Abu Ammar
In Hoyyar Siri, a Rohingya village in Buthidaung Township, Human Rights Watch found that the Arakan Army killed and wounded hundreds of Rohingya civilians on 2 May 2024, including villagers who were reportedly unarmed and seeking safety. More than 170 villagers, including about 90 children, were listed as killed or missing. The village was later burned, and survivors could not return.
This is not a footnote to the Rohingya crisis. It is evidence that the violence did not end with the Myanmar military’s 2017 clearance operations. It continued, changed form, and now operates through more than one coercive power in Rakhine.
The Past Is Not Past
The 2017 atrocities remain the central reference point for understanding the Rohingya crisis. Myanmar security forces carried out mass killings, rape, torture, village burnings, and forced displacement after attacks by ARSA on security posts. More than 700,000 Rohingya fled to Bangladesh. Médecins Sans Frontières estimated that at least 6,700 Rohingya, including at least 730 children under five, were killed in the first month.
The Inn Din massacre exposed the mechanics of that violence in miniature. Ten Rohingya men were executed and buried in a mass grave. Reuters investigated the case, and the Myanmar military later acknowledged involvement. The significance of Inn Din was not only the killing itself. It showed how military power, local collaboration, and impunity operated together.
After 2017, destruction continued through another method. Former Rohingya villages were razed, repurposed, and overwritten by security infrastructure and state projects. Reuters reported in 2025 that a UN backed investigation found villages, religious sites, and farmland systematically destroyed and replaced with security outposts. The violence was not only against bodies. It was also against land, memory, and the possibility of return.
A New Perpetrator in an Old Structure
The Arakan Army’s rise has changed the political map of Rakhine, but it has not produced safety for Rohingya. Human Rights Watch’s 2026 report on Hoyyar Siri found that AA fighters deliberately fired on unarmed villagers seeking safety, including civilians waving white flags. HRW concluded that the attack involved grave violations of the laws of war amounting to war crimes.
The Arakan Army denied committing war crimes and said it targeted only military personnel or members of Rohingya armed groups. HRW said its findings contradicted that claim. The evidence included witness and survivor interviews, satellite imagery, and verified photographs and videos.
The massacre was not the only documented abuse. HRW also reported robbery of cash and jewelry, beatings, torture including electric shocks, abduction of Rohingya women and girls, forced relocation to a makeshift camp, denial of movement, forced labor, and shortages of food and medical care.
This is the central political fact. The junta remains responsible for the historical architecture of Rohingya persecution. But the Arakan Army has emerged as a second coercive authority, exercising power over Rohingya lives through killing, displacement, detention, forced labor, and restriction.
Flight Has Also Become a Killing Ground
In August 2024, Rohingya civilians fleeing toward Bangladesh were attacked near the Naf River in Maungdaw Township. Fortify Rights said more than 100 Rohingya women, children, and men were killed by drone and shelling attacks. Reuters reported many dozens killed, with some estimates above 200. OHCHR said responsibility remained unclear, while survivors and Fortify Rights attributed fire to AA positions and the AA denied responsibility.
The precise attribution of every strike remains contested, but the pattern is clear. Rohingya civilians were not safe in their villages, and they were not safe while fleeing. Some drowned when overcrowded boats sank amid attacks, shelling, and panic. One survivor reported losing five children.
This repeats a cruel logic familiar from 2017. Rohingya are exposed to violence when they stay, and exposed again when they move. Flight, which should be a route to survival, becomes another site of death.
Starvation as Slow Violence
Violence in Rakhine is not produced only by bullets, drones, and arson. It is also produced through hunger, blocked aid, collapsed agriculture, and the denial of basic survival conditions.
UNDP warned in November 2024 that more than 2 million people in Rakhine were at risk of starvation and that local food production could cover only 20 percent of needs by March to April 2025. This was not merely a food security warning. It described a social order in which conflict, blockade, trade disruption, aid restriction, and displacement were making survival structurally impossible.
For Rohingya, starvation operates within an existing history of exclusion. A population denied citizenship, movement, land security, and legal protection is already vulnerable to survival collapse. When food and medical access are obstructed, the boundary between humanitarian crisis and persecution becomes harder to maintain.
The Legal Process Is Moving, but Protection Is Not
International justice has not been absent. The Gambia filed a genocide case against Myanmar at the International Court of Justice in 2019. Merits hearings were held in January 2026. At the International Criminal Court, Prosecutor Karim Khan requested an arrest warrant in November 2024 for Min Aung Hlaing for alleged crimes against humanity of deportation and persecution of Rohingya.
