Genocide does not end when the killing stops by DR. AZEEM IBRAHIM

 Nine years have passed since Myanmar’s military launched the campaign of violence that drove more than 700,000 Rohingya across the border into Bangladesh.

The anniversary will understandably be marked by demands for justice. Yet there is another question that deserves greater attention. What happens when the political and demographic consequences created by mass atrocities are allowed to survive long after the violence itself has subsided? The answer should trouble us.

The international system has developed mechanisms for identifying atrocities, assisting their victims and prosecuting their perpetrators. It is considerably less effective at reversing the realities that atrocities create.

We concentrate on three objectives: prevention, protection and prosecution. There should be a fourth: reversal

Dr. Azeem Ibrahim

That distinction matters because ethnic cleansing does not require violence to continue indefinitely to achieve its objective. People need only be expelled and prevented from returning for long enough that their absence gradually becomes accepted as the new political reality.

This is the danger confronting the Rohingya.

In August 2017, Myanmar’s military launched operations across northern Rakhine State that produced one of the fastest refugee movements of recent decades. More than 700,000 Rohingya fled into Bangladesh. Many had witnessed killings, sexual violence and the destruction of their villages.

Nine years later, the temporary refuge created by that emergency has become something approaching permanence.

Bangladesh was hosting about 1.2 million Rohingya refugees by June this year, according to UN Refugee Agency figures, including more recent arrivals. More than 1.16 million were in Cox’s Bazar alone.

A child born during the 2017 exodus is now nine years old. For that child, Myanmar is not somewhere remembered from childhood. It is a homeland experienced through the memories of parents and grandparents. This is why time is not neutral after ethnic cleansing. Every year that passes without restoring an expelled population’s ability to return makes the consequences of its expulsion harder to reverse.

Property disappears. Land is occupied or repurposed. Villages cease to exist. Political institutions evolve without the displaced population. Children grow up elsewhere. New authorities emerge. The emergency gradually becomes the status quo.

Refugees should not politically disappear simply because they have physically crossed an international border

Dr. Azeem Ibrahim

Eventually, the international conversation changes. What began as a discussion about people violently expelled from Myanmar becomes a discussion about how Bangladesh should manage a large refugee population. That is a profound transformation.

Humanitarian assistance is essential because people must be fed, housed and protected. Bangladesh has carried an enormous burden in hosting the Rohingya, while international agencies have helped sustain a population that remains heavily dependent on humanitarian support.

But there is a paradox at the heart of the international response. The better the world becomes at managing prolonged displacement without resolving its political causes, the easier it becomes for forced demographic change to endure. Refugee camps can save the victims of ethnic cleansing while inadvertently allowing the territorial consequences of ethnic cleansing to become permanent.

This is not an argument against humanitarian assistance. It is an argument against mistaking humanitarian survival for political resolution.

International law is rightly concerned with accountability. The perpetrators of mass atrocities must face justice. But imagine a future in which senior officials responsible for atrocities against the Rohingya are successfully prosecuted, yet the Rohingya themselves remain outside Myanmar. Would justice have succeeded?

It would have punished individuals responsible for crimes while leaving intact one of the principal consequences of those crimes. That exposes a weakness in how the international community thinks about mass atrocities.

We concentrate on three objectives: prevention, protection and prosecution. There should be a fourth: reversal.

Reversal does not mean recreating the world exactly as it existed before violence occurred. That is often impossible. Nor can refugees ever be compelled to return simply to restore a previous demographic distribution. It means ensuring that perpetrators and successor authorities cannot permanently benefit politically or territorially from forced displacement.

That requires protecting citizenship claims, property rights, documentation and political representation even during prolonged exile. It means displaced populations must remain participants in decisions about the territories from which they were expelled. Above all, it requires preserving a genuine right to voluntary, safe and dignified return rather than allowing that right to decay with time.

The Rohingya demonstrate why this matters. Myanmar has changed dramatically since 2017. The military seized power in 2021. Civil war subsequently spread across the country. The Arakan Army has become a dominant military and administrative actor across much of Rakhine State. The political actors controlling territory may therefore change while the consequences of earlier atrocities remain. This creates a dangerous responsibility gap.

A new authority can say that it did not commit the original crime. A future democratic government could make the same argument. Yet if each successor inherits a territory transformed by forced displacement without accepting responsibility for reversing that exclusion, the outcome of ethnic cleansing survives regardless of who governs.

This principle extends far beyond Myanmar. Mass displacement has transformed communities in Syria. Sudan’s wars have uprooted millions and altered control over territory. Bosnia still demonstrates, three decades after its war, how the demographic consequences of ethnic violence can become embedded within political structures.

The lesson is that atrocities create facts on the ground and facts on the ground acquire political power with time. This should change how the international community responds to forced displacement.

When populations are deliberately expelled, maintaining their connection to their homeland should become part of atrocity prevention itself. Refugees should not politically disappear simply because they have physically crossed an international border.

Their property claims should survive. Their citizenship should survive. Their political voice should survive. And their right to determine whether they eventually return should survive. Otherwise, the passage of time becomes an ally of those responsible for removing them.

Nine years after the Rohingya exodus, the international community still tends to measure the crisis through the condition of the refugees. Are they receiving enough food? Are the camps adequately funded? Can Bangladesh continue hosting them? These are urgent questions.

But another question is more fundamental. Are we allowing the political outcome created by their persecution to become permanent?

More than a million Rohingya now live as refugees in Bangladesh. The longer their exclusion from Myanmar persists, the greater the danger that the world begins treating that exclusion not as the consequence of an atrocity that must be reversed but simply as reality. That would establish a terrible precedent.

The ultimate measure of the international response to genocide cannot simply be whether the killing eventually stops or whether some perpetrators are prosecuted. It must also be whether those responsible are allowed to keep the world their violence created.

• Dr. Azeem Ibrahim is the director of special initiatives at the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy in Washington.