Who Controls Rohingya Land in Northern Arakan?

From Burned Villages to Occupied Land

In discussions about the Rohingya crisis, the focus often falls on displacement, refugee camps, or prospects for repatriation. Yet these conversations frequently overlook a more fundamental question: what happened to the land the Rohingya left behind? Return is not simply a matter of crossing a border.

It depends on whether people can reclaim their homes, farms, mosques, and villages. In northern Arakan, that question has become increasingly difficult to answer because ownership has been eclipsed by control.

Since 2017, Rohingya land has undergone a profound transformation. Villages have been burned, bulldozed, removed from official maps, converted into military installations, and more recently subjected to new forms of control under the Arakan Army (AA). The issue is therefore no longer confined to property rights. It concerns the reordering of territory itself. In northern Arakan today, the practical question is not who legally owns the land, but who exercises power over it.

Land as an Instrument of Permanent Removal

The destruction that followed the Myanmar military’s “clearance operations” in August 2017 was never limited to attacks on people. Entire villages disappeared from the landscape.

According to Human Rights Watch, at least 288 Rohingya villages were partially or completely destroyed by fire after 25 August 2017. Satellite imagery later documented extensive bulldozing of these already abandoned settlements.

Bulldozing carried a significance beyond physical destruction. Burned buildings still bear evidence of what once existed. Foundations, roads, wells, mosques, schools, cemeteries, and property boundaries remain visible.

Bulldozers erase those traces. Human Rights Watch warned that this process threatened not only physical structures but also the evidence necessary for future accountability and the legal claims of displaced Rohingya families.

Amnesty International reached a similar conclusion in its 2018 report Remaking Rakhine State. Rather than preserving destroyed villages for eventual return, Myanmar authorities were rebuilding the landscape in the absence of its original inhabitants. Roads were widened, security compounds expanded, and military facilities constructed where Rohingya communities had once lived.

These actions reveal an important distinction. The objective was not merely to remove a population. It was to remove the physical basis upon which that population could return.

Occupation Replaced Ownership

The destruction of Rohingya villages marked the beginning of a broader process of territorial transformation. The Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM), in its 2025 public summary on the destruction and dispossession of Rohingya land and property, documented how homes, farmland, mosques, and other civilian property were systematically destroyed or seized across village tracts in northern Rakhine.

The report also detailed what replaced them.

Former Rohingya villages became sites for Border Guard Police battalion headquarters, security installations, roads, and other state infrastructure. Land once cultivated by Rohingya families was incorporated into facilities serving military and administrative purposes. These changes fundamentally altered both the physical and political geography of northern Arakan.

This transformation matters because land ownership does not exist independently of power. A family may possess historical claims to farmland, but those claims become practically meaningless when armed actors occupy the land, state institutions redesign its use, and the legal system no longer recognizes the rights of those who were expelled.

In other words, the question is no longer whether Rohingya owned these lands before 2017. That historical record is well established. The more pressing question is who controls those lands today.

Dispossession Was Administrative as Well as Military

The image of burning villages suggests spontaneous wartime destruction. The available evidence points instead to a much more organized process.

The IIMM concluded that the transformation of Rohingya land involved not only Myanmar security forces but also corporations and other entities participating in redevelopment. Reuters, reporting on the IIMM findings, likewise noted that private companies played roles in demolishing former Rohingya villages and facilitating new construction.

This observation is significant because it broadens responsibility beyond military operations. Land dispossession was implemented through administrative decisions, engineering projects, construction contracts, and long-term planning. The destruction of villages became intertwined with the creation of new infrastructure.

Such developments challenge the common perception that displacement ends once violence subsides. In northern Arakan, displacement continued through reconstruction itself. Every newly constructed security base, access road, or administrative facility on former Rohingya land made restoration increasingly difficult.

The architecture of exclusion was therefore built not only through armed force but through ordinary administrative practices.

Erasing Geography, Erasing Claims

Control over territory involves more than occupying land. It also requires controlling how that land is recorded, remembered, and represented.

One of the clearest examples concerns Kan Kya village. Reuters, later echoed in regional reporting including Prothom Alo and The Daily Star, documented how the village was burned, bulldozed, and subsequently removed from official government maps. Later, mapping systems used by international organizations reflected similar changes.

