The Rohingya and Myanmar’s Spring Revolution By Ro Mayyu Islam

 On the last weekend of July 2026, the Myanmar military regime’s Foreign Ministry published a set of figures with the flat precision of a spreadsheet: of the 828,824 names Bangladesh has submitted for repatriation, the military regime says it has confirmed 308,797 people as former residents of Rakhine State, could not verify 113,507, and flagged 4,241 as alleged terrorists. Weeks earlier, two boats loaded mostly with Rohingya passengers fleeing violence and persecution vanished off Myanmar’s own coast; UN agencies now believe more than 500 people aboard are dead.

Both scenes describe the same failure from opposite ends. In one, Rohingya are rows in a verification database, processed by a government that committed genocide against them and insists it is still not safe for their return. In the other, they are bodies in the Bay of Bengal, proof that waiting for that government’s permission is its own form of violence. Neither outcome answers the question that actually decides whether Rohingya go home: do they belong to the political community of Myanmar? The Myanmar military junta insists that Rohingya do not belong. How will the Spring Revolution answer?

Rohingya repatriation cannot be treated as a humanitarian dividend to be collected once the Spring Revolution has already won. It is one of the earliest and most exacting tests of whether the federal democratic union the revolution promises is real.

In February 2021, the Myanmar military ended a decade of tentative, imperfect democratization and arrested the elected government it had allowed to govern. The national uprising that emerged to contest the military’s betrayal demanded more than a return to the old order. The Spring Revolution seeks a nationwide, multi-ethnic project to end entrenched military rule and the 2008 constitution that gives its ruthlessness it a veneer of legality, and build a more stable and just political system characterized by an inclusive federal democratic union . By October 2025, anti-junta forces and allied ethnic armed organizations together held more territory than the military itself.

The junta, desperate to show its international enablers that it offers a viable path to stability, responded with a series of performative political reforms.. A multi-phased election running from December 28, 2025 to January 25, 2026 excluded the parties that won more than 90 percent of the seats in the 2020 election, and only held polls in constituencies the military controlled; 67 townships did not voteat all. Despite rigging the vote, the military’s proxy party won less than half of the votes, but was able to control the legislature. Western governments and the United Nations called the result neither free nor fair. The same investigators who document Myanmar’s war crimes found that violence against civilians, aerial attacks, arbitrary detention and torture continued through the election period without pause.

This is regime choreography, not political transformation. And it is the exact distinction that will decide whether Rohingya ever go home.

II. The Rohingya Had Already Lived This Reality

For the Rohingya, little of this is new; only the audience has changed. Since Ne Win’s 1962 coup pushed Myanmar toward militarized, race-based statehood, the community has been governed as a problem to be solved by force rather than a population to be included in the nation. The 1982 Citizenship Law, which anchors nationality to a fixed list of state-defined “national races” rather than to residence or birth, effectively wrote statelessness into law. Mass expulsions followed in 1978, again in 1991 and 1992, communal violence in 2012, and then, in August 2017, what a UN-mandated fact-finding mission concluded amounted to genocide, a finding the International Court of Justice is now deliberating whether to confirm.

What is new since 2021 is that the majority Bamar Buddhist population has been subject to the same  machinery of relentless and brutal violence. The Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar’s latest annual report, covering July 2025 to June 2026, documents a sustained campaign of aerial attacks on homes, schools and hospitals, arbitrary detention, torture and sexual violence, drawn from more than 1,600 sources. Large numbers of Bamar, Karen, Chin and other communities now experience displacement and state violence as a feature of daily life. What the Spring Revolution has not yet answered is whether that shared experience becomes shared politics.

III. The New Political Recognition of the Rohingya

To its credit, the resistance movement has said more about Rohingya rights than any Myanmar government in living memory. Weeks after its formation, the National Unity Government invited “Rohingyas to join hands with us… in this Spring Revolution against military dictatorship.” Its representatives have since promised to repeal the 1982 Citizenship Law and repatriate the Rohingya with full citizenship once the junta falls.

But public statements have not always matched recognition in practice. Rohingya organizations pointed out, as early as 2021, that the Federal Democracy Charter’s own list of the union’s ethnic nationalities did not name the Rohingya as explicitly as it should have. A more recent and rather unsentimental assessment, published in the American Bar Association’s international law journal, put the deeper problem plainly: the NUG can offer a normative commitment the junta will never make, but it cannot yet guarantee Rohingya security or citizenship, because it does not control the territory they would return to. A revolution can mean every word of its promise to the Rohingya and still be structurally unable to keep it, which is exactly why that promise needs to be written into institutions now, while it still costs the movement something, rather than issued later as a reward for a victory already won.

