Unearthing Unknown Stories – Sexual Violence Against Women During the Holocaust

Myanmar's western Rakhine State is the homeland of the Rohingya, often referred to as "the most persecuted ethnic minority on Earth." Whenever state violence in Myanmar escalated to the brink, the Rohingya would carry whatever tools of survival they could, turn their backs on their homeland, and head west. After days of relentless jungle trekking, they reached the Naf River—the final gateway before setting foot on Bangladeshi soil. It is a river of terror, requiring a tense 45-minute crossing on a fragile raft in silence, trying to evade the eyes of border guards. Yet it is also a river that renews their determination to live. Over the past half-century, countless Rohingya have crossed this perilous river and gathered in the refugee camps of Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh.

It was eight years ago that the Cox's Bazar Rohingya camps came to be known as "the world’s largest refugee camp." At dawn on August 25, 2017, the Rohingya armed group Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), which had made its presence known the previous year, attacked more than 30 military and police outposts again. As if they had been waiting for this moment, the Myanmar military launched a large-scale “Clearance Operation.” Buddhist extremists within the Rakhine ethnic community, the Rohingya’s closest yet most hostile neighbors, actively joined the operation. Once again, the Naf River became filled with people. Countless individuals tied together bamboo, plastic, even empty oil drums—anything that could float—with ropes to fashion makeshift rafts and crossed the river, and many continued to lose their lives in the process. Only then did something unprecedented occur: the Rohingya issue, which had long failed to draw serious global attention, suddenly received widespread coverage on social media and in mainstream media outlets.

The 2017 “Rohingya Massacre” marked the first “genocide” of the social media era, defined as the mass killing and extermination of members of a specific group due to conflicts over race, ethnicity, tribe, or ideology. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) stated, “The 2017 Rohingya refugee wave was the largest since World War II.” Eight years on, the annual Rohingya Genocide commemoration has once again come around. At a memorial event in a Cox’s Bazar camp, a young man clutched a placard that read, “No More Refugee Life.”

Refugees Weary of Life in Exile

The history of Cox’s Bazar becoming the world’s largest refugee camp is itself intertwined with the Rohingya genocide. In 1974, Ne Win, the former dictator of Burma (now Myanmar), who dismantled parliamentary democracy in a 1962 coup, introduced the concept of “Taing Yin Thar,”^[1] an exclusionary identity concept based on far-right nationalism, into the Constitution. Based on their arbitrary classifications of "national race," the Ne Win military regime mapped out a genocidal project against the Rohingya, whom they deemed not to belong to any recognized national race.

Four years later, in 1978, the Ne Win military regime carried out a large-scale massacre under the pretext of cracking down on "illegal immigrants" and "Bengalis" (a derogatory term used to label the Rohingya as immigrants from Bangladesh). During this period, around 250,000 Rohingya fled to Bangladesh in the first major expulsion known as “Operation Nagamin.” In 1982, the regime revised the Citizenship Law, establishing the legal grounds to revoke the Rohingya’s citizenship. In the early 1990s, the regime defined “135 officially recognized ethnic groups" and implemented a program to replace ID cards. Consequently, the Rohingya, who had been granted citizenship under the first Citizenship Law of the "Union of Burma" after independence from Britain in 1948, were excluded from both the "national race" and the 135 recognized groups, becoming a "non-existent group" in all official systems and records.

Shortly after, the Ne Win military regime launched “Operation Pyi Thaya” (ironically named “Operation Clean and Beautiful Nation”), marking the second mass expulsion. This crackdown forced another 200,000 Rohingya into Cox's Bazar. Comprehensive policies of oppression, including routine discrimination, forced labor, land confiscation, and restrictions on freedom of movement, relentlessly drove the Rohingya toward the Naf River. This explains why an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 refugees were already in the Cox's Bazar camps prior to the 2017 genocide. Additionally, with around 800,000 fleeing between 2016 and 2017, Cox's Bazar literally became the “world's largest refugee camp,” housing well over a million people.

The World's Most Persecuted Ethnic Minority and the Largest Refugee Camp

It is often said that “women and children are the primary victims of conflict.” The Rohingya genocide is a poignant case in point. During the 2017 massacre, women accounted for 52 percent of the refugees fleeing, with minors making up half of that number. The scale of sexual violence against women during this period is chilling. The Ontario International Development Agency (OIDA), a Canadian NGO, estimated that approximately 18,000 women and girls were raped by the military, police, and local mobs.

