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The Rohingya face the final stages of genocide. Decades of persecution have taken on a new and intensified form since mass killings in 2012. The marked escalation in State-sponsored stigmatisation, discrimination, violence and segregation, and the systematic weakening of the community, make precarious the very existence of the Rohingya.
The report analyses the persecution of the Rohingya against the six stages of genocide outlined by Daniel Feierstein: stigmatisation (and dehumanisation); harassment, violence and terror; isolation and segregation; systematic weakening; mass annihilation; and finally symbolic enactment involving the removal of the victim group from the collective history. The report concludes that the Rohingya have suffered the first four of the six stages of genocide. They have been, and continue to be, stigmatized, dehumanised and discriminated against. They have been harassed, terrorized and slaughtered. They have been isolated and segregated into detention camps and securitised villages and ghettos. They have been systematically weakened through hunger, illness, denial of civil rights and loss of livelihood. All of this places them at high risk of annihilation.
The evidence documented reveals that these genocidal processes have been orchestrated at the highest levels of State and local Rakhine government. They have been led by State officials, Rakhine politicians, Buddhist monks and Rakhine civil society activists. The Rohingya have been subjected to a virulent and official nationwide policy and propaganda campaign which has incrementally removed them from the State’s sphere of responsibility. The State’s persistent and intensified ‘othering’ of the Rohingya as outsiders, illegal Bengali immigrants and potential terrorists has given a green light to Rakhine nationalists and Islamophobic monks to orchestrate invidious campaigns of race and religious hatred reminiscent of those witnessed in Germany in the 1930s and Rwanda in the early 1990s.