IV. The Current Reality in Rakhine

Even if Naypyitaw’s intentions changed overnight, it has little say as to whether Rohingya can return to their home of Rakhine State. Since fighting resumed in 2023, the Arakan Army (AA) has taken 14 of Rakhine State’s 17 townships, and by some estimates more than 90 percent of its territory, including the entire border with Bangladesh. Through its political wing, the United League of Arakan (ULA), it runs a functioning civil administration, the Arakan People’s Revolutionary Government, with its own courts, tax collection, land registries and health departments.

That administration has not been kind to the Rohingya now living under it. Amnesty International and other monitors have documented extrajudicial killings, forced labor, arson and severe restrictions on movement and livelihoods under the AA, and estimate around 150,000 Rohingya have fled Rakhine since mid-2024 alone, on top of the 2017 exodus. The AA disputes the characterization and argues its measures are calibrated to wartime security needs rather than targeting Rohingya specifically; independent investigators remain unpersuaded.

On the one question that decides whether repatriation means anything, citizenship, the record is not ambiguous. A May 2026 policy brief from the Australian National University’s Myanmar Research Centre found that the AA and its civil administration have not challenged the 1982 Citizenship Law or proposed any legal alternative to it; Rohingya under its rule remain as undocumented as they were under the junta. Territory has changed hands. The architecture of exclusion has not moved an inch.

V. Why Repatriation Keeps Failing

Two earlier attempts at repatriation, in 2018 and 2019, collapsed because Rohingya refugees were asked to return but given no credible guarantee of safety, so refused to go. What is striking about 2026 is the scale of bureaucratic activity, and how little of it has touched that original problem.

In April 2025, Bangladesh announced Myanmar had cleared 180,000 names for return, its first such confirmation in years. By January 2026, that figure had grown to roughly 354,751 verified, of whom 253,964 were confirmed as former residents. By the end of July, the numbers had grown again: 828,824 names submitted in total, of which 426,545 had actually been processed, and 308,797 confirmed as former Rakhine residents. Not one person has gone home under this process. The junta’s position, restated at every stage, is that security conditions are not yet suitable.

These bureaucratic verification processes have become a way of appearing to move while the variables that actually matter to a returning family—what are their rights, who guarantees those rights, who governs their village and patrols their streets, can they vote, who represents them politically—remain untouched. A repatriation process built entirely around list-processing will keep producing bigger, more precise lists and exactly zero returns, because it was never designed to answer the questions a Rohingya family is actually asking.

VI. The Hidden Question: Who Belongs to Myanmar?

Those questions of rights, political power, governance and recognition resolve into a single deeper one: who is part of the political community of Myanmar? Myanmar’s official documents still routinely describe the Rohingya as “Bengali,” a label that pre-decides the argument by identifying them as recent foreign arrivals. Under the 1982 Citizenship Law, belonging is decided by membership in a fixed list of national races invented and controlled entirely by the state itself, not by residence, birth or generations of lived history in Rakhine. A family can be verified as having lived in Myanmar for a century and still not be recognized as its citizens or deserving of rights.

VII. Rakhine and the Problem of Shared Political Space

These problems stem from the nature of exclusionary military-dominated politics in Myanmar. They are not the fault of ordinary Rakhine people. The abuses documented against the Rohingya in the 2017 clearance operations and in the post-2021 conflict alike, are the acts of armed and governing institutions: the Myanmar military’s chain of command, the AA’s chain of command, and the political leaderships that speak in their name. They are not a condemnation of Rakhine society.

Rakhine civilians have themselves been bombed, displaced and impoverished by the same military that terrorized Rohingya villages. Reporting from inside AA-administered townships shows the picture is not monolithic: other minority communities there describe improved, even warm relations with Arakanese neighbors and administrators under the new civil government, which makes the specifically harsh treatment documented against Rohingya communities in the same territory look like policy and choice, not an unavoidable feature of war.