This was not simply a cartographic adjustment. Maps shape legal recognition, humanitarian planning, administrative records, and future restitution claims. When a village disappears from official records, its residents lose more than a place name. They lose documentary evidence that their community existed as a recognized settlement.

The disappearance of village names complements the destruction of physical structures. Together they produce a deeper form of erasure: one removes evidence from the landscape; the other removes evidence from official memory.

For displaced communities seeking eventual return, both forms matter equally.

Land, Citizenship, and Power

The struggle over Rohingya land cannot be separated from the question of citizenship.

For decades, Rohingya have faced systematic exclusion from Myanmar’s legal and political order. Statelessness meant that property rights were always fragile. Restrictions on movement, discriminatory land administration, and limited legal protection left Rohingya vulnerable long before the events of 2017.

The report Persecution of the Rohingya Muslims: Is Genocide Occurring in Myanmar’s Rakhine State?, published by Fortify Rights and the Yale Law School Lowenstein Clinic in 2015, documented how restrictions on movement, land access, and public participation formed part of an entrenched system of persecution before the mass expulsions.

Seen in this longer perspective, 2017 did not create Rohingya dispossession. It accelerated it dramatically.

The destruction of villages, seizure of farmland, and construction of military facilities were not isolated wartime measures. They built upon decades of legal exclusion that had already weakened Rohingya claims to land and citizenship.

This historical continuity is essential. Without it, village destruction appears as collateral damage of armed conflict. With it, the destruction becomes part of a larger political project aimed at transforming who belongs to northern Arakan and who does not.

A Question That Has Become More Complicated

For several years after 2017, identifying the authority controlling Rohingya land appeared relatively straightforward. The Myanmar military and state institutions exercised formal power across northern Rakhine. The central debate concerned whether those authorities would permit meaningful return.

That landscape has changed dramatically.

The Arakan Army’s rapid territorial expansion since late 2023 has fundamentally altered control over large parts of northern Arakan. While the legal status of Rohingya land remains unresolved, the practical authority governing much of that territory has shifted.

This creates a new question that did not exist in the immediate aftermath of the genocide. If land once seized under state authority now lies within territory controlled by a different armed administration, who exercises power over it? And what does that mean for Rohingya claims to return?

Those questions define the next phase of the Rohingya land crisis. They move the debate beyond the history of dispossession toward the emerging politics of territorial control.

From State Seizure to Armed Governance

If the first phase of Rohingya land dispossession was driven by the Myanmar state, the second phase is unfolding under a far more fragmented political landscape.

Since late 2023, the Arakan Army (AA) has steadily displaced the Myanmar military from large parts of northern Rakhine. By the end of 2024, it claimed control over Maungdaw and much of the Bangladesh border, fundamentally altering who governs territory on the ground.

This shift has encouraged a widespread assumption that the removal of the Myanmar military might create conditions for Rohingya return.

Yet the available evidence suggests that replacing one authority with another has not restored Rohingya rights over land. Instead, it has introduced a new system of territorial control, one that raises its own concerns about ownership, access, and restitution.

The question, therefore, is no longer simply whether the Myanmar state confiscated Rohingya land. It is whether that confiscated land is now being absorbed into a different political order.

A New Authority, the Same Land

The Arakan Army is no longer simply an insurgent force fighting the junta. Across much of northern Arakan, it now functions as the de facto governing authority. It controls roads, checkpoints, taxation, movement, and local administration in many areas that were once governed by the Myanmar state.

Territorial control inevitably includes control over land.

Unlike sovereignty recognized under international law, de facto authority derives from the practical ability to administer territory. Whoever collects taxes, regulates movement, allocates land, and enforces decisions exercises meaningful power regardless of formal legal status.

This distinction is crucial for understanding the Rohingya land question. While legal ownership has never been transferred from displaced Rohingya families through any legitimate judicial process, practical control has increasingly shifted to those who command armed authority on the ground.

Land rights have therefore become subordinate to territorial power.

Emerging Allegations of Redistribution

Recent reporting suggests that the politics of land in northern Arakan may be entering a new phase.

In June 2026, the Burmese Rohingya Human Rights Network (BHRN) reported that around 300 Rohingya in northern Maungdaw had been forced to construct housing for incoming ethnic Rakhine families on land that had previously belonged to Rohingya communities. According to the organization, many of those performing the construction were working on land confiscated from their own villages.

