5th, 2024, alone, 200 people who were trying to flee were killed via drone strikes. This can spark a question for some: why does Myanmar do these things to the Rohingya people? Myanmar believes that the Rohingya people are not originally from Myanmar and instead are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. This belief caused an apartheid-like Citizenship Act in 1982, which created different types of citizenship, whereas non-native people had a more complicated process of receiving full citizenship. Fast forward to 1992, military operation Pyi Thaya had soldiers rape, assault, and kill Rohingya people resulting in 250,000 Rohingya being forced to flee to Bangladesh. Even though the full-scale genocide didn’t start till 2017, atrocities like these were still committed against the Rohingya people.
With a lot of the Rohingya people being Muslim, they have been targeted by Buddhist nationalists who have pillaged villages, such as in 2012 when a whole Rohingya village was destroyed and leveled by bulldozers. Amid this violence, about 10,000 people were forced to leave their homes by authorities. Five years later, in 2017, the all-out genocide started against the Rohingya people, with an estimated 9,000 people being killed and an additional 700,000 being forced to flee to Bangladesh. During this time, they had killed individuals’ family members in front of them, according to eyewitness accounts. The Rohingya people continued to be targeted in genocidal attacks with no signs of the military letting off.
Rohingya village being burnt down by military
Although official numbers of casualties haven’t been released yet, it is confirmed that these acts are committed and that tens of thousands of people have been killed. Myanmar was taken to court for genocide, where it was approved for seven different states to intervene in the conflict. The United States has been actively trying to support Myanmar in becoming democratic and recognizing the rights of all people. The US supplies the people of Myanmar with humanitarian assistance while another agency ensures that none of the US’s help goes to supporting the regime. Regardless of how much help is being given in Myanmar, this genocide is not letting off. We are taught in school about genocides like the Holocaust to avoid them happening again in the future. Still, today, we are seeing the same acts of genocide being committed against Muslims.
Refugee camp in Bangladesh that caught on fire earlier this year
