Myanmar’s various ruling elites and counter-elites have proven incapable of finding political solutions to fundamental political problems including ethnic equality, religious tolerance, respect for basic human and civil rights and a representative government. Additionally, Myanmar’s woes get further exacerbated by the meddling of powerful external actors, by they foreign governments and corporations, particularly extractive industries, or Asian neighbours with their own respective commercial, industrial and strategic interests.
Today’s youth in Myanmar, of all ethnicities and faith-based communities, are forced to abandon their dreams and aspirations of a peaceful country where they could chart their own life course. For the post-colonial civil war that began in March 1948 continues to rage on. Since the widely unpopular coup of February 2021, the war at home has both widened and deepened.
Many thousands of Myanmar’s young men and women have joined different revolutionary networks – 2,600 armed organizations, according to this documentary jointly produced by Al Jazeera English and Myanmar dissidents’ Burma VJ (video-journalists). A vast number of their peers, again both men and women, who had previously chosen not take up arms to fight the coup junta have fled the country in order to avoid forcibly mass-conscripted into the country’s military.
Watch the newly released: “War with the Junta: Exposing the hidden horrors on Myanmar’s battlefields I Al Jazeera Investigations”
The story of the capsized boat carrying 100 Rohingya genocide survivors, men, women and children, with another 200 missing on two other boats, in the Andaman Sea, hit today’s news headlines. But this has been a perennial catastrophe for the nearly 2 million Rohingyas (1.3 million in the refugee camps in Bangladesh and less than 500,000 inside Myanmar’s war-torn Rakhine state).
Needless to say, the Rohingya ethnic community that survived the 2016 and 2017 waves of genocidal violence in Western Myanmar continue to fare worst in the country’s un-ending wars and violence.
Because the conditions of life in Myanmar, as well as in refugee camps in Bangladesh, have been unbearable and/or totally unsafe and precarious, with no adequate access to food, livelihoods or education or no safety for them as Rohingyas, on land, thousands of Rohingyas attempt to get on rickety boats.
2018: Rohingya Camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. Photo VOA, Wikipedia Commons
Undoubtedly, they and relatives in third countries pay large human trafficking networks large sums of money to escape Myanmar as their ancestral homeland turns hell on earth.
When states and armed groups take their land beneath these persecuted people, they will naturally risk their lives on high sea – in search of a more hopeful and safer future.
Video from Ro Yassin Abdumonab. “The lives of Rohingyas are in the forests and jungles where they go in search of better lives but they lose their lives on the way to their destination.” Watch HERE.
Western organizations such as the wire news agencies and mass media, human rights watch dogs and the United Nations agencies and INGOs should stop adding insult to the injury of Rohingya genocide survivors by acknowledging them as genocide fleeing refugees, and stop falsifying them as “migrants” who are on “irregular migration”.
Watch FORSEA Co-founder Maung Zarni’s 5-minutes analysis of the latest Rohingya tragedy on the Andaman Sea on TRT World News on 10 November 2025.
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- Focus on saving lives, urges UNHCR as more Rohingya flee by sea
- Twan Mrat Naing’s Interview: The Arakan Army’s Narrative Game | Analysis by Shafiur Rahman
- What the Arakan Army offers the Rohingya
- The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingya
