The Ongoing Genocidal Crisis of the Rohingya Minority in Myanmar

Abstract

The serious plight of the Rohingya ethnic group’s extreme victimization in Myanmar has finally emerged on the international stage. They are mostly a stateless Muslim minority from the state of Rakhine which, over recent decades, have been abused by severe and repeated multiple human rights violations. There are now approximately 850,000 displaced Rohingya refugees mostly in Bangladesh and surrounding countries with thousands more waiting in peril between Myanmar and Bangladesh. The saga of the Rohingya dilemma has been fraught with complex ethno-religious conflicts between Buddhist, Muslim and Hindu factions exacerbated by the scale of people involved, rapidity of events, recency of occurrences, abject poverty, racial hatred, linguistic differences, confused ancestral rights, severe humanitarian violations, genocidal policies, surrounded by nations themselves struggling with few resources. The present-day conflicted leadership in Myanmar between the military and the democratically elected leader of her government, Aung San Suu Kyi, has been severely criticized for their brutal continued ethnic cleansing.