Sushovan Dhar marks the ninth anniversary of the 2017 Rohingya genocide with an argument against the comfortable version of the story. The genocide was structural before it was violent — and the forces now tearing down the Myanmar state may simply inherit the order that produced it.

The essay opens on the August 2024 killings on the Naf River in Maungdaw, where drones and mortars hit Rohingya families waiting to cross into Bangladesh. Roughly two hundred died. The twist: the killers were attributed not to the Tatmadaw, the army that drove three-quarters of a million Rohingya into exile in 2017, but to the Arakan Army — the ethnic Rakhine force that has spent two years dismantling that same military’s grip on the state.

The legal foundation of statelessness:

  • The 1982 Citizenship Law codified belonging into 135 “national races,” defined by presence before British colonization
  • The Rohingya were left off the list — reclassified in a stroke as illegal immigrants from Bengal
  • Independent Burma inherited a colonial geography: a Burman-Buddhist core governing minority peripheries (Kachin, Shan, Karen, Chin, Rakhine), with promised autonomy dissolving into military domination
  • The Tatmadaw governed by balancing the antagonisms beneath it; Burman-Buddhist chauvinism was its ideological cement
  • The Rohingya were its most useful enemy — a stateless, defenseless population against whom national unity could always be manufactured

The junta is losing. After the February 2021 coup detonated the widest challenge to the state since independence, it now controls about a fifth of the country, has staged sham elections, and installed Min Aung Hlaing — the general behind both the genocide and the coup — as president of a nominally civilian government, while bombing hospitals in the territory slipping away.

But Dhar refuses the democracy-versus-dictatorship frame as dangerously incomplete. The Arakan Army, founded only in 2009, holds roughly 90 percent of Rakhine State, runs courts, policing, taxation and conscription, and speaks of confederal self-rule — in its own terms exactly what the left says it supports. Its documented record against the Rohingya tells a different story:

  • Villages shelled and burned as AA forces took Buthidaung and Maungdaw in 2024
  • Human Rights Watch documented at least 170 Rohingya killed at Hoyyar Siri in May 2024, with survivors putting the figure higher
  • Bans on movement and livelihood, land confiscation, forced labor, men detained and killed
  • A refusal to use the word “Rohingya,” naming them “Bengalis” or “Muslims” instead
  • Rohingya refugees told Amnesty that life under the AA felt worse than under the Tatmadaw, because they are now permanently suspected of collaboration

And a trap with no exit: when the junta conscripted Rohingya men and boys in 2024 to fight the AA, the AA cited those forced recruits as proof the whole population was a fifth column.

The National Unity Government’s 2021 pledge — repeal the 1982 law, abolish verification cards, ground citizenship in birth rather than “national race,” accept international court jurisdiction — was genuinely courageous for a body dependent on an anti-Rohingya base. But the NUG holds no territory in Rakhine, and its reform is deferred to a constitution that does not yet exist.

So long as Myanmar’s political imagination is organized around ethnic homelands, each the patrimony of a titular nationality, the Rohingya remain the constitutive exception: the people who fit no homeland and therefore belong nowhere. A federation of ethnic states answers Burman domination; it does not answer Rohingya statelessness.

That is the test Dhar sets. The Rohingya can’t be a humanitarian appendix to the conflict, to be addressed once the real political questions are settled. Their fate is the political question — whether the collapse of the old order produces something genuinely different, or just a redistribution of territory and power among armed actors, each erecting its own machinery of belonging and unbelonging.