From a centuries-old community in the kingdom of Arakan to one of the world's largest stateless populations — how law, politics, and violence progressively unmade a people's place in their own land.
The Rohingya are a predominantly Muslim people of Arakan — today’s Rakhine State, on Myanmar’s western coast. Their presence in the region spans centuries, yet over the past seventy years successive governments have recast them from citizens into outsiders, culminating in statelessness, mass expulsion, and the crisis that continues today.
From the 15th to the 18th century, Arakan flourished as an independent and cosmopolitan kingdom. The kingdom of Mrauk U maintained deep cultural, political, and commercial ties across the Bay of Bengal. Muslim communities were already established in the region and were part of the social life of the Arakan coast long before modern borders divided Burma, Bengal, and South Asia.
This early period matters because it shows that the Muslim population of Arakan was not a sudden colonial creation. The Rohingya identity developed within Arakan’s own historical landscape, shaped by centuries of local settlement, regional exchange, and coexistence.
In 1785, Arakan was conquered by the Bamar, the dominant ethnic group in Burma. The Burmese occupation was harsh and deeply disruptive. Thousands of Rakhine men were executed, many people were deported to central Burma, and large numbers fled across the border into British Bengal to escape persecution. By 1799, as many as 35,000 people had fled from Arakan into British Bengal.
Around this period, one of the earliest recorded mentions of the term “Rohingya” appeared in British literature. In 1799, Dr. Francis Buchanan-Hamilton, a British physician and geographer, wrote that the Muslims who had long settled in Arakan called themselves “Rooinga,” meaning natives of Arakan. His account also distinguished them from the Buddhist Rakhine population. This reference is important because it records both the presence of a long-settled Muslim community in Arakan and the use of a name connected to Rohingya identity.
In 1823, Burma came under British rule after a number of wars. Under British administration, Arakan became connected to British India, and the colonial economy encouraged Bengali and other Indian labourers to move into Burma for work in paddy fields, plantations, and other sectors. However, these later colonial-era migrants were distinct from the Rohingya, who had already maintained their own language and community identity in Arakan.
British rule changed the political balance of Burma. The Burmese Buddhist majority felt threatened and unsupported under colonial rule. Traditionally, Burmese kings had claimed legitimacy through protection of the Buddhist religious hierarchy. Under the British, that old order was weakened. Burmese nationalist leaders used anti-Muslim sentiment as a political tool, falsely blaming Muslim communities for the loss of power and privilege under colonial rule, in order to build resentment and mobilise support for Buddhist nationalist movements. This hostility toward Muslims was not a response to real advantages they held, but a manufactured narrative designed to fuel ethnic and religious division.
During the Second World War, Japan invaded Burma and the British retreated toward India. Burmese nationalists welcomed the Japanese because they saw Japan’s arrival as a way to remove British colonial power. The Rohingya, however, remained loyal to the British side, a position rooted in their lived experience and their hope that loyalty would bring protection.
Buddhist Rakhine militias, operating in coordination with Japanese forces, launched systematic attacks on Rohingya villages across Arakan. Massacres, arson, mass displacement, and targeted killing of Rohingya civilians were carried out under this alliance. The Rohingya were the victims of organised violence, not its cause. While the British did provide some arms to Rohingya communities during this period, this was a response to the violence already being inflicted upon them — not the origin of the conflict. The full moral and historical responsibility for the bloodshed of this period lies with those who chose to attack a Muslim civilian population: the Rakhine militias and their Japanese allies. The war years left deep wounds in Arakan, but those wounds were inflicted on the Rohingya, not shared equally between communities.
Japan left Burma in 1945, and in 1948, Burma received formal independence from Britain. For much of the country, this was a transition of political power. For the Rohingya, however, independence did not bring freedom. The new Burmese state moved quickly to marginalise and suppress the Rohingya rather than include them as equal citizens. The transfer of power from British hands to Burmese nationalist hands meant, for the Rohingya, replacing one form of vulnerability with a far more direct and hostile form of exclusion.
