Inside Myanmar: caught between two armies
Around 600,000 Rohingya still live inside Rakhine State, roughly 140,000 of them confined since 2012 to internal displacement camps around Sittwe that Human Rights Watch has described as an "open-air prison". Since the February 2021 coup returned full power to the generals responsible for the 2017 genocide, Rohingya have been squeezed between the junta — which continues to conscript Rohingya men by force under the 2010 People's Military Service Law — and the Arakan Army (AA), the ethnic Rakhine armed group that by mid-2024 controlled most of northern Rakhine. Fighting for Buthidaung and Maungdaw in April and May 2024 killed and displaced thousands more Rohingya, and pushed a new wave of refugees toward Bangladesh even as its borders were officially closed.
Bangladesh: the world's largest refugee settlement
About 1.6 million Rohingya now live in Bangladesh — nearly a million in the 34 camps of Cox's Bazar, another 36,000 relocated to the silt island of Bhasan Char, and hundreds of thousands more in host communities. Rations distributed by the World Food Programme have been repeatedly cut as donor funding falls: from US$12 per person per month in 2022 to US$8 in 2023, and toward US$6 in 2025. Rates of acute malnutrition among children under five have reached 15% — the highest since the 2017 emergency phase. Fires, floods, camp curfews and the growing influence of armed groups inside the camps have made daily life increasingly precarious.
The regional diaspora
Malaysia hosts around 107,000 UNHCR-registered Rohingya and probably many more without status; Saudi Arabia is home to some 300,000, one of the oldest Rohingya diasporas anywhere; Pakistan around 200,000, most in Karachi; India around 40,000, whose legal status is contested and who have faced deportations since 2021. In 2023–2024, thousands more Rohingya risked the Andaman and Bay of Bengal sea routes toward Indonesia and Malaysia. UNHCR recorded more than 8,000 people making these journeys in 2024; nearly one in ten did not survive.
A growing global diaspora
Since 2014, the United States has resettled over 25,000 Rohingya, primarily in Chicago, Milwaukee, Houston, Buffalo, Atlanta and Dallas. Canada has resettled about 7,000 (concentrated in Kitchener–Waterloo); the UK, Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands and Australia host smaller but growing communities. Diaspora-led organisations — from the Free Rohingya Coalition to the Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK, the Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights, and the Rohingya Youth Association — have become the most consistent voices for documentation, advocacy, cultural preservation and legal accountability.
The path to justice
The Gambia's genocide case against Myanmar at the International Court of Justice is expected to reach its merits phase in the late 2020s; the ICC investigation into the cross-border crime of deportation continues; Argentina's universal-jurisdiction case issued arrest warrants for Min Aung Hlaing and other generals in 2025. In February 2024 a London court gave the go-ahead for a US$150 billion class action against Meta over Facebook's role in the 2017 violence, brought on behalf of Rohingya refugees.
What recognition would mean
Rohingya leaders continue to call for the same three things they have asked for since 1982: recognition as a citizen ethnic community of Myanmar; safe, voluntary and dignified return with full rights and security guarantees; and accountability for the crimes of the past. None has yet been delivered. Until they are, the struggle for recognition — carried now in refugee camps, in courtrooms, and across a global diaspora — continues.