Are Radical Bangagya Diaspora Activists a Threat to Peaceful Coexistence in Arakan?

Opinion December 24, 2025

Diaspora Bangagya Activists

The world has moved on from the 2017 exodus. Cameras stopped rolling, headlines faded, and the camps along the Naf River turned into a permanent scar everyone agreed to ignore. While Myanmar burns in a hundred places, something quieter but far more hopeful is happening in the west: the Arakan Army now holds every inch of the borderland, from Maungdaw to Buthidaung and beyond.

Roads are opening, markets are coming back, and for the first time in generations, local leaders (Rakhine and Muslim alike) sit at the same table to decide water sharing, school language, and night patrols. People who fled in terror are starting to walk home, not because someone forced them, but because neighbours they know told them the guns have gone quiet.

This fragile new reality has one loud enemy: the professional activists who live in Chicago, London, or Kuala Lumpur, collect donor money in the name of “Rohingya rights,” and spend their days screaming on Twitter about genocide that supposedly never ended. Safe behind oceans and visas, they paint the world in pure black and white: every Rakhine is a monster, every Arakan Army soldier a war criminal, every attempt at local dialogue a trick. Their language is borrowed straight from 2017 cables; it has not changed even one word while life on the ground has changed beyond recognition.

Worse, many of these voices quietly cheer for the very armed groups that make peace impossible. Messages of support (sometimes money, sometimes just applause) flow from certain diaspora accounts to ARSA, to RSO remnants, to new outfits like the Arakan Rohingya Army. When a village administrator tries to bring back electricity, they call it “forced assimilation.” When the AA arrests an ARSA bomber, they call it “ethnic cleansing.” Every small step toward living together again is labelled betrayal. Trust, already paper-thin, gets shredded by people who will never have to live with the consequences.

Ask the imams and headmen inside northern Maungdaw today whom they trust more: the loud activist with a verified blue tick in America, or the AA officer who grew up two villages away and speaks the same dialect they do. The answer is instant. Local Muslim leaders issue statements begging the diaspora to stop the hate campaign. Their letters are ignored, because nuance does not raise funds in Washington or Brussels. Donors want tears and fire, not boring stories about shared wells and joint football matches.

These activists have become strangers to their own people. They demand a separate “Rohingya homeland” that would mean new war, new displacement, new graves. Meanwhile, the people still living on the land (Rakhine, Muslim, Hindu, everyone) are trying to build one homeland where no one has to flee again. The diaspora radicals are not part of that future; they are its biggest obstacle.

Peaceful coexistence is never dramatic enough for a crowdfunding page. It happens slowly: a Rakