Why Rohingya refugees are protesting in Cox’s Bazar, 9 years after genocide

Rohingya refugees protest, nine years after exodus to Bangladesh

On Monday, hundreds of Rohingya refugees gathered at Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh demanding justice and the right to return to their homes, on the ninth anniversary of the genocide perpetrated against them in Myanmar. Since then, more than one million stateless Rohingya have remained stranded in tightly packed camps in Bangladesh’s coastal district of Cox’s Bazar, where living conditions are steadily deteriorating as international aid declines.

The presence of the Rohingya in Bangladesh has made the South Asian country home to one of the world’s largest refugee populations.

Key bodies and actors have deemed the Rohingya crisis a genocide, including United Nations officials and former United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken in 2022, but what action has the international community taken, and is there any resolution in sight?

As of 2021, there were an estimated 120,000 Rohingya , a Muslim-majority ethnic group, internally displaced in Myanmar. They have been described by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres as “one of, if not the, most discriminated people in the world”.

Before 2017, there were more than one million Rohingya in Myanmar.

While Myanmar is an ethnically diverse nation, with 135 major ethnic groups and seven ethnic minority states, according to the international human rights organisation, Minority Rights Group, the Rohingya are not formally recognised as one of them. They have been denied citizenship in Myanmar since 1982, which makes them the world’s largest stateless group. The Burmese are the largest and most dominant ethnic group in Myanmar.

The government of Myanmar, a predominantly Buddhist country, views the Rohingya as undocumented immigrants from Bangladesh. They were not included in the country’s 2014 national census.