Message from Maung Zarni
Racism wrapped in the language of community protection is still racism.
Spotted in Jelan Kebun, Klang, Selangor, Malaysia:
“We, the residents of Jalan Kebun, reject Rohingya squatters.
For the future of our village/community.
Dirty and destructive squatters do not deserve to… pic.twitter.com/epYLu0vNL4— Shafiur Rahman (@shafiur) June 24, 2026
A recent petition titled “Remove Rohingya from Malaysia” on Change.org gathered more than 420,000 signatures before Change.org placed it under review, citing its Community Guidelines. At the time of writing, the petition is no longer accessible. In my previous piece at FORSEA on the Rohingya sea crisis, I wrote about how Rohingya are both forced and driven to take the deadly sea route to Malaysia.
In this essay, I will explain what it means to demand the “removal” of genocide-fled refugees, and what lies behind calls to send them back.
Why Rohingya genocide survivors leave
The Rohingya migration to neighbouring countries has increased year by year due to continuous violence from the Myanmar state against the community. This is not a recent development. It is a long recurring phenomenon rooted in layers and wavers of persecution at home in Western Myanmar.
Over decades, Rohingya communities were gradually stripped of citizenship, particularly after the 1982 Citizenship Law. The law enacted by the then one-party military dictatorship of General Ne Win formally excluded them from legal nationality, something which they were lawfully granted upon the country’s independence from Britain in 1948.
(For the best scholarship on citizenship stripping of Rohingyas, see Natalie Brinham’s PhD thesis Citizenship and Genocide Cards: IDs, Statelessness and Rohingya Resistance in Myanmar – FORSEA ]
What followed were repeated waves of violence, forced displacement, mass deportation and killings. These patterns of genocidal persecution pushed large numbers of Rohingya out of Myanmar, resulting in mass displacement, including nearly one million people forced into Bangladesh. Rohingyas have suffered not a single crisis, but a lengthy institutionalized process designed to erase their group identity, physical presence and historical memories, or a slow-burning genocide.
In Myanmar’s Rakhine State today, a new actor has also emerged called the Arakan Army. While it has taken control in parts of the region, Human Rights Watch investigations, in recent months, suggest that Rohingya civilians continue to face serious violence under its presence as well. A 2026 HRW report documented mass killings, including an incident in Hoyyar Siri (a Rohingya village) where survivors described burned homes and at least 170 civilians killed during clashes. The report raised further concerns about unlawful killings and destruction of property. Actors changed. Government in Naypyidaw changed. The tragedy for the Rohingya, however, remained unchanged.
For many Rohingya young people, elders, and even women, leaving Rakhine became not a choice but a necessity. The pull was not economic opportunities abroad, but the internal push to survive, to simply stay alive. Life in Arakan had become increasingly impossible: no livelihoods, severe restrictions on movements, including daily access to food systems such as rivers, creeks, paddy fields, forests, trade route, the non-existent labour market amidst the localized civil war, and the pressure of large families depending on a single person to provide for them.
Rohingya are mostly Muslim, with a deep cultural and religious identity in their ancestral borderlands of Arakan or Rakhine adjacent to Bangladesh. Both Bangladesh and Myanmar are post-colonial era inventions as “nation-states”. Rohingya presence long predates either country. The majority of them used to earn their living peasant farmers, fishermen, farm labourers, cross-border traders, and government servants in local administrations, schools, hospitals and so on.
For many Rohingya people who today feel sandwiched between the persecuting military-controlled state of Myanmar and ultra-Buddhist nationalist local militia group called Arakan Army, predominantly Islamic countries such as Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, or Bangladesh felt like a possible and perhaps only path to safety rather than other neighbouring destinations. But the reality that greeted them was very different from what they had imagined.
A life without legal status
Malaysia is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention and does not have a formal asylum law. Refugees are not legally recognised under domestic law and remain entirely dependent on UNHCR registration. A Human Rights Watch report estimates that more than 190,000 refugees and asylum seekers from Myanmar are registered in Malaysia, including a large number of Rohingya, though actual figures are likely higher due to unregistered cases.
Without legal status, many live in long-term uncertainty. They work in informal sectors. They face the constant risk of detention. They are exposed to periodic immigration enforcement campaigns. This is not a temporary condition. It is a structural legal gap, one that has existed for years, without resolution.
