In August of 2017, the world saw satellite images from Myanmar of entire Rohingya villages being burned to the ground. Survivors described unimaginable horror, the systematic massacre of men, women, and children, as more than 700,000 were forced to flee across the border to Bangladesh. 

The United Nations called it genocide, and world leaders collectively condemned the atrocities, while promising to deliver protection and accountability.

Eight years on, those promises have largely given way to silence. In 2025, the Rohingya remain dispossessed, trapped, and abandoned – caught between a collapsing humanitarian response in Bangladesh and the continuation of genocide inside Myanmar.

For those who escaped the mass killings in Myanmar, life in exile has brought a different kind of struggle. Cox’s Bazar, now the world’s largest refugee camp, holds more than 1.1 million Rohingya struggling to survive.

New arrivals, fleeing continued violence and hunger in the country, are pouring into camps that were already collapsing under inhumane conditions.

Refugees remain banned from working, leaving them entirely dependent on shrinking aid. With more than half the population being children, 40 percent were already stunted by malnutrition. This year, brutal aid cuts have caused further devastating consequences.

These cuts stem largely from a global funding crisis, as major donors such as the United States and United Kingdom scale back contributions to the Rohingya response, leaving essential needs like food, healthcare, and sanitation critically underfunded.

Education centres are closing, children are going hungry, and an entire generation faces abandonment to illiteracy and despair.

Starvation as a weapon in Rakhine

In November 2024, the UN was already warning that famine was imminent in Rakhine State, with more than two million people at risk. Since then, the Myanmar’s military has tightened blockades and restrictions, deliberately starving civilians.

In Sittwe, Rakhine’s capital, more than 120,000 Rohingya remain confined to camps, surviving on scraps of taro root and sweet potato.

A recent report by Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK (BROUK), Starving to Death, details how the military has replaced bullets with starvation as its primary weapon of genocide.

The rise of the Arakan Army (AA) in Rakhine, which has seized large areas of the state from Myanmar’s army, has left the Rohingya trapped between two oppressors. The military continues its strategy of starvation – blocking trade and aid – while the AA enforces anti-Rohingya policies: denying identity, restricting movement, extorting “fees,” and profiting from human trafficking.

Detention is used as a weapon of intimidation, and Rohingya are routinely arrested without due process, held for ransom, or ordered to leave the country under threat of re-arrest.

Victims often vanish in custody or report severe abuse upon release. Human Rights Watch recently documented AA abuses, including forced labour and recruitment, while Fortify Rights, an NGO with long-standing expertise in the region, has called for an ICC investigation into AA war crimes, from abductions to mass killings and beheadings of Rohingya civilians.

These abuses form part of a broader campaign of violence and displacement. For the Rohingya, the AA represents a second wave of persecution and a continuation of genocide. Both Myanmar’s army and the AA continue atrocities with impunity.

Broken promises

The international community has failed us. Political attention is shrinking, and funding pledges go unmet. The world that once declared “never again” has turned away.

International justice mechanisms, which should offer hope to the Rohingya and pave the way for peace and reconciliation in Myanmar, have failed to deliver. 

Proceedings at the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice have yet to provide meaningful accountability, while the only arrest warrants to date have come from the Rohingya-led universal jurisdiction case in Argentina.

Beyond this, the international community’s failure to act decisively has left the Rohingya without justice and even less trust in global mechanisms meant to protect them.

What must change

Next month's UN High-Level Conference on the Situation of Rohingya Muslims and Other Minorities in Myanmar must not be another symbolic exercise. It must deliver urgent, concrete outcomes:

• Fully fund humanitarian aid to meet immediate needs in both Bangladesh and Myanmar. Aid cuts must be reversed to prevent mass starvation, especially among children.

• Lift blockades in Rakhine State. Maximum pressure must be exerted on Myanmar’s army to end its weaponisation of starvation by immediately lifting trade and aid blockades and allowing unrestricted humanitarian access.

• Pursue and enforce international justice. Both Myanmar’s military and the Arakan Army must be held accountable for their crimes against the Rohingya. Armed struggle does not excuse persecution, extortion, trafficking, or executions.

• Convene the UN Security Council to address Myanmar’s failure to comply with the ICJ's binding order to protect the Rohingya, and to press for referral of crimes to the ICC.

• Impose targeted measures. Coordinated multilateral efforts are needed to enforce a global arms embargo, halt the transfer of aviation fuel to the military, and impose targeted sanctions on Myanmar’s military, its leaders, and its sources of revenue.

• Guarantee Rohingya representation and protection. Durable solutions cannot be imposed on us. Rohingya must be involved in shaping their future, with guarantees for safe, voluntary, and dignified return to their homes and land.

• Support Bangladesh. The international community must increase support to Bangladesh to ensure food, medicine, shelter, education, and livelihoods for Rohingya refugees, while ending harmful restrictions on work and education in the camps.

Famine in Rakhine is not inevitable. Starvation in Cox’s Bazar is not inevitable. Another lost generation is not inevitable. All are preventable – if the world takes the opportunity to act.

Doing nothing is not neutral; it is a choice to let genocide continue. History will remember not only the generals who torched our villages in 2017, but also the silence and broken promises that followed.