The new Al Jazeera English documentary places the 2017 exodus within a much longer history of citizenship denial, discrimination, military campaigns and repeated forced displacement of the Rohingya.
by RK Desk
20 August 2026: Al Jazeera English has released a new documentary examining how decades of persecution and systematic exclusion in Myanmar drove successive generations of Rohingya from their homeland, challenging narratives that treat the Rohingya crisis as beginning only with the mass displacement of 2017.
Published under the title “How decades of persecution displaced Myanmar’s Rohingya,” the documentary is part of Al Jazeera’s Untangles series, which explains complex historical and political issues through documentary storytelling.
The programme traces how the Rohingya were gradually deprived of citizenship and state protection in Myanmar and how repeated waves of persecution eventually produced one of the world’s largest stateless refugee populations.
Al Jazeera describes the episode as examining how Myanmar stripped the Rohingya of citizenship and protection, leading to mass expulsions that are now at the centre of a genocide case before the International Court of Justice.
The Crisis Did Not Begin in 2017
The documentary’s central significance is its historical framing.
More than 700,000 Rohingya fled Myanmar for Bangladesh following the military crackdown that began in August 2017. But the community’s displacement had begun decades earlier.
Rohingya had faced repeated military operations and mass displacement before 2017, including a major exodus into Bangladesh in 1978 and another involving hundreds of thousands of refugees in 1991–92.
The erosion of their legal status also developed over decades. Myanmar’s 1982 Citizenship Law created a citizenship system under which most Rohingya were progressively excluded from full citizenship and later subjected to increasingly restrictive documentation and verification regimes.
Over time, Rohingya faced severe restrictions on movement, marriage, education, healthcare and livelihoods, while successive Myanmar governments increasingly denied their ethnic identity and portrayed them as outsiders.
The result was not a single episode of displacement but a prolonged process in which legal exclusion, administrative restrictions, military violence and recurring expulsions reinforced one another.
2017 Brought the Largest Exodus
That process reached its most devastating point in 2017, when Myanmar’s military launched operations across northern Rakhine following attacks by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army on security posts.
The military campaign involved mass killings, sexual violence and the destruction of Rohingya villages, according to UN investigations and international human rights organisations.
Hundreds of thousands crossed into Bangladesh within months, joining Rohingya who had fled earlier waves of violence and persecution.
The 2017 campaign later became central to international accountability efforts, including the genocide case against Myanmar before the International Court of Justice.
A History That Shapes the Question of Return
The documentary’s historical perspective is particularly relevant as Bangladesh and Myanmar again discuss possible Rohingya repatriation.
Myanmar’s military junta recently said it had verified 308,797 Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh as former residents of Rakhine State and could receive them if security conditions improve.
But Rohingya representatives have repeatedly argued that recognition of former residence alone does not resolve the conditions that produced their displacement.
They have demanded recognition of their Rohingya identity, citizenship, freedom of movement, security, restoration of homes and land, and guarantees against renewed persecution before returning.
The history highlighted by Al Jazeera helps explain why those demands remain central.
For Rohingya refugees, return is not simply a question of crossing the Bangladesh-Myanmar border. It involves whether the political and legal structures that progressively excluded them from their homeland will actually change.
Nearly nine years after the 2017 mass exodus, more than one million Rohingya remain in Bangladesh, while others continue to live under severe restrictions and conflict inside Rakhine State.
Al Jazeera’s documentary brings that longer history back into focus at a time when international attention is once again turning toward repatriation—showing that the Rohingya crisis cannot be understood, or sustainably resolved, without confronting the decades of exclusion that preceded 2017.
