Since 1978, the Rohingya, a Muslim minority of Western Burma,
have been subject to a state-sponsored process of destruction. The Rohingya have deep
historical roots in the borderlands of Rakhine State, Myanmar, and were recognized
officially both as citizens and as an ethnic group by three successive governments of
post-independence Burma. In 1978, General Ne Win’s socialist military dictatorship
launched the first large-scale campaign against the Rohingya in Rakhine State with the
intent first of expelling them en masse from Western Burma and subsequently
legalizing the systematic erasure of Rohingya group identity and legitimizing their
physical destruction. This on-going process has continued to the present day under the
civilian-military rule of President Thein Sein’s government. Since 2012, the Rohingya
have been subject to renewed waves of hate campaigns and accompanying violence,
killings and ostracization that aim both to destroy the Rohingya and to permanently
remove them from their ancestral homes in Rakhine State.
Findings from the authors’ three-year research on the plight of the Rohingya lead
us to conclude that Rohingya have been subject to a process of slow-burning genocide
over the past thirty-five years. The destruction of the Rohingya is carried out both by
civilian populations backed by the state and perpetrated directly by state actors and
state institutions. Both the State in Burma and the local community have committed
four out of five acts of genocide as spelled out by the 1948 Convention on the
Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide. Despite growing evidence of
genocide, the international community has so far avoided calling this large scale human
suffering genocide because no powerful member states of the UN Security Council
have any appetite to forego their commercial and strategic interests in Burma to
address the slow-burning Rohingya genocide.