China’s Xi urges new Middle East security framework during rare Egypt visit

 Chinese President Xi Jinping has called on Middle East countries to oppose external influence and consider reshaping the region’s security order.

Xi’s remarks on Wednesday to his Egyptian counterpart Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, on his first visit to Cairo in a decade, come as Beijing seeks to expand its influence in the region amid the United States-Israel war with Iran.

“We must uphold the principle that the people of the Middle East are the masters of their own affairs, oppose external interference [and] support regional countries in strengthening dialogue on peace and security,” Xi said in a meeting with el-Sisi, according to Chinese state news agency Xinhua.

Xi was greeted by el-Sisi and a 21-gun salute for talks at the Ittihadiya presidential palace in the Egyptian capital.

The talks covered the six-month US-Israel war on Iran, with both presidents urging “diplomatic solutions” to reach a “comprehensive agreement to end the war”, according to a statement from el-Sisi’s spokesperson.

Sisi’s office also said the two countries signed an agreement to launch the third phase of the Egyptian-Chinese industrial zone at the Suez Canal, which officials say already hosts 200 companies and investments worth approximately $4bn.

The new investments – for which Egypt has not announced a figure – give Beijing even greater influence in the canal zone, a critical artery of global trade, as conflict in the region chokes traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, which passes between Oman and Iran, and the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, which separates Yemen and the Horn of Africa.

Xi said China “stands ready to work with countries in the region to safeguard the security of international shipping lanes, advance development cooperation … and eliminate the breeding grounds for conflict”.

A series of additional agreements were also signed, though Egyptian officials did not provide details.

Beijing seeks greater influence

Beijing is eyeing a greater foothold in the Middle East, at a time when “the United States looks like it can’t really make up its mind whether it wants to withdraw from the region or be more engaged”, Mirette Mabrouk, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Middle East Institute, told the AFP news agency.

China sees Egypt as a key partner and an entry point to more regional influence. For Egypt, closer ties with China are part of a broader effort to diversify partnerships rather than align with a single power, Mabrouk said.

The diplomatic campaign comes before an expected meeting between Xi and US President Donald Trump this month.

Cairo is one of the largest recipients of US military aid, receiving $1.3bn annually, and has historically served as a key Middle East mediator.

Xi’s visit also comes after Saudi Arabia, Turkiye and Pakistan last month signed the Mecca Defence Alliance. Experts have said the move demonstrates a desire by regional countries to diversify their security arrangements beyond Washington.

The US-Israel war with Iran has led several regional allies to question the dependability of the traditional US security guarantee. Washington has, in turn, called on Gulf partners to take greater charge of their own regional deterrence.

The pact contains a NATO-style Article 5 clause, meaning an armed attack on any of the three member states is considered an attack on all.

Officials in Turkiye, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have stressed the pact is not meant to replace any pre-existing security deals.

Across Cairo, a megalopolis home to more than 26 million people, major streets were lined on Wednesday with Chinese and Egyptian flags, as well as billboards showing el-Sisi and Xi.

Xi is expected to head to the Grand Egyptian Museum overlooking the Giza Pyramids later on Wednesday.

Nine Americans Killed. No Accountability. Tell the Senate to Act on Israel

 

Nine Americans have been killed by Israeli settlers or Israeli security forces in the occupied West Bank since 2022. Their families are still waiting for justice. Meanwhile, Palestinians face escalating settler attacks, military violence, displacement and the detention, with billions of OUR dollars. Senators now have an opportunity to do more than issue another appeal to the Israeli government. A new resolution led by Sens. Chris Van Hollen, Tim Kaine and Bernie Sanders would use U.S. law to compel the State Department to report what it knows about these killings and Israel’s wider human rights practices. call-to-action  Contact your senators today. Urge them to cosponsor and vote for the Van Hollen-Kaine-Sanders Section 502B(c) resolution, oppose any attempt to block it and demand full accountability for Israeli violence against Americans and Palestinians. No country receiving U.S. weapons and taxpayer dollars should be exempt from U.S. human rights law. CONTACT YOUR SENATORS

JUSTICE FOR ALL CONDEMNS U.S. AMBASSADOR’S REMARKS ON KASHMIR

 Justice For All, a global human rights organization through its Kashmir Action campaign, strongly condemns the recent remarks by U.S. Ambassador to India Sergio Gor. Characterizing the disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir as an “important part of India” directly contradicts the region’s internationally recognized status and undermines the fundamental right of its people to self-determination as enshrined in multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions.