American feminist political scientist Cynthia Enloe, renowned for her research on militarism and gender, classifies conflict-related sexual violence into three categories. The first is “recreational rape,” where women’s bodies are sexually abused and penetrated by soldiers during wartime. The second is “national security rape,” and the third is “systematic mass rape.” The Rohingya genocide encompasses all three, particularly as a combination of the latter two. The Myanmar military regime, along with mainstream society, has long regarded the Rohingya as a threat to national security. Since ARSA’s first attack on October 9, 2016, the military has characterized its “Clearance Operation” as a “war on terror.” The sexual violence and mass rapes against Rohingya women during this period were war crimes that directly realized the logic of claiming victory by raping the women of the enemy.

Myanmar's reproductive restriction policy, specifically targeting the Rohingya since the 1990s, must also be understood within the broader context of national security and genocide. The policy was first announced on January 31, 1993, under the name “Population Control Policy.” It was initially implemented as a mandate of the “Border Area Immigration Control Headquarters,” commonly known as “Nasaka.” According to the terminology used by the then-ruling military body, the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), Nasaka was a hybrid state apparatus that combined the military, police, and immigration authorities, specifically tasked with “Bengali affairs.” As a notorious instrument of human rights abuses, Nasaka was an object of terror and dread for the Rohingya.^[2]

The military regime's reproductive restriction policy targeting the Rohingya is closely linked to the second mass expulsion of the early 1990s. After nearly 200,000 Rohingya were expelled between 1991 and 1992, they began to be forcibly repatriated to Rakhine State, Myanmar, starting in September 1992. This repatriation led the military to seek a strategic shift. Beyond direct extermination through military campaigns, the regime is understood to have decided to establish a "genocide infrastructure" by institutionalizing oppressive laws and regulations. It was against this backdrop that both the reproductive restriction policy and the marriage authorization system were implemented.

The reproductive restriction policy was officially reaffirmed at least four or five times. In April 2005, twelve years after its introduction, it was reissued as a “regional order,” initially permitting up to three children. However, this three-child limit was further tightened in 2007 to a strict two-child limit. While wartime rape and gender-based violence by the Myanmar military are not unique to the Rohingya, the violence against them has a distinct dimension. Beyond committing war crimes, the military used Rohingya women’s bodies as a tool of genocide, controlling them and restricting their ethnic reproduction.

Rohingya Reproductive Restriction: A Project of Ethnic Extermination

The Myanmar military is not the only militarized entity oppressing Rohingya women. Despite being treated as a “revolutionary resistance force” fighting in the anti-junta front, the Arakan Army (AA), which is rapidly emerging as the de facto ruler of Rakhine State, is a far-right ethnic armed group whose stance on the Rohingya is indistinguishable from the Myanmar military's. While the Myanmar junta is fueled by "Bamar-Buddhist nationalism," the AA is driven by "Rakhine-Buddhist nationalism.” The AA has recently gained notoriety as a "new perpetrator" of the Rohingya genocide, reportedly confining Rohingya to forced labor camps and being responsible for at least two massacres of Rohingya in 2024. There are also reports implicating the AA in the mass rape of Rohingya women.

Meanwhile, Rohingya women face compounded, multi-layered struggles. In addition to contending with the two armed actors, the Myanmar military and the AA, they must grapple with deeply entrenched patriarchal practices and gender discrimination within their own communities. This makes their fight all the more difficult. Even the annual Rohingya Genocide Commemoration Day on August 25, when the community gathers in mourning and remembrance, is no exception. A report published in July 2025 by the UK-based Rohingya human rights organization Burma Human Rights Network (BHRN), titled Everywhere Women Are Being Restricted, documents how Rohingya women, who have endured some of the deepest scars of the genocide, are excluded from the history of remembrance and commemoration. According to the report, which examines the sixth anniversary memorial on August 25, 2023, camp administrators prohibited women from attending, while Rohingya men were allowed to participate in large-scale commemorative events. Loudspeaker announcements were even broadcast the day before, instructing women not to attend the memorial events.

Rohingya Women Shaking up the Refugee Camps

Nevertheless, if there is one group undergoing the most profound change and transition in the Cox's Bazar camps, it is the women. The very sight of women moving through public spaces and participating in various events is a scene that would have been impossible had they not fled Rakhine State for Bangladesh. Furthermore, despite the restrictive environment, many Rohingya women have seized every limited educational opportunity to achieve exceptional growth. Their journeys stand as inspiring models of resilience and empowerment.

