Why Rohingya refugees are protesting in Cox’s Bazar, 9 years after genocide

EXPLAINERRohingya refugees face deep aid cuts in Bangladesh and forced evictions in Malaysia and India.Rohingya refugees protest, nine years after exodus to BangladeshPublished On 25 Aug 2026On Monday, hundreds of Rohingya refugees gathered at Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh demanding justice and the right to return to their homes, on the ninth anniversary of the genocide perpetrated against them in Myanmar. Since then, more than one million stateless Rohingya have remained stranded in tightly packed camps in Bangladesh’s coastal district of Cox’s Bazar, where living conditions are steadily deteriorating as international aid declines.The presence of the Rohingya in Bangladesh has made the South Asian country home to one of the world’s largest refugee populations.Key bodies and actors have deemed the Rohingya crisis a genocide, including United Nations officials and former United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken in 2022, but what action has the international community taken, and is there any resolution in sight?Who are the Rohingya?As of 2021, there were an estimated 120,000 Rohingya, a Muslim-majority ethnic group, internally displaced in Myanmar. They have been described by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres as “one of, if not the, most discriminated people in the world”.Before 2017, there were more than one million Rohingya in Myanmar.While Myanmar is an ethnically diverse nation, with 135 major ethnic groups and seven ethnic minority states, according to the international human rights organisation, Minority Rights Group, the Rohingya are not formally recognised as one of them. They have been denied citizenship in Myanmar since 1982, which makes them the world’s largest stateless group. The Burmese are the largest and most dominant ethnic group in Myanmar.The government of Myanmar, a predominantly Buddhist country, views the Rohingya as undocumented immigrants from Bangladesh. They were not included in the country’s 2014 national census.Nearly all the Rohingya remaining in Myanmar live in the coastal state of Rakhine, which was called Arakan until 1989 and which borders Bangladesh.Why did so many Rohingya flee to Bangladesh?The Myanmar military has repeatedly cracked down on the Rohingya in Rakhine state since the 1970s.Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, was under military rule for five decades until the 2015 election, when Aung San Suu Kyi won a landslide victory.While Aung San Suu Kyi’s electoral victory was initially viewed as a desperately needed reprieve from a long period of military regimes, she remained silent on the issue of the Rohingya, who continued to suffer harassment.In August 2017, a violent military crackdown forced more than 700,000 Rohingya refugees to flee across the border into Bangladesh. Many refugees have since reported rape, torture, arson and murder by Myanmar security forces, backed by Buddhist groups.Soon after the military campaign against the Rohingya began, Human Rights Watch reported that at least 200 Rohingya villages had been destroyed and burned by the military, while an estimated 13,000 Rohingya were killed. Doctors Without Borders, known by its French initials MSF, reported that at least 6,700 Rohingya were killed in the first month, including more than 700 children below the age of five.The 2017 crackdown is now the subject of an ongoing genocide case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, filed by The Gambia in 2019.Aung San Suu Kyi was deposed in a military coup in February 2021, prompting mass protests which evolved into an armed uprising after the generals responded with force.Since then, violence against Rohingya remaining in Myanmar has continued.How many Rohingya are in Bangladesh?As of July this year, Bangladesh was hosting close to 1.2 million Rohingya refugees, according to UN figures. Most of them are living in refugee camps in Kutupalong and Nayapara, in the Cox’s Bazar region. More than 75 percent of the refugee population comprises women and children, according to UN figures.Thousands of Rohingya have continued to make dangerous journeys by boat or on foot to Bangladesh since the initial exodus of 2017, amid political instability in Myanmar.According to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), more than 6,500 Rohingya refugees embarked on unsafe maritime journeys out of Myanmar, during which 900 died in 2025.Its report added that one in seven Rohingya refugees last year were reported missing or dead in the Andaman Sea and Bay of Bengal. This marks the highest mortality rate worldwide of any route for refugee and migrant sea journeys.What are the demands of the Rohingya protesters?Refugees are calling on the international community to place pressure on Myanmar to allow them to return to their homes without fear of more violence.Nay San Lwin, the cofounder of the Free Rohingya Coalition, a global network of Rohingya activists, told Al Jazeera: “Nine years have passed with delayed justice and no clear path to repatriation with full rights and dignity.“The nine-year commemoration must spark immediate action, not just statements. All supporters and allies must unite to pressure the Myanmar military and the Arakan Army to end violence against the Rohingya and establish safe conditions for survivors to return home,” Nay San Lwin said.“All we ask is to return to our homeland with full rights, peace, safety, dignity and justice.”The international response to the Rohingya genocide is characterised by an initial wave of humanitarian assistance and democratic efforts, but both these efforts have stagnated since.Receiving refugeesOnce praised for taking in more than one million Rohingya refugees, Bangladesh is now facing growing criticism as it insists it lacks the resources to sustain them, citing deep aid shortfalls and economic strains at home.Bangladesh hosts a vast majority of Rohingya refugees. But a number of them have also settled in neighbouring countries, such as Malaysia, which hosts 192,481 Rohingya refugees, and India, which hosts 87,022.However, a Human Rights Watch report last year stated that Indian authorities expelled dozens of Rohingya refugees to Bangladesh, deeming them “illegal immigrants”. Rohingya refugees have also been evicted from their homes in Malaysia.Humanitarian aidSince the first Joint Response Plan (JRP) was launched by Bangladesh and UN bodies in March 2018, successive plans have cut humanitarian support to a population that relies almost entirely on aid. The recalibrated 2026 JRP has reduced its appeal by 26 percent to $710.5m, to cover only the most critical, life‑saving needs, piling pressure on services such as food security.“Children and youth are growing up without formal education, while the international community continues to reduce funding, forcing the World Food Programme to cut food rations. Desperation drives survivors to seek safety elsewhere, often leading to tragic drownings at sea,” Nay San Lwin said.Last year, the World Food Programme said “severe funding shortfalls” had forced it to cut monthly food vouchers for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh by more than half – from $12.50 to $6 per person per month.Diplomatic supportTo mark the ninth Rohingya Genocide Remembrance Day on August 25, 16 diplomatic missions in Dhaka, including those of the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and the European Union, issued a joint statement calling for the Rohingya’s right to return to their homes.UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also wrote an X post calling for renewed global attention to the Rohingya crisis.“Rohingya people in Myanmar, Bangladesh & across the region face deepening insecurity, shrinking protection space and diminishing prospects for durable solutions, exacerbated by funding cuts impacting life-saving assistance,” he wrote.Myanmar’s 2017 military crackdown on the Rohingya has been under investigation by the International Criminal Court (ICC) since 2019. The ICC approved that investigation after Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s de facto civilian leader at the time, was named in an Argentinian lawsuit over crimes against the Rohingya.However, little progress has been made in the ICC case and, so far, there have been no public indictments or trials.A separate case was filed by The Gambia in 2019 at the ICJ, accusing Myanmar of committing genocide against the Rohingya.In 2019, Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi defended her country’s military against allegations of genocide at the court. In a speech that lasted about 30 minutes, the former human rights icon denied “genocidal intent” and outlined the history of tensions in Rakhine state.She promised that civilians and members of the military who attacked innocent people would be prosecuted, but repeatedly termed the 2017 crackdown as an “internal conflict”, saying Myanmar’s military was responding to attacks by armed local groups, such as the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), a group which claimed to be acting in self-defence on behalf of Rohingya people.But Aung San Suu Kyi failed to use the word “Rohingya” even once in her 3,379-word speech.In 2020, the ICJ ordered provisional measures requiring Myanmar to protect the Rohingya and prevent genocidal acts. The case remains before the court, with no final ruling issued.