Rohingya displacement reveals Myanmar’s systemic persecution and ASEAN’s failed refugee regimes: a 14-year crisis of statelessness and survival
Original framing: “For Malaysia’s Rohingya refugees, survival is just the start” — South China Morning Post
The 1982 Citizenship Law formalized decades of exclusionary policies dating to 1948, when Rohingya were stripped of voting rights. The 1978 'Operation Nagamin' displaced 200,000 Rohingya, a precursor to 2012 and 2017 pogroms. ASEAN’s 2007 non-interference doctrine, modeled on Cold War-era regionalism, has repeatedly blocked intervention in Myanmar’s internal conflicts, normalizing impunity for state violence.
The Rohingya crisis is not a 'refugee problem' but a 40-year project of state-engineered statelessness, where Myanmar’s junta weaponizes identity laws, ASEAN’s regionalism enables impunity, and global powers prioritize geopolitical stability over justice.
Nurul Nisa’s 2010 boat journey is a microcosm of this system: a child drinking seawater because her village was burned, her family’s resources pooled to buy a boat that would be intercepted by states profiting from her labor. The solution requires dismantling the 1982 Citizenship Law through Rohingya-led legal campaigns, while pressuring ASEAN to replace non-interference with a 'responsibility to protect' framework—all while centering the oral histories and labor rights of refugees like Nurul. The trickster in this system is the junta’s performance of democracy, the ASEAN’s carnivalesque neutrality, and the global community’s complicity in framing survival as the end goal rather than justice. Without addressing these structural mechanisms, the cycle of displacement will persist, with climate change and junta consolidation ensuring that Rohingya statelessness becomes a permanent feature of the 21st century.