A Decade of Impunity in Myanmar Will the ICC Finally Deliver Justice for the Rohingya

 Myanmar's Rohingya do not need another promise. They need justice. Nearly a decade after the world watched villages burn in northern Rakhine, the word “accountability” still hangs over Myanmar like a diplomatic ornament—frequently invoked, rarely delivered. For the Rohingya, it is not a slogan. It is the difference between memory and erasure, between survival and permanent exile.

The United Nations Special Rapporteur's latest report is devastating in its clarity: impunity is not a side effect of Myanmar's crisis; it is its engine. Since the 2021 military coup, the junta has murdered thousands of civilians, arbitrarily detained more than 30,000 people, displaced at least 3.6 million internally, and burned more than 100,000 civilian homes through systematic arson campaigns. Airstrikes hit schools, weddings, clinics, tea shops and displacement camps. Torture is routine. Sexual violence is weaponised. The architecture of terror is deliberate.

For the Rohingya, however, this did not begin in 2021. It is the continuation of a longer history that the world repeatedly chose to treat as temporary.

The 1982 Citizenship Act institutionalised statelessness. The apartheid system that followed the 2012 violence confined hundreds of thousands of Rohingya to camps and stripped movement, livelihoods and dignity. Then came 2017, when more than 700,000 Rohingya fled genocidal violence into Bangladesh after Myanmar's military launched what it cynically called “clearance operations.” Entire villages were erased. Women were raped in front of their families. Men were executed in fields. Children disappeared into the fire.

One Rohingya survivor told the Special Rapporteur: “We can only forgive or be happy when justice is totally served, every single perpetrator is held accountable, and people are given compensation for their loss.”

This is not vengeance. It is the minimum demand of civilisation. And yet global policy still behaves as though time itself is a substitute for justice.

The international system has not been entirely absent. The Gambia's genocide case against Myanmar at the International Court of Justice is historic. The International Criminal Court prosecutor's request for an arrest warrant for Min Aung Hlaing marked a long-overdue recognition that command responsibility must mean something. Argentina's universal jurisdiction case has also cracked open another legal front.

But these remain fragments of accountability in a landscape dominated by strategic hesitation. The UN Security Council has still not referred Myanmar to the ICC. No permanent member has meaningfully forced the question. ASEAN continues to perform the ritual of “constructive engagement” while civilians are bombed from the sky. Powerful states denounce atrocities while allowing supply chains, aviation fuel networks, arms transfers and financial channels to remain dangerously porous.

This contradiction is not just a moral failure. It is a policy failure. The strategic competition in the Indo-Pacific cannot be divorced from human security. Myanmar proves the point brutally. Instability in Rakhine is not a local tragedy; it is a regional fracture line touching Bangladesh, India, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Australia. Refugee flows destabilise politics. Maritime insecurity expands. Extremist recruitment thrives where statelessness hardens into generational despair.

Cox's Bazar now hosts nearly one million Rohingya refugees, making it the largest refugee settlement on earth. Bangladesh has carried a burden that should have been shared globally. Yet donor fatigue is growing. The World Food Programme has repeatedly warned of ration cuts. Children born after the genocide are reaching adolescence, having never seen home, citizenship, or justice.

A generation is being raised inside the ruins of international law. From ASEAN's uneasy diplomacy to Brussels” declarations of values, from Washington's strategic calculations to the Gulf's growing economic reach, Myanmar cannot remain treated as a humanitarian file while the politics of impunity are politely avoided. Food aid without justice is not peace; it is the administration of despair. Refugee camps cannot become the world's substitute for accountability, nor can donor conferences replace courtrooms.

Bangladesh carries the unbearable weight of nearly one million Rohingya refugees, while Southeast Asia absorbs the tremors of instability through trafficking, maritime insecurity, and the slow corrosion of regional trust. Every delayed sanction, every protected business channel, every diplomatic handshake with military power tells survivors the same cruel message: survival is acknowledged, but justice is negotiable.

Humanitarian relief may keep people alive, but without accountability, it merely teaches perpetrators that atrocity has no real political cost.

This is no longer only Myanmar's tragedy; it is a referendum on the credibility of the international order itself. ASEAN's principle of non-interference cannot become a burial ground for human dignity. The European Union's human rights language must move beyond statements into enforceable consequences. The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, carrying the moral weight of one of the world's most persecuted Muslim communities, must continue pressing the legal and diplomatic front with urgency.

African leadership, through The Gambia's extraordinary courage at the International Court of Justice, has already shown what principled action looks like when larger powers hesitate. Latin America's universal jurisdiction efforts have shown that geography is no excuse for silence. If genocide can be managed through fatigue, if ethnic cleansing can be absorbed into routine diplomacy, then international law becomes theatre, not protection.

The Rohingya crisis demands something far harder than sympathy—it demands that the world prove justice is stronger than strategic convenience.

Targeted sanctions must move beyond symbolism and focus on military-controlled revenue streams, especially oil, gas, aviation fuel and arms procurement networks. States should prepare now for a likely ICJ ruling on genocide and be ready to enforce consequences without hiding behind Security Council paralysis. Universal jurisdiction laws should be used, not merely praised in seminars. Military leaders emerging from sham elections should be treated not as legitimate statesmen but as alleged perpetrators of atrocity crimes.

The Special Rapporteur was right to state that Min Aung Hlaing belongs in a courtroom, not on a diplomatic red carpet.

There is also a harder truth: accountability must be designed with Rohingya voices at its centre, not appended later as consultation theatre. Too often, transitional justice is discussed by elites as architecture while survivors are asked to remain patient.

They are not patient. They are exhausted. A young Rohingya woman raised in Bangladesh told the UN: “If there's no accountability, it feels like our suffering doesn't matter.”

That sentence should haunt every foreign ministry. Because what is being tested in Myanmar is larger than one country. It is whether genocide can be politically survivable. Whether perpetrators can simply wait out outrage. Whether international law is a shield for the vulnerable or merely a language for commemorating failure.

There is a dangerous habit in diplomacy of confusing stability with silence. Myanmar's generals understand this perfectly. Every delayed prosecution, every softened communiqué, every invitation to normal diplomatic engagement teaches the same lesson: brutality is negotiable.

For the Rohingya, the lesson has already been written in blood. Justice will not restore the dead. It will not return burned villages exactly as they were. It will not erase the memory of mothers searching for children in the Naf River or fathers burying names without bodies.

But justice matters because impunity writes the future. Without it, the next massacre is only a matter of timing. The world once said “never again” for the Rohingya. It now faces a simpler question: did those words mean anything at all?