Lucky Karim’s story serves as a powerful example. In 2017, at the age of fourteen, she fled to Bangladesh with her family after a grueling seven-day journey on foot. In 2019, she became the first Rohingya refugee to enroll at the Asian University for Women in Bangladesh. She later went door to door in the refugee camps, encouraging families to send their daughters to school. After resettling in Chicago, USA, in 2022 through a refugee resettlement program, she founded “Refugee Women for Peace and Justice (RWPJ),” an organization dedicated to ending child marriage and combating gender-based violence against Rohingya women. Last August, in observance of the eighth anniversary of the genocide, Karim briefly returned to Cox's Bazar as a panelist at the “Stakeholders’ Dialogue on Rohingya Crisis" conference, where she shared the grim realities facing her community.

“The Rohingya genocide did not begin in 2017; It began decades ago. Over those decades, we have fled again and again. Our brothers and sisters who remain in Arakan (Rakhine State) are starving. They are being tortured, forcibly disappeared, and detained… facing atrocities every single day.”

Pay Attention to the Reality of Genocide Survivors Facing Starvation!

When the Ne Win military regime enshrined the concept of “national races” in the 1974 Constitution, few could have predicted that it would lead to the reality of the Rohingya genocide we witness today. Yet genocide is a crime that represents the culmination of a long process. The inclusion of the word “prevention” in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide highlights the responsibility to recognize and act upon the numerous warning signs emerging throughout the criminal process. Despite these repeated warnings, the reality we face today is the hypocrisy, indifference, and incompetence of an international community that failed to prevent genocide.

Today, as we commemorate the souls lost in the Rohingya genocide eight years ago, the geopolitical landscape surrounding Myanmar in Southeast Asia and South Asia has grown immensely complex. Since the 2021 coup, Myanmar’s civil war has escalated. In Rakhine State, in particular, both key actors in the conflict—the military and the AA—continue to forcibly conscript, oppress, and carry out mass killings of the Rohingya. In this dire situation, it is crucial for the international community to exercise political will and fulfill at least a minimal role. I have outlined these reflections into three key “recommendations.”

First, third-country resettlement programs for Rohingya refugees must be pursued more proactively. As Lucky Karim’s story demonstrates, the growth of refugee children transformed by education represents both the future and potential of the Rohingya community. Therefore, these success stories must be accumulated. However, the current reality is deeply troubling. Since 2022, Bangladeshi authorities have closed educational facilities in the refugee camps, and the schools supported by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) are being forced to close due to a shortfall in international aid. This raises serious concerns that an entire generation of Rohingya refugees could fall into the black hole of the “Lost Generation,” deprived of education. At this critical juncture, the Korean government, which has shared the resilience and pride of “K-democracy” on the global stage, should also take an active role in Rohingya resettlement programs. If full-scale family resettlement is not immediately feasible, providing educational opportunities for Rohingya children and youth to study in Korea through a proper selection process could serve as a proactive alternative.

Second, more countries, including Korea, should invoke universal jurisdiction over perpetrators of genocide. It is true that domestically, Article 6, Paragraph 1 of the Constitution of the Republic of Korea grants international law the same force as domestic law, thereby opening the possibility for the exercise of universal jurisdiction. A notable precedent is the case from February 2025, when an Argentine federal court issued arrest warrants for approximately 25 individuals, including military leader Min Aung Hlaing, military generals, and high-ranking civilian government officials, in connection with the Rohingya genocide.

Third, it is urgent to develop fundamental alternatives, such as increasing and sustaining humanitarian aid while reducing the administrative costs of international organizations. Currently, both the Cox's Bazar camps and Myanmar's Rakhine State are facing a humanitarian crisis. The World Food Programme (WFP) has provided refugees in Cox's Bazar with rations worth USD 12 per person per month. However, in March 2025, the UN announced it would reduce the ration to USD 6 due to a funding shortage. According to the UK-based humanitarian organization Islamic Relief, the population suffering from acute malnutrition in the refugee camps has increased by at least 27 percent since 2024. The situation in Rakhine State is even more dire as the military continues to block humanitarian supplies. In November 2024, the UN warned that two million Rohingya were at risk of starvation. Today, the Rohingya people continue to desperately await humanitarian support from global citizens.