Ambassador Gor’s statement in Srinagar is a sharp departure from the long-standing diplomatic position held by the United States under both Republican and Democratic administrations. The U.N. Security Council has adopted at least 17 resolutions and memorandums on the Kashmir dispute since 1948, including Resolution 47, which established the right to self-determination through a free and impartial plebiscite.. By ignoring these obligations, the Ambassador has effectively negated U.S. neutrality and dismissed the aspirations of the Kashmiri people.

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, has expressed grave concern over the situation in the region, calling for political dialogue to address underlying grievances. U.N. Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues, Fernand de Varennes, has documented dramatic human rights violations by India, including arbitrary arrests, political persecution and suppression of free media. In November 2025, eight U.N. Special Rapporteurs and Working Groups issued a landmark report documenting widespread repression in Kashmir and urging a peaceful resolution reflecting the aspirations of the Kashmiri people, a call that remains unheeded.

“Ambassador Gor’s assertion is not only a diplomatic provocation but an attempt to erase the legal reality of the Kashmir dispute,” said Imam Abdel Malik, President of Justice For All. “The United States cannot cherry-pick international law. The U.N.-mandated plebiscite, a longstanding commitment of the United States, is the only legitimate path to a just and lasting resolution.”

“The U.S. must stop rewarding India the occupying power and hold it accountable,” stated Hena Zuberi, DC Director of Advocacy for Justice For All. “We call on the State Department to disavow Ambassador Gor’s statement and reaffirm its commitment to U.N. resolutions on Kashmir. The mass detention of political leaders, silencing of dissent, land confiscation and attempts at demographic engineering through the systematic alteration of the region’s demographic composition are violations of international law that the U.S. is obliged to address.”

Justice For All urges the international community to reject this new narrative and uphold the U.N. Charter, insisting on the immediate release of all political prisoners by India and an end to the occupation, paving the way for a free and fair plebiscite throughout all of Kashmir.

Save Uyghur Campaign Condemns China’s Continued Atrocities and Deceptive Cover-Ups in Occupied East Turkistan

 August 31 marks the fourth anniversary of the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) landmark assessment of human rights concerns in Chinese-occupied East Turkistan. Four years after the U.N. formally declared that Beijing’s actions “may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity,” the Save Uyghur Campaign warns that virtually nothing has changed for the millions of Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic people living under Chinese occupation. If anything, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has merely refined its tactics, becoming highly sophisticated in hiding its ongoing genocide, extrajudicial incarcerations and systematic erasure from the eyes of the international community.

The 2022 U.N. report meticulously documented a pattern of large-scale arbitrary detention in so-called “Vocational Education and Training Centres” (VETCs), which it concluded amounted to a severe deprivation of liberty. Survivors described horrifying conditions, including beatings with electric batons while restrained in “tiger chairs,” forced administration of drowsiness-inducing pills and injections, and systemic sexual and gender-based violence, including rape and invasive gynecological examinations.

Four years later, the Save Uyghur Campaign highlights that while Beijing has repeatedly claimed these “camps” are closed and all “trainees” have “graduated,” the highly repressive legal and policy framework that underpinned the entire internment system remains fully intact and can be re-engaged at any moment. In reality, the CCP has simply pivoted its strategy from extrajudicial camps to formal, long-term imprisonments. During the height of the crackdown, criminal sentences of five years or longer skyrocketed by ten-fold, with courts sentencing 86,655 individuals in 2017 alone. Hundreds of thousands of Uyghur scholars, artists, intellectuals and ordinary citizens continue to serve these lengthy, unjust sentences in an expanded network of high-security prisons today.

Arslan Hidayat, Save Uyghur Team Lead, said: “Four years ago, the United Nations confirmed what our community has cried out for years: that the Chinese regime is committing atrocities in East Turkistan that amount to crimes against humanity. Today, in 2026, we stand here to declare that absolutely nothing has changed for the better. The camps have not truly disappeared; they have simply been institutionalized. Beijing has transitioned from extrajudicial re-education to formal, long-term prison sentences to keep our people locked away in silence.”

