In the last six months of 2017, more than 600,000 people, over half of the Rohingya population of Rakhine state, an area in Western Burma (the nation also called Myanmar), have become refugees on the Bangladeshi side of its border with its neighbor. Thousands more are internally displaced. While access to the affected region is difficult and sometimes dangerous, reports of rape by Burmese soldiers, often orchestrated, have been reported by humanitarian organizations and major news outlets. Mass killings have also been reported by witnesses and survivors.

The Rohingya have been described as the “most persecuted” and “least wanted” people on earth. As stateless persons not recognized as citizens by the Burmese government, the Rohingya have been systematically oppressed, with bouts of increased violence and military crackdowns in 1978, 1991-2, 2012, and as recently as 2015. When violence broke out in August 2017, many in the US were caught unaware. Ethnic cleansing in the Rakhine state, as some UN officials have described, seemingly came out of nowhere. However, a deeper understanding of the politicization of religious differences in Myanmar explains why the rejection of religious pluralism by the ruling Buddhist majority was so dangerous.

Experts have warned that the Rohingya are at risk of genocide and Myanmar has been near the top of their early warnings at-risk regions for years, according to Gittleman of the Holocaust Museum, but the international community took no action.

In the United States, the situation of the Rohingya may seem extremely distant; but we should not be complacent.

Read the full article by Marni Morse about stopping the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya from The Aspen Institute