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Thursday, 22 May 2025

Rohingya people

Indo-Aryan ethnic group of western Myanmar


Rohingya people
Rohingya people

The Rohingya people are a stateless Indo-Aryan ethnolinguistic group who predominantly follow Islam and reside in Bangladesh and Rakhine State, Myanmar, with an approximate additional one quarter of the population living in Pakistan. Before the Rohingya genocide in 2017, when over 740,000 fled to Bangladesh, an estimated 1.4 million Rohingya lived in Myanmar. Described by journalists and news outlets as one of the most persecuted minorities in the world, the Rohingya are denied citizenship under the 1982 Myanmar nationality law. There are also restrictions on their freedom of movement, access to state education and civil service jobs. The legal conditions faced by the Rohingya in Myanmar have been compared to apartheid by some academics, analysts and political figures, including Nobel laureate Bishop Desmond Tutu, a South African anti-apartheid activist. The most recent mass displacement of Rohingya in 2017 led the International Criminal Court to investigate crimes against humanity, and the International Court of Justice to investigate in the genocide.

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