Executive Summary
The United League of Arakan / Arakan Army (ULA/AA) has consolidated control over significant territory in Arakan State and is actively seeking diplomatic recognition as the legitimate authority governing the region.
Its media apparatus, the Global Arakan Network, has positioned the group as the natural guarantor of Rohingya safety and the necessary partner for any repatriation framework. This briefing argues that this proposition rests on a fundamental contradiction that cannot be resolved through diplomatic accommodation.
A force documented in the systematic killing, torture, expulsion, and conscription of Rohingya civilians cannot simultaneously serve as their protector. The appropriate response of the international community, Bangladesh foremost among them, is accountability, not recognition.
I. Recognition as the Objective
The ULA/AA’s current campaign, launched in November 2023, has made it the most significant non-state territorial authority in Myanmar. With that control comes a deliberate legitimacy operation: the transformation of military conquest into diplomatic standing, using the Rohingya crisis as the entry point to statecraft. The group’s public positioning, offering to negotiate repatriation terms with Dhaka while its fighters continue to displace Rohingya, should be understood not as a peace overture but as an attempt to launder a record of atrocity into governance credentials.
The strategic design is: secure recognition from Bangladesh and other regional actors as the de facto authority in Arakan, thereby insulating its leadership from accountability and converting a captive population into a bargaining chip. Where territorial control is leveraged to secure political legitimacy without corresponding obligations to a protected minority, the international community faces a precedent with implications far beyond Myanmar’s borders.
II. Evidence Assessment: The Record in Arakan
A. The Hoyyar Siri Massacre (2 May 2024)
At Hoyyar Siri (Htan Shauk Khan), Buthidaung Township, AA fighters fired on unarmed Rohingya villagers fleeing a captured military base. Human Rights Watch’s 56-page report, *“Skeletons and Skulls Scattered Everywhere,”* documents at least 170 killed, including approximately 90 children, with the actual toll likely higher. Survivors described fighters opening fire on civilians waving white flags; others reported being gathered in a paddy field beside a mosque and fired upon without warning, followed by beatings, torture with electric shocks, and the burning of the village.
Two years on, the AA has denied responsibility, offered no accounting, and prevented survivors from returning home. Many remain effectively detained in makeshift camps under AA control, subjected to forced labour and movement restrictions.
B. The Pattern of Expulsion
Two weeks after Hoyyar Siri, the AA seized Buthidaung town. Witness accounts describe shelling, looting, and the torching of Rohingya quarters, driving thousands toward Bangladesh. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights reported in September 2025 that over the preceding 14 months, the AA had killed, abducted, tortured, arbitrarily detained, and forcibly recruited Rohingya, and burned homes and villages. Approximately 150,000 Rohingya have crossed into Bangladesh since November 2023—an expulsion carried out by fire, gun, and terror.
C. Death at Sea: The Displacement Continuum
The expulsion does not terminate at the border. Rohingya squeezed inside overcrowded camps are pushed onto unseaworthy vessels in the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea, where drownings are recorded almost weekly and spike sharply in bad weather. These deaths are not merely accidents of nature; they are the predictable consequence of driving a people from their homes and leaving them no safe route to survival. Any actor that manufactures this displacement bears responsibility for where it ends.
D. Governance by Coercion
Multiple human rights organisations have documented the architecture of AA rule since 2024. Amnesty International, interviewing refugees who arrived in Bangladesh as recently as July 2025, concluded that for many Rohingya, the Arakan Army has replaced the military as their oppressor. The documented pattern includes:
1. Forced Labour: Institutionalised across villages, requiring every household to send a member aged 15–70 for unpaid labour—carrying materials to checkpoints, clearing battlefields, and building military infrastructure. Refusal triggers beatings, detention, or fines up to 50,000 kyat per day.
2. Restrictions on Movement: Rohingya require paid permits to travel, some valid for only two days. In some areas, only limited numbers may leave home for basic errands, and only for an hour at a time. Livelihood activities such as fishing are prohibited.
3. Forced Recruitment: Unlawful conscription of adults and children into military training and hard labour, including frontline duties.
4. Arbitrary Detention and Torture: Detainees held in AA-run prisons or makeshift centres without judicial process, reporting beatings, torture, and food denial.
5. Denial of Identity: The AA has banned the term “Rohingya” on threat of penalty, referring to the community only as “Bengalis” or “Muslims”—the same terminology the military deployed to deny Rohingya indigeneity. The AA’s commander-in-chief has publicly denied the distinct identity of the Rohingya.