The distinction between Rakhine and Rohingya communities, though, is one of power. Unlike the Rakhine community, the Rohingya have no power—political or coercive—that can ensure they are protected if repatriated. Any solution to Rohingya repatriation must come with political power, or else Rohingya are bound to find themselves back in refugee camps in short order. This begins with citizenship, fundamental rights protected by an independent judiciary, and the right to establish political organizations.

VIII. Repatriation as a Test of Federal Democracy

Rohingya repatriation should not be treated as a humanitarian outcome to be delivered once Myanmar’s federal democratic transition has otherwise succeeded. It should be understood as one of the first and most exacting tests of whether that transition is real, because it cannot be resolved without resolving almost every foundational question a federal union has to answer: who is a citizen, who controls territory, who guarantees security, who owns land, who is represented in government, who is protected by law.

Analysts studying Bangladesh’s side of this problem have converged on the same conclusion from a different angle: repatriation is not primarily a logistical or humanitarian challenge, but a political, legal, security and judicial one that can only be resolved inside Myanmar. Citizenship is the floor beneath everything else; without it, freedom of movement, political participation, education, healthcare and property ownership have no legal foundation to stand on. Investigators have also begun documenting the deliberate destruction and appropriation of Rohingya land and property as its own category of crime, a reminder that home is not an abstraction but a specific, often now-occupied plot of ground.

I would state the standard as five conditions rather than one: Recognition. Citizenship. Security. Land and livelihood. Representation. Call it the Five Guarantees of Democratic Return. Physical return without all five is temporary relocation, not repatriation. A federal democratic Myanmar will be proven not by the constitution it drafts, but by whether a Rohingya family enjoys all five guarantees at once, in the village they came from.

IX. What Rohingya Should Do

Political agency has to be built as the wider movement grows. That means training a generation of Rohingya negotiators, politicians and lawyers who can sit with the Spring Revolutionaries with ideas for a new political future. It means documenting land, property and residency claims now, systematically and with evidence, so that a future restitution process has something to work from rather than starting from memory. It means building direct relationships with Rakhine civil society and other ethnic political actors, not only with exile politics based abroad, since Rakhine’s political future will be negotiated locally as much as nationally. And it means insisting that Rohingya are included in every forum where Myanmar’s future is discussed.

X. What the Spring Revolution Must Do

The obligation runs the other way too. If the Spring Revolution wants to live up to its principles, it should include the Rohingya in its political community. The pledge to repeal the 1982 Citizenship Law should exist as drafted legislative text now, available for scrutiny, rather than a promise held in reserve for after victory. The NUG, the ethnic armed organizations and, critically, the AA and ULA must ensure that its stated commitments to democracy, rights protections and self-determination are not confined to their own ethnic constituents but to everyone, including Rohingya. A revolution that liberates land while leaving the legal architecture of exclusion in place will have only changed who rules.

XI. Two Possible Futures

Myanmar is already showing what the first future looks like. In it, the junta eventually cedes or loses power, but the exclusionary architecture survives: citizenship remains conditional on ethnicity, repatriation remains a bureaucratic exercise, and Rakhine becomes a site of competing nationalisms rather than negotiated coexistence.

In the second future, the principles of the Spring Revolution yield a more stable future: citizenship is equal and unconditional, security is guaranteed by mechanisms Rohingya themselves trust, land is restored or compensated, and Rohingya representatives sit in political institutions to peacefully exercise the power of people who are equal before the law. Under this system, inclusion in the political community of Myanmar is not defined by one’s ethnicity—Bamar, Rakhine, Rohingya or otherwise—but by a set of rules, rights and obligations that apply to all. That is not a utopian standard. It is the ordinary meaning of federal citizenship, applied without exception.

If Myanmar’s revolutionaries cannot build a political home for the most excluded population in the country, it is fair to ask if they are genuinely committed to the principles they espouse. Federal democracy will not only be proven by a new federal democratic constitution. It will be proven the day a Rohingya family can return to the village they were driven from, hold citizenship no one can revoke, vote, farm land recorded in their own name, and call a security service accountable to them rather than fear it. Everything short of that is territory changing hands, not a revolution finished.

The true measure of this revolution will not be how completely it removes the generals from power. It will be whether it removes the idea, older than the generals, of who is allowed to belong, and whether the next boat of Rohingya has somewhere to return to instead of somewhere to flee.

Ro Mayyu Islam is the founding chair of the Center for Rohingya Crisis Studies.