The Chinese regime has become incredibly adept at concealing its crimes. They force released survivors to sign pledges of absolute silence under threats of severe reprisals to their families, enforce “strict secrecy” among state personnel and systematically discredit any witness who dares to speak out.

The U.N. assessment laid bare a chilling blueprint of demographic and cultural genocide, all of which continues unabated in East Turkistan:

Demographic Suppression:

• Coercive family planning and birth control policies, including forced sterilizations and IUD placements, resulting in an unprecedented, stark decline of approximately 48.7 per cent in the birth rate of East Turkistan between 2017 and 2019. Uyghur-majority prefectures like Hotan and Kashgar saw their birth rates plummet by over 50 per cent in just two years.

Cultural and Religious Erasure:

• The systematic defacement and demolition of Islamic religious sites, such as the historic Imam Asim Shrine.
• Aggressive suppression of linguistic rights, including directives in Hotan county prohibiting the use of the Uyghur language in schools, collective activities and administrative work.

State-Sponsored Forced Labor:

• The expansion of coercive “surplus labor” and “labor transfer” schemes, which relocate rural labourers under strict surveillance and the constant threat of internment if they refuse “government administration.”

Total Surveillance and Family Destruction:

• A high-tech surveillance grid driven by the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP) database, facial recognition cameras and biometric tracking.
• The highly intrusive “Becoming Family” homestay program, where over a million Han-Chinese cadres have been sent to live inside Uyghur homes, subjecting families, especially women, to constant surveillance, political indoctrination and sexual harassment.
• The trans-border reach of the CCP that tears families apart. Uyghurs in the diaspora remain entirely severed from their loved ones in East Turkistan, unable to contact them due to the extreme risk of reprisals. Diaspora members are routinely subjected to threatening phone calls, intimidation and the constant threat of forcible return (refoulement) by host countries in violation of international law.

On this solemn anniversary, the Save Uyghur Campaign echoes the U.N.’s urgent recommendations and calls upon the international community and world governments to:

• Demand the immediate release of all individuals arbitrarily deprived of their liberty in prisons, VETCs or other detention facilities in East Turkistan.
• Enforce strict import bans on all goods produced through state-sponsored forced labor schemes in the region.
• Urgently protect Uyghur refugees and diaspora members by strictly adhering to the principle of non-refoulement, and investigate trans-border intimidation and reprisals by Chinese state actors.
• Establish independent oversight mechanisms to investigate allegations of torture, sexual violence, forced labor and suspicious deaths in custody.

The time for empty statements has passed. The U.N. report was a call to action; four years of inaction have only allowed Beijing to perfect its machinery of erasure.

The Rohingya need a unified strategy, not piecemeal efforts by Enam Khan

 For close to a decade, I have been in rooms with various ethnic groups and their political wings, with figures of Myanmar authority and politics and, more instructively, with the Rohingya themselves. Negotiating in conflict environments teaches us that political settlements are not stumbled upon but rather formed when people show up and try to build them together.

One of the people who kept showing up was Mohib Ullah. He was my friend—a science teacher from Maungdaw, known in the camps as “Mastor Shahib.” He repeatedly said that his people were not stateless, that they had a state, and that state was Myanmar. He kept records, too, names of the dead and children of 2017 and lists of those at risk. After our last meeting in a camp, I asked him to stop walking me to my car because of safety reasons. He smiled and said that if he stopped walking, everyone would live in fear, which was exactly what the criminals wanted. He was murdered in his office on September 29, 2021. The killing was aimed at his push for repatriation—a stark reminder of what the delay in this process costs and who pays for it.  

The Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commissioner’s office has administered the largest refugee settlement on earth under conditions that would break most administrations. Host communities gave up land, resources, and quiet on a scale that few societies have been asked to bear. Donor countries, humanitarian agencies, and the taxpayers who fund them have sustained an operation without precedent in this region. Bangladesh government’s own commission on Rohingya refugee affairs has placed the issue at the centre of national decision-making. None of it has yet produced a viable path to repatriation, and that is a failure not of will but of form.