If accurate, these allegations represent more than another case of forced labour. They indicate a transition from state-led seizure toward new forms of territorial redistribution under de facto authorities.

The significance lies not simply in who occupies the land today, but in how demographic realities may be permanently reshaped. When displaced communities are prevented from returning while new settlements emerge on former Rohingya property, restitution becomes increasingly difficult both politically and practically.

Whether individual projects remain limited or become more widespread, they illustrate a broader concern: territorial authority now includes decisions over who may inhabit land once occupied by Rohingya communities.

Property Without Protection

Land ownership depends upon institutions capable of recognizing and enforcing rights. Those institutions no longer function for Rohingya in northern Arakan.

The Myanmar legal system historically denied Rohingya citizenship and offered little meaningful protection for property rights. Following displacement, displaced families lost not only physical possession of land but also effective legal access to challenge confiscation or destruction.

The transition to Arakan Army administration has not resolved that problem.

Human Rights Watch, OHCHR, and other organizations have documented allegations of land confiscation, forced labour, arbitrary detention, movement restrictions, and restrictions on livelihoods under AA control. OHCHR reported in February 2026 that there were reports of Rohingya land and property being confiscated and misappropriated by the Arakan Army, while non-Rohingya villages were reportedly being established on Rohingya land.

Whether viewed individually or collectively, these allegations indicate that Rohingya remain unable to exercise meaningful authority over their own property.

Ownership exists on paper, memory, and history. Control exists elsewhere.

Governance Through Territory

Land is rarely governed through ownership alone. It is governed through administration.

Who issues travel permits? Who determines whether farmers may cultivate fields? Who regulates construction? Who decides which communities may settle where? These questions define territorial governance more clearly than formal legal titles.

The Arakan Army’s broader administrative practices help explain why land cannot be understood separately from governance.

Recent documentation by Human Rights Watch, Fortify Rights, and OHCHR has described movement restrictions, checkpoints, forced labour, arbitrary detention, taxation, and compulsory recruitment affecting Rohingya communities living under AA control. These measures regulate daily life through territorial authority.

Land therefore becomes one element within a larger governing system.

Communities unable to move freely cannot cultivate distant farmland.

Families facing forced labour lose the capacity to maintain agricultural production.

Movement permits determine access to markets.

Security checkpoints regulate economic life.

Control over land is exercised not only through confiscation but through regulation of everything necessary to use that land.

The Return of Demographic Engineering

One of the defining characteristics of the 2017 violence was its attempt to alter the demographic composition of northern Rakhine.

The destruction of Rohingya villages was followed by new security infrastructure, expanded military installations, and redevelopment projects documented by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Reuters, and the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar.

Current allegations suggest that demographic transformation may continue under altered political circumstances.

If former Rohingya land becomes the site of new settlements for other communities while displaced owners remain unable to return, the practical consequences resemble earlier patterns even if the political actors have changed.

The mechanism differs. The outcome may not.

Demographic engineering does not necessarily require mass violence every day. It can proceed gradually through settlement policies, infrastructure development, administrative decisions, and prolonged exclusion of previous inhabitants.

For displaced populations, time itself becomes a political instrument. Every year that passes without restitution strengthens the permanence of new realities on the ground.

From Legal Erasure to Political Erasure

The destruction of Rohingya villages after 2017 was accompanied by another process: the disappearance of villages from official maps and administrative records.

Today, a similar risk emerges through political transformation.

As new governing authorities consolidate power, they inevitably produce their own administrative systems, local regulations, taxation structures, and territorial priorities. Without explicit recognition of Rohingya land rights, these institutions may normalize the post-displacement landscape rather than reverse it.

This creates what might be called political erasure.

Communities disappear not because they are forgotten, but because governance proceeds as though their absence were permanent.

Land once understood as temporarily inaccessible gradually becomes treated as permanently available for new uses.

That transformation is among the greatest obstacles facing future restitution.

Control Is Becoming More Complex

The title of this essay asks a deceptively simple question: Who controls Rohingya land in northern Arakan?

The evidence suggests there is no single answer.

The Myanmar military and state institutions remain responsible for initiating large-scale destruction, seizure, and repurposing of Rohingya villages after 2017. State agencies continue to occupy or administer parts of confiscated land through military installations and security infrastructure.

Private contractors and corporations also played documented roles in redevelopment and demolition.

