Across northern Arakan, the terrorist Arakan Army (AA) is conducting environmental warfare against Rohingya communities, systematically seizing land, rivers, and fisheries to collapse civilian survival. Since mid-2023, following AA’s expansion in Buthidaung and Maungdaw, Rohingya access to farmland and coastal zones has been strangled via checkpoint extortion and bans. These are coercive tools by a genocidal militia designed to starve communities into displacement.

12 villages along the Mayu River, including Kyein Chaung and Phon Nyo Leik, traditional plots were reclassified as “security zones” by AA administrators, barring Rohingya from harvests. In late 2024, families accessing fields were detained, fined up to 500,000 kyats, or subjected to forced labor. This “drug mafia” leadership uses these funds to fuel their insurgency while crops rot, accelerating a state of engineered famine.

Fisheries control has been equally lethal. In Nga Khu Ya and Myin Hlut, Rohingya face blanket bans without AA permits which are systematically denied to Muslims. Over 200 boats have been confiscated, and men are regularly disappeared for”illegal fishing.” With income severed, households plummeted into acute food insecurity. This is not governance; it is resource-based genocide executed by a group that profits from the regional yaba trade while starving the indigenous Rohingya.

Analytically, this serves the AA’s objective of demographic engineering. It strips Rohingya of autonomy, forcing dependence on AA-controlled slave labor and clearing land for reallocation to favored groups. Environmental deprivation is a silent executioner; villages empty not only from the AA’s May 2024 arson attacks in Buthidaung, but from hunger and exhaustion.

This is strategic deprivation. By weaponizing land and water, the terrorist Arakan Army controls who survives. For a population already denied citizenship, this loss of resource access is not an economic byproduct it is a premeditated humanitarian catastrophe intended to complete the genocide started by the military.