The issue has been worked along three separate lines—bilateral and trilateral negotiation, a humanitarian operation, and a periodic appeal to conscience—each run competently. But three defensible efforts in parallel do not constitute a strategy. Meanwhile, the world has changed. Funding is declining, the ground in Rakhine is no longer held by a single party across the table, and a second generation is growing up in the camps without any memory of the place they must return to. Every year of drift turns a repatriation problem into a permanent population problem with stark implications. That is how a displacement crisis hardens into a cultural, identity, and resource crisis with no natural end.

What is required, then, is a single national instrument—a serious national strategy—that will name the conditions for return rather than merely gesture at them, attaching published indicators to each so that return is facilitated against a standard rather than announced against a calendar. It will treat the camps and the host district as facilitators of return rather than a waiting room, and improve their conditions in the coming months. It will shift international efforts from maintenance towards skills and market creation for eventual lawful employment in Myanmar; engage every counterpart who can move the outcome; keep accountability and repatriation on separate tracks so that neither is traded for the other; and ask partners for defined roles and milestones rather than sympathy alone.

The framework must also correct a framing error that has persisted since 2017—that this is not a bilateral issue between Dhaka and Naypyidaw. The cause lies inside Myanmar and so does the remedy; Bangladesh is merely where the consequence came. Asean, China, or the West treat it as something the two neighbours should settle between themselves, which is inaccurate. Rakhine also cannot be treated as a theatre with Myanmar as backdrop, since the decisions shaping it are taken elsewhere. A settlement there is a function of wider stabilisation. The ethnic groups and their armed formations matter, of course, but each is one party among several, and a strategy resting on a single interlocutor ends up having one point of failure.

Then there is the phrase “conducive conditions,” which governs every conversation about return but has never been defined. Undefined conditionality is indefinite deferral. It lets a counterparty postpone, prevents a partner from guaranteeing, and asks the Rohingya to consent against a standard nobody has offered. Write the conditions out, and the environment becomes something built and verified rather than awaited.

Anyone who has listened to the Rohingya knows the security question cannot be reduced to law enforcement. The expulsions there were not the Tatmadaw’s work alone. Communities participated, property changed hands locally, and the fear people voice in the camps is often a fear of the village rather than of the state. So, reconciliation and dual-community benefits are load-bearing, not decorative. Every project must be transactional and visibly serve Rakhine and Rohingya alike, because history there is unambiguous about what one-sided assistance produces.

The same realism applies to the issues of narcotics and scam centres. The narco trade running through these camps is not a Rohingya enterprise; it sits at the end of a chain whose laboratories, capital, and protection are inside Myanmar. The scam compounds that recruit from the camps answer to the same economy. China, Asean, and the West have a direct stake here, because the revenue ruining young people in Cox’s Bazar, Bangkok, and Kunming is also the revenue that arms the fighting in Rakhine and beyond. Addressing the trade at its origin will help shrink two problems.

Which brings me to the thing that nobody says aloud. Alone among the significant communities of Myanmar, the Rohingya field no armed organisation. ARSA does not represent them and never has, and civil Rohingya unity is a must to counter armed and criminal groups in the camps. Yet the world extends understanding to every other armed movement in Myanmar while treating Rohingya self-defence as unthinkable. I say this as a warning, not a proposal: protraction produces armed formation and no movement in Myanmar ever needed the state’s permission or weapons to come into being. Stabilising Rakhine and making repatriation moves visible will prove how the community’s civilian character holds. Leave a stateless people with no lawful route back home for another decade, and things may take a darker turn.

The economics point the same way. Myanmar can be labour-short, Rakhine most acutely, while Bangladesh holds a labour surplus—and among them sits a working-age displaced population that is Myanmar’s own. Skills, certification, lawful employment, and food production in Rakhine cost less than indefinite maintenance, and can turn a returnee into a contributor to Rakhine’s prosperity. My argument is always that return restores a workforce and a market without which Rakhine’s recovery is difficult.

Ultimately, the Rohingya community must be empowered rather than spoken for—with civilian leadership, identity retention, and a place in the forums deciding its future. The Rohingya must not be absent from settlement processes. That was Mastor Shahib’s whole argument. A camp, however humanely run, is not a home. A ration, however faithfully delivered, is not a livelihood. The desire to return is the oldest and most human one, and a strategy’s purpose should be to give it a road home.

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Shahab Enam Khan teaches international relations at Jahangirnagar University and Bangladesh University of Professionals.

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.