Meanwhile, the Arakan Army now exercises practical authority across much of the territory where these confiscated lands are located. As de facto administrator, it increasingly influences who may use land, who may settle, and under what conditions.

Control has therefore become layered.

Legal ownership belongs overwhelmingly to displaced Rohingya families.

Historical responsibility lies primarily with the Myanmar state.

Practical authority is increasingly exercised by multiple actors.

That fragmentation makes restitution considerably more difficult than restoring property seized by a single government.

It also transforms the land question from a dispute over ownership into a struggle over sovereignty itself.

There Can Be No Return Without Land

International discussions on the Rohingya crisis almost invariably return to one question: When can the Rohingya go home? Governments speak of voluntary repatriation, humanitarian agencies discuss conditions for return, and international courts examine accountability for past crimes. Yet one question remains remarkably absent from these conversations.

What exactly are the Rohingya expected to return to?

Return is not simply the movement of people across a border. It is the restoration of the relationship between people and place. A refugee who crosses back into Myanmar but cannot reclaim a home, cultivate family farmland, worship in the village mosque, or exercise legal rights over property has not truly returned. He or she has merely entered the territory from which they were once expelled.

That distinction makes land the central question of any future solution.

Return Without Restitution Is Not Return

International law has long recognized that displacement does not extinguish property rights. Refugees do not lose ownership simply because they flee persecution. Yet in northern Arakan, the practical conditions necessary for exercising those rights have steadily disappeared.

The villages have been burned.

The houses have been bulldozed.

Military installations have been constructed.

Administrative maps have been altered.

Former settlements have been repurposed.

And in areas now under Arakan Army control, new allegations suggest that confiscated Rohingya land is being incorporated into emerging systems of territorial administration.

Taken together, these developments create a profound contradiction. International actors continue to discuss repatriation while the material foundations of return are progressively dismantled.

A return process that ignores land restitution risks transforming repatriation into relocation. Refugees may return to Myanmar, but not to the communities from which they were expelled.

The Architecture of Erasure

Land dispossession should not be understood as an unintended consequence of conflict. The available evidence suggests something more systematic.

The destruction of villages removed physical communities.

Bulldozing erased evidence.

Military construction altered land use.

Administrative changes erased villages from official records.

Settlement projects changed demographic realities.

Each of these actions served a different immediate purpose, yet together they produced a single political outcome: the weakening of future Rohingya claims to territory.

The Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar described this process as the destruction and dispossession of Rohingya land and property. Its findings indicate that homes, farms, mosques, and civilian infrastructure were not merely damaged but deliberately transformed through seizure and repurposing.

Seen together, these measures amount to an architecture of erasure.

They reshape not only the landscape but also the political possibilities available to displaced communities.

The Land Question Has Entered a New Phase

Much of the international discussion still assumes that the Rohingya land question is primarily a dispute between displaced refugees and the Myanmar state.

That assumption no longer reflects realities on the ground.

Northern Arakan today is governed through overlapping authorities. The Myanmar military remains responsible for the original destruction and many continuing violations. At the same time, the Arakan Army now exercises de facto authority across much of the territory where former Rohingya villages are located.

This creates a more complicated challenge than existed immediately after 2017.

Restitution would no longer require only legal recognition from the Myanmar state. It would also require political arrangements involving authorities that now exercise practical control over the territory.

The land question has therefore become inseparable from the question of governance.

Who allocates land?

Who recognizes ownership?

Who resolves competing claims?

Who guarantees security for returning communities?

Without clear answers, legal ownership alone offers little protection.

Citizenship and Land Cannot Be Separated

The struggle over Rohingya land ultimately returns to the issue that has defined the crisis for decades: citizenship.

Land rights depend upon legal recognition.

Legal recognition depends upon political membership.

As long as Rohingya remain excluded from Myanmar’s citizenship framework, their property rights will remain exceptionally vulnerable regardless of which authority governs northern Arakan.

This explains why the destruction of villages did not begin in 2017. Earlier restrictions on movement, land access, marriage, education, and public participation had already weakened Rohingya claims to belonging. The violence of 2017 accelerated a much older process rather than creating it.

Statelessness made dispossession possible.

Dispossession, in turn, deepened statelessness.

The two reinforce one another.

Without addressing citizenship, any attempt to restore land rights will remain fragile. Without restoring land rights, citizenship itself risks becoming an abstract legal status detached from everyday life.