The ANU Myanmar Research Centre notes that the AA possesses no legal power to grant citizenship, issue recognised identity documents, or operate a civil registry, leaving Rohingya under its rule entirely undocumented and outside any system of legal personhood. A people who can be taxed, conscripted, displaced, and conscripted—but never enfranchised—has not been integrated. It has been captured.
III. Regional and International Implications
A. Bangladesh’s Strategic Dilemma
With over 1.3 million Rohingya refugees already inside its territory and more arriving by land and sea, Dhaka faces acute pressure. The temptation to treat the ULA/AA as a negotiating partner is strategically comprehensible but diplomatically perilous. To sit across a table from a group that is actively killing and expelling Rohingya is to engage with the very force generating the crisis. Recognition without accountability would reward conquest, entrench an actor with no demonstrated commitment to Rohingya rights, and establish a corrosive precedent: that documented atrocity can be converted into diplomatic standing.
B. The Media Cell and Legitimacy Operations
The Global Arakan Network’s framing of the ULA/AA as a responsible state-in-waiting is the core of the legitimacy operation. Humanitarian engagement with AA-controlled areas is necessary for access and protection, but such engagement requires no political endorsement. De facto control of territory is not a licence to decide the fate of the people being driven off it.
C. China, India, and the Bay of Bengal
Arakan holds substantial oil and gas reserves, commands strategic Indian Ocean access, and hosts major Chinese and Indian projects, including the Kyaukphyu deep-sea port and pipeline corridor. These interests confer real leverage on external actors. That leverage should be conditioned on accountability and rights protection—not expended on shielding a group from the consequences of its conduct in exchange for commercial access.
D. ASEAN and International Justice
ASEAN’s Five-Point Consensus has achieved limited results, but the situation in Arakan offers the bloc and the wider international community a clear line: territorial control confers no legitimacy; the appropriate response to documented atrocity is judicial accountability; and any discussion of Rohingya return must include Rohingya representation and independent ground verification. States should support the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM) and the ongoing proceedings at the International Court of Justice, and preserve the path to individual prosecutions.
IV. Policy Recommendations
1. Prosecution, Not Negotiation. Bangladesh and the international community should treat the ULA/AA’s documented conduct—the Hoyyar Siri massacre and the pattern of abuse since May 2024—as a matter for accountability, not diplomacy. The group’s denial of responsibility, refusal of redress, and prevention of survivor return confirm it is not a credible counterparty.
2. Refer the ULA/AA to International Justice. States should back independent investigations, cooperate with and resource the IIMM, preserve evidence of atrocities, and pursue every available avenue—including ICJ proceedings, potential ICC referral, and universal-jurisdiction cases—to hold named perpetrators to account rather than seating them at negotiating tables.
3. Firewall Humanitarian Engagement from Political Recognition. Governments and international bodies should decline to receive the Global Arakan Network’s framing of the ULA/AA as a negotiating power. Necessary humanitarian contact must be strictly separated from political endorsement; no engagement should imply acceptance of the group’s authority over the Rohingya.
4. Protect Those Fleeing by Sea. Because expulsion is now killing Rohingya on the water, littoral states around the Bay of Bengal should strengthen search-and-rescue capacity, honour the duty of non-refoulement, and treat maritime deaths as evidence of the human cost of displacement—not as separate misfortunes of weather.
5. Mandate Rohingya Representation and Independent Verification. Rohingya must speak for themselves. No process concerning their future should be conducted by the force accused of harming them. Any eventual return must be preceded by monitored pilot returns verified by the United Nations or the ICRC, testing freedom of movement, equal safety, livelihood access, and the absence of forced labour and arbitrary detention. Without that, repatriation is not return but transfer into another form of control.
V. Conclusion
The ULA/AA’s military gains are real, and its quest for recognition is strategically rational. But recognition cannot be earned through conquest, and it certainly cannot be earned by a force documented in the killing, burning, expelling, conscripting, and detaining of the very people it now offers to “protect” people who are still drowning at sea as they flee.
Bangladesh and the international community face a plain choice. They can hold the ULA/AA to account, documenting its crimes, supporting international justice, and refusing the political recognition it craves—or they can seat it at the table without accountability, rewarding atrocity, silencing the Rohingya, and converting a massacre into a memorandum and a captive people into a bargaining chip.