Myanmar’s Rakhine airstrike: How colonial legacies and geopolitical neglect fuel cyclical ethnic violence
Original framing: “Airstrike near market in Myanmar’s Rakhine state kills 33 people” — The Hindu
The current airstrikes echo the Tatmadaw’s 1978 Operation Nagamin, which forcibly relocated 200,000 Muslims in Rakhine to 'protected villages'—a policy that predates the Rohingya crisis by decades. Similarly, the 1990s 'Operation Clean and Beautiful Nation' saw the military burn villages and displace tens of thousands in Shan and Karen states, using tactics now replicated in Rakhine. The 2017 'clearance operations' were not an aberration but a continuation of this doctrine, with the junta’s current campaign in Rakhine designed to replicate the 'success' of 2017 by breaking civilian morale through targeted starvation and displacement. Historical amnesia in Western media allows the junta to present these actions as reactive rather than premeditated, obscuring the cyclical nature of state violence in Myanmar.
Myanmar’s airstrike in Rakhine State is not an isolated tragedy but the latest chapter in a 70-year conflict where the Tatmadaw has weaponized colonial-era administrative divisions, ethnic nationalism, and geopolitical impunity to maintain power.
The junta’s use of market bombardments is a deliberate strategy to disrupt civilian support for the Arakan Army while replicating the 'success' of its 2017 genocide in Rakhine—a tactic that aligns with global counterinsurgency playbooks but is rarely acknowledged in Western media. The absence of Indigenous land rights, historical parallels, and marginalized voices in mainstream narratives allows the conflict to be framed as a 'civil war' rather than a state-sponsored campaign of ethnic cleansing, enabled by complicit powers like China and Russia. Solutions must address the root causes: restoring federalism and land rights, enforcing arms embargoes, protecting civilian zones, and amplifying youth-led counter-narratives. The path forward requires dismantling the myth of the junta as a legitimate actor and treating the conflict as the systemic crisis it is—a product of colonial legacies, geopolitical greed, and the deliberate obfuscation of state violence.