International Justice Has Not Yet Produced Territorial Justice

The international response has increasingly recognized the gravity of crimes committed against the Rohingya.

The International Court of Justice continues to hear The Gambia’s genocide case against Myanmar.

The International Criminal Court is considering the Prosecutor’s application for an arrest warrant against Senior General Min Aung Hlaing for crimes against humanity.

The Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar continues collecting evidence of atrocity crimes.

These developments represent important progress in accountability.

Yet accountability alone does not restore villages.

Court proceedings cannot rebuild destroyed mosques.

Legal findings do not automatically return farmland.

Nor do they prevent new authorities from consolidating control over abandoned territory.

The gap between legal accountability and territorial justice remains substantial.

Justice requires not only identifying perpetrators but also addressing the material consequences of the crimes they committed.

For the Rohingya, those consequences are written into the geography of northern Arakan.

Repatriation Must Be Reimagined

The dominant language surrounding repatriation often emphasizes safety, voluntariness, and dignity. These principles remain essential.

But they are incomplete.

A fourth principle deserves equal attention: restitution.

Safe return without land restoration leaves displaced people dependent on whoever currently controls territory.

Voluntary return without recognized property rights exposes refugees to renewed dispossession.

Dignified return becomes difficult when former villages no longer exist.

This is particularly significant in northern Arakan today, where territorial authority is fragmented and contested.

Future repatriation frameworks cannot assume that returning refugees will simply resume life where they left off. In many places, the physical, administrative, and political landscape has been fundamentally altered.

Recognizing this reality is not an argument against repatriation. It is an argument for making repatriation meaningful.

Who Controls Rohingya Land?

The title of this essay asks a simple question.

The answer is neither simple nor singular.

Legally, much of the land still belongs to Rohingya families who were forced to flee.

Historically, the Myanmar military and state institutions bear primary responsibility for destroying villages, confiscating property, and reshaping northern Rakhine after 2017.

Administratively, state agencies, security institutions, and documented corporate actors participated in transforming that landscape.

Practically, however, control over large parts of northern Arakan has increasingly shifted to the Arakan Army, whose growing territorial authority has been accompanied by new allegations of land confiscation, forced labour, and settlement on former Rohingya land.

Ownership and control have become separated.

The Rohingya retain historical claims.

Others increasingly exercise power.

That distinction explains why the land question has become the central political question of post-genocide Rakhine.

Conclusion

The destruction of Rohingya villages did not end when the fires of 2017 subsided. It continued through bulldozers, military installations, administrative redesign, altered maps, and new systems of territorial governance.

The struggle over Rohingya land is therefore not about property alone. It concerns sovereignty, memory, citizenship, and the conditions under which a displaced people can genuinely return.

International debate often treats repatriation as a humanitarian objective. But humanitarian return without territorial justice risks legitimizing the very transformations that displacement was intended to achieve.

The future of northern Arakan will not be determined solely by who controls its borders or who governs its townships. It will also be determined by whether the people who were driven from their land are allowed to reclaim it.

Until that question is answered, the issue is not simply whether Rohingya can return home.

It is whether home still exists in any meaningful legal, political, or territorial sense.

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References

Amnesty International. Remaking Rakhine State. 2018.

Fortify Rights & Yale Law School Lowenstein Clinic. Persecution of the Rohingya Muslims: Is Genocide Occurring in Myanmar’s Rakhine State? 2015.

Human Rights Watch. Scores of Rohingya Villages Bulldozed. 2018.

Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM). Destruction and Dispossession of Rohingya Land and Property – Public Summary. 2025.

Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM). Press Release, 29 September 2025.

OHCHR. Report on the Situation of Human Rights of Rohingya Muslims and Other Minorities in Myanmar. 2025.

Reuters. Erasing the Rohingya. 2018.

Reuters. Myanmar Army Razed Rohingya Villages to Build Security Outposts, UN-Backed Report Says. 2025.

Burmese Rohingya Human Rights Network (BHRN). Arakan Army Forcing Rohingya to Build Settlements for Rakhine on Their Own Confiscated Land. 15 June 2026.

Associated Press. Reporting on Arakan Army control of Maungdaw and northern Rakhine. 2024.

UK Home Office. Myanmar: Rohingya Country Policy and Information Note. 2026.