Myanmar's Rohingya: The Genocide No One Is Talking About

For people who are not so familiar with Rohingya Muslims and their plight, can you give us a bit of a backgrounder on how this whole issue started and where it is now?

Yeah, so the Rohingya are a kind of Muslim majority ethnic group in Western Myanmar who have for decades faced persecution that has just periodically ramped up.

And you could say some of it traces back to the independence of Myanmar or Burma as it was known at the time, but really has been at its most intense since around 1978, which was the first major military operation.

that forced the Rohingya in numbers of more than 100,000 to Bangladesh, neighboring Bangladesh, as refugees.

That's a process that has repeated itself numerous times since then.

The biggest was in 2017 when around 700,000 people fled the violence to go to Bangladesh.

A major part of this is in 1982, there was a law that stripped the Rohingya of citizenship.

And that has been the foundation of Rohingya persecution and statelessness.

And their statelessness is the source of why they face so many problems, not just in Myanmar, but also abroad.

What was the core issue, though? I mean, why did this even start? Why were they persecuted so much?

So the Rohingya have just historically been excluded from the idea of what a citizen of Myanmar is seen as outsiders, people kind of pushed to the side.

They're from a religious group.

They're Muslims.

They're different to the religions of most of Myanmar.

They are also ethnically different speaker, different language and geographically are close to Bangladesh.

So Myanmar, I think has this problem of what its identity is and There are actually many, many different cultures, different ethnic groups, but the Rohingya are quite specific in that even though they've never actually really had any significant group can attempt to secede and say we're independent people, they've been treated as one.

They've been excluded and never been allowed to.

be part of the nation seen as a threat, seen as a kind of, yeah, seen as intruders.

And that's how they've often been portrayed, especially in the last few decades as like intruders.

They tend to be described as Bengalis rather than Rohingya by, by officials, which it all boils down, I think, to like issues of nation state and identity in the modern world for country post independence.