From the earliest days of the independent state, the Rohingya faced systematic discrimination. Despite living in Arakan for generations, they were denied full citizenship rights, subjected to movement restrictions, excluded from key positions, and treated as foreigners in their own land. The state did not recognise them as legitimate members of the national community. Any limited political participation by individual Rohingya existed despite institutional discrimination, not because of any sincere commitment to their rights.
Some Rohingya movements sought union with the newly formed state of Pakistan, reflecting the deep uncertainty and genuine fear about their future inside Burma. The question of Rohingya belonging became one of the central unresolved issues of post-independence Burma.
In 1962, General Ne Win’s military coup brought Burma under decades of military rule. The military government narrowed the definition of who belonged to the nation and strengthened the link between Burmese nationalism and Theravada Buddhism. Among all minority communities in Burma, the Rohingya were targeted most directly and most severely. They were not simply one persecuted group among many; they were the primary focus of the military’s campaign to define Burmese identity in exclusionary terms. The Rohingya faced the denial of citizenship, restrictions on movement and marriage, and institutional violence that exceeded what other minorities experienced.
In 1978, Operation Nagamin, also known as King Dragon, drove around 200,000 Rohingya into Bangladesh amid widespread abuse. This became the first mass expulsion of the Rohingya in the modern era. Many later returned, but the operation set a dangerous precedent: the state could use military force, citizenship suspicion, and accusations of foreignness to push Rohingya out of their homeland.
During the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971, conflict across the border brought immense suffering to millions of Bengalis. Some displaced people briefly moved near the Arakan border area. However, this created no genuine demographic threat to Buddhist communities in Arakan, and the narrative that Bangladeshis posed a danger was a false construction used by the Burmese military to serve its own political goals. The Burmese government used the instability of the period as a pretext to expel more than 200,000 Muslims from Arakan — the great majority of them native Rohingya who had no connection to Bangladesh and no part in the war across the border.
This period strengthened the state’s false narrative that Muslims in Arakan were outsiders, even though all Rohingya had deep historical roots in the region going back centuries. The government deliberately blurred the distinction between refugees from Bangladesh and the long-settled Rohingya population of Arakan, providing itself with a convenient excuse to deny an indigenous people their rightful identity and home.
In 1982, the Burmese government enacted the Citizenship Law. The law identified 135 officially recognised ethnic groups that the government claimed had settled in Burma before 1823, but it excluded the Rohingya. The use of 1823 as a historical cutoff was a deliberate act of erasure. The Rohingya had been present in Arakan for centuries before British influence began. Where population movement did occur during the colonial period, it was often the result of forced economic displacement, colonial labour policies, and circumstances imposed on ordinary people from above — not voluntary migration. The Burmese government selected this cutoff date knowing it could reclassify an indigenous people as colonial-era migrants, erasing their centuries of prior presence and belonging in Arakan.
For the Rohingya, the 1982 Citizenship Law was a turning point. It turned exclusion into law and laid the foundation for statelessness. A community with generations of history in Arakan was officially denied recognition as one of the country’s national races. This legal exclusion became the basis for later restrictions on movement, marriage, education, employment, political participation, and access to basic rights.
In 1991 and 1992, another military campaign forced roughly 250,000 Rohingya into Bangladesh. Forced labour, land confiscation, movement restrictions, and abuse became routine instruments of control in northern Arakan. This second mass exodus showed that the 1978 expulsion had not been an isolated event. It had become part of a repeated pattern: pressure, violence, displacement, partial return, and continued restriction.
From the 1980s through the 2000s, Myanmar’s military government used a mixture of Burmese nationalism and Theravada Buddhism to strengthen its legitimacy. It promoted the idea that Burma was fundamentally a land for Burmese Buddhists and treated minority communities as threats to national unity.
The Rohingya, along with other minority groups, faced heavy discrimination. The government used “us versus them” rhetoric to unite the majority population behind military rule. This political atmosphere made the Rohingya increasingly vulnerable, because they were portrayed not as an indigenous community with rights, but as outsiders whose presence could be questioned or removed.
In 2012, waves of communal violence broke out between Rohingya Muslims and Buddhist Rakhines in Arakan. Villages were burned, many people were killed, and well over 100,000 people were displaced. Tens of thousands of Rohingya were confined to camps around Sittwe, where they became segregated from the wider population and dependent on humanitarian aid.
Burmese authorities recorded 78 people killed — a figure widely considered to be a severe undercount of the true death toll. These were not neutral casualties of mutual conflict. They were Rohingya civilians killed by Burmese mobs and, in many documented cases, by security forces who either participated in the violence or stood aside while it was carried out. Around 140,000 people were displaced, the overwhelming majority of them Rohingya, who lost their homes, livelihoods, and freedom of movement.
After the violence, the government imposed curfews and deployed the military in Arakan. These measures led to increased arrests, movement restrictions, and targeted violence against the Rohingya.
The 2012 violence marked a major shift. Rohingya communities were no longer only legally excluded; many were physically segregated into camps and cut off from normal life. The denial of citizenship became joined with spatial confinement, aid dependency, and long-term social isolation.
In 2016 and 2017, the Myanmar military used a series of attacks attributed to a shadowy armed organisation as the pretext for its so-called “clearance operations.” This organisation, whose true origins and sponsors remain the subject of serious scrutiny, is widely believed by researchers and analysts to have been instrumentalised — or directly facilitated — by elements within the military establishment itself, in order to manufacture a justification for violence that had been planned long in advance. The attacks gave the military the public pretext it needed. The scale, coordination, and deliberate targeting of civilians in the operations that followed made clear that what occurred was not a counter-insurgency response, but a prepared campaign of mass atrocity. The armed organisation served as a tool to give genocide a false legitimacy.
From August 2017, more than 700,000 Rohingya fled to Bangladesh amid mass killings, sexual violence, and the burning of villages. UN investigators later concluded that the violence carried the hallmarks of genocide, and the case reached the International Court of Justice.
The 2017 crisis became the largest and most visible mass displacement of the Rohingya. Entire villages were destroyed, families were separated, and survivors crossed into Bangladesh with accounts of killings, rape, arson, and military brutality. The refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar became home to one of the world’s largest refugee populations.
In 2021, Myanmar’s military seized power again, overthrowing the elected civilian government and plunging the country into nationwide conflict. In Arakan, the Arakan Army grew in strength, challenging the authority of the military regime and changing the balance of power on the ground.
For the Rohingya, the coup created new uncertainty. The community remained stateless, restricted, and vulnerable, while the wider conflict around them became more complex. Their future was now shaped not only by the military junta, but also by rising armed actors and shifting territorial control in Arakan.
From 2023 to 2026, as the Arakan Army took control of large parts of Arakan, Rohingya civilians were again caught in violence, arson, forced displacement, and political uncertainty. The retreating junta and the rising de facto authority created a dangerous environment in which Rohingya communities faced renewed risk.
The Rohingya who survived the 2017 atrocities now face another chapter of danger. Many remain trapped between armed powers, denied citizenship by the state, and excluded from meaningful protection. Their history shows that each wave of violence has been made possible by the one before it: first identity was questioned, then citizenship was stripped, then movement was restricted, then communities were segregated, and finally villages were erased.
The Rohingya story is not only a story of displacement. It is a history of belonging denied. For centuries, Muslim communities lived in Arakan as part of the region’s social and cultural landscape. Over time, state policies, military rule, ethnic nationalism, and repeated violence transformed them into outsiders in their own homeland.
Understanding this timeline is essential because the present crisis did not appear suddenly. It was built step by step through conquest, colonial tension, wartime violence, post-independence exclusion, military operations, the 1982 Citizenship Law, mass expulsions, camp confinement, and genocidal violence. The Rohingya crisis is therefore not only a humanitarian emergency; it is the result of a long political process of erasure.
Today, any honest account of Arakan and Myanmar must recognise the Rohingya as a people with deep historical roots, a people whose identity has survived despite repeated attempts to deny it, and a people whose future depends on justice, citizenship, protection, and the restoration of their rightful place in their homeland.
This account synthesises widely documented history from academic, UN, and human-rights sources. Dates and figures reflect the established public record and are presented for orientation.