The petition and what it actually represents
The petition calling for the removal of Rohingya from Malaysia reflects several concerns often raised in public debate: resource pressure, social stability, and security. But it does not appear in isolation. It reflects long-standing, unresolved issues: unclear refugee policy, inconsistent enforcement, and the absence of any long-term framework for a population that has remained in the country without legal status for years.
In this sense, the petition compresses a deeply complex situation into a single word: removal. But “remove” and “retain” do not reflect the reality on the ground, where statelessness, international protection principles such as non-refoulement, and the absence of safe conditions for return to Myanmar all exist at the same time.
What “sending them back” actually means
The petition frames the Rohingya as a group that can be collectively expelled. It does not focus on policy reform or legal design. It treats an entire stateless population as something that can simply be pushed out across a border.
But Rohingya are not ordinary migrants who can return to a functioning home country. They are a stateless people who have survived decades of persecution, displacement, and repeated cycles of violence including village destruction, trafficking, detention, and dangerous sea journeys that have taken thousands of lives. To speak of removal without identifying a clear and safe place of return raises a basic question of feasibility, not only morality.
{Watch here FORSEA’s Myanmar co-founder Dr Maung Zarni explains the crucial reason behind Rohingya presence in Malaysia and a brief background history of their persecution at home.}
At the same time, many of the claims used in public debate around this issue including arguments about crime or resource pressure are not supported by consistent evidence in human rights reporting. When such claims dominate the discussion, a vulnerable population becomes maliciously framed as a threat to public and national security, rather than a protected group under international norms.
Source: Instagram
Myanmar itself does not currently offer a stable or secure environment for large-scale Rohingya return. Control over Rakhine State remains fragmented. Political conditions remain unstable. Besides, there exists no clear legal pathway for citizenship restoration or safe reintegration. So when the idea of “sending them back” is raised, the practical question remains unanswered: return to what conditions, and under what protection?
No resolution in sight
The Rohingya situation in Malaysia is not only a question of migration policy. It is the continuation of a long displacement process that has never reached a resolution point.
They arrived with survival as the only option. They now exist in a country where legal status is undefined, and where public frustration is increasingly expressed through campaigns like this petition, but directed at a population that did not create the conditions it finds itself in.
‘India put us on the boat like captives – then threw us in the sea’
Actors change. Borders change. Narratives change. But the underlying condition remains the same: people moving between systems that do not accept moral or legal responsibility for them as refugees, whether recognized as such or not. The question is not only why they move. It is what happens when no structure fully defines where they belong — and when anti-refugee public pressure campaigns start filling that vacuum.
Spurred by what the INGOs and UN experts euphemistically term “irregular migration at sea”, that is, the recurring flows of war and genocide-fleeing refugees such as Rohingyas and resultant mass deaths from drowning in high seas, governments in collaboration with the state-centered UN organizations in Asia and Pacific region, have embarked on the so-called Bali Process, a talk-shop led by Australian government almost a quarter century ago.
Honest scholarly evaluations have found the process rather wanting.
So @Change seems to have become a meet-up hub for Malaysian racists.https://t.co/qYqDyopzK3
First a petition demanding the “removal” of Rohingya refugees. Then another vile petition calling for Rohingya women with UNHCR cards to be sterilised so they do not “breed like rats.”… pic.twitter.com/CcHrdtU7Id— Shafiur Rahman (@shafiur) July 3, 2026
For there is found to be “a lack of enthusiasm by countries to engage in open discussions about the underlying causes, circumstances, and characteristics of international migration, of which migrant smuggling is merely one form. There is a remarkable void in international law insofar as binding agreements pertaining to international migration are concerned. The many treaties and declarations on issues such as refugees, asylum seekers, migrant workers, migrant smuggling et cetera, and the work done by organisations such UNHCR, IOM, ILO, and UNODC are seen by some merely as patchwork to regulate or control rudimentary aspects of what is a much wider and far more complex problem (p.23).”
Abu Kasim, a young Rohingya researcher.
A. Kasim
[See the critical research study by JOSEPH H DOUGLAS & ANDREAS SCHLOENHARDT (2021) COMBATTING MIGRANT SMUGGLING WITH REGIONAL DIPLOMACY: AN EXAMINATION OF THE BALI PROCESS, U. of Queensland Migrant Smuggling Working Group, Research Paper here.]
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