These processes matter. They record responsibility, preserve evidence, and challenge denial. But they have not yet protected Rohingya civilians on the ground. The ICJ process did not prevent Hoyyar Siri. It did not prevent the Naf River killings. It did not stop village destruction, starvation risk, forced labor, or renewed displacement.
That does not make international justice irrelevant. It exposes its limitation. Legal recognition without immediate protection leaves survivors waiting inside the same structures that produced their suffering.
Return Without Protection Would Reproduce Persecution
The evidence from 2024 to 2026 makes one conclusion unavoidable. Any discussion of Rohingya repatriation that ignores current conditions in Rakhine is politically dishonest.
Rakhine is not simply a post 2017 landscape awaiting safe return. It is a militarized territory shaped by junta violence, Arakan Army abuses, starvation risk, land destruction, denial of citizenship, and restricted movement. In some areas, Rohingya are caught between armed actors, including the junta, the AA, and Rohingya armed groups. In others, they are subject to coercive governance by whichever actor controls the ground.
Human Rights Watch’s framing is therefore crucial. Hoyyar Siri shows that return to Rakhine remains unsafe not only under the junta but also under Arakan Army control. This changes the repatriation debate. Safety cannot be measured only by whether the Myanmar military is present. It must be measured by whether Rohingya can live with citizenship, movement, land rights, protection from forced labor, access to food and medicine, and legal remedy.
None of those conditions currently exists in a reliable form.
The Structure Remains
The Rohingya genocide should not be treated as a closed event that occurred in 2017 and now survives only as memory, trauma, or legal evidence. The structures that made it possible remain active: statelessness, impunity, territorial exclusion, militarized control, denial of identity, and the destruction of survival conditions.
What has changed is the configuration of power. The junta remains central. But the Arakan Army has become part of the present danger. That reality does not erase the military’s responsibility. It expands the field of accountability.
The analytical error would be to treat each incident separately: Hoyyar Siri as one massacre, the Naf River attacks as one border tragedy, starvation as one humanitarian crisis, forced labor as one governance abuse. The stronger reading is that these events are connected by a durable structure of domination.
The Rohingya are still being denied the ordinary conditions of protected life. They are denied safety at home, safety in flight, safety in camps, and safety in return. Until that structure is dismantled, the question is not whether the genocide ended in 2017. The question is how it has been allowed to continue under new forms.
References
Human Rights Watch. “Skeletons and Skulls Scattered Everywhere”: Arakan Army Massacre of Rohingya Muslims in Hoyyar Siri, Myanmar. 2026.
Human Rights Watch. Myanmar: No Redress for Rohingya Muslims in Arakan Army Massacre. 2026.
Human Rights Watch. Myanmar: New Atrocities Against Rohingya. 2024.
Human Rights Watch. World Report 2025: Myanmar. 2025.
Amnesty International. Myanmar/Bangladesh: Rohingya community facing gravest threats since 2017. 2024.
Amnesty International. Myanmar: Rohingya repatriation ‘catastrophic’ under existing conditions in northern Rakhine State. 2025.
OHCHR. Myanmar: Türk deplores attacks on civilians fleeing Rakhine, fears repeat of 2017 atrocities against Rohingya. 2024.
OHCHR. Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, A/80/490. 2025.
OHCHR. Report of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar. 2018.
UNDP. Rakhine: A Famine in the Making. 2024.
International Court of Justice. Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, The Gambia v. Myanmar. Ongoing.
International Criminal Court. Situation in Bangladesh/Myanmar: Prosecutor’s application for arrest warrant for Min Aung Hlaing. 2024.
Fortify Rights. International Criminal Court: Investigate Arakan Army Massacre of Rohingya Civilians, Hold Perpetrators Accountable. 2024.
Fortify Rights. Myanmar: Arakan Army Subjecting Ethnic Minorities to Forced Labor. 2025.
Médecins Sans Frontières. MSF surveys estimate that at least 6,700 Rohingya were killed during attacks in Myanmar. 2017.
Reuters. Many dozens of Rohingya, including children, killed in drone attack while fleeing Myanmar, witnesses say. 2024.
Reuters. Why is the ICC prosecutor pursuing Myanmar’s top general? 2024.
Reuters. Myanmar army razed Rohingya villages to build security outposts, UN backed report says. 2025.
AP. Hearings on whether Myanmar committed genocide against the Rohingya opens at top UN court. 2026.
