Oppression, persecution, conflict, violence, law – all of which are the defining features of the Rohingya crisis. The Rohingya are an ethnic minority of Muslims in the Rakhine State of Myanmar that have historically been oppressed by the Burmese since their implementation of the 1982 Citizenship Law, which denied all of the Rohingya Burmese citizenship. As such, they have become one of the largest groups of stateless people in the world. The UN Declaration of Human Rights dictates that every human being has the right to a nationality and therefore, the Rohingya are facing major human rights violations due to that. But at the end of the day, what motivated Myanmar into branding the Rohingya as outcasts?

The Burmese nationalists, like Firebrand Monk Wirathu, who has been dubbed “Monk Bin Laden”, frequently find themselves outraged by the outside condemnation of the crisis by the United Nations (UN), the International Criminal Court (ICC), as well as several other non-governmental organizations. Just recently since September 2018, the ICC has begun inquiries into the atrocities of the situation. Many nationalists see the Rohingya as illegal immigrants or outsiders from Bangladesh. However, the Rohingya have had themselves long since established in Myanmar, claiming themselves to be indigenous to the region. The Burmese government claims for these people to be “Bengali” and just not one of them. As such, they determine the Rohingya to not be citizens of Myanmar. Oh, nationalism strikes once again but in a different time and different place.