READ FOR ROHINGYA

The Rohingya people are a stateless, ethnic Muslim minority group from Rakhine State, Myanmar, also known as Burma.  Myanmar is bordered by India and Bangladesh to its west, Thailand and Laos to its east and China to its north and northeast.

Described by the United Nations in 2013 as one of the most persecuted minorities in the world, the Rohingya people are denied citizenship under the 1982 Myanmar nationality law, despite the fact that Rohingya history can be traced back to the 8th century.  The Rohingya people are denied political, civil, economic and cultural rights… restricted from freedom of movement, state education and more, all due to the fact that Myanmar law does not recognise their ethnicity as one of the eight national races.

The Rohingya people have a heritage of over a millennium and maintain that they are indigenous to Western Myanmar, however, the current official position of the Myanmar government is that the Rohingyas are not a national race, but that they are illegal immigrants from neighbouring Bangladesh.  Prior to the 2015 Rohingya refugee crisis and military crackdown in 2016 and 2017 the Rohingya population in Myanmar was estimated to be around 1.1 to 1.3 million.

During 2015 a mass migration of thousands of Rohingya people from Myanmar and Bangladesh resulted in what is now referred to as the Rohingya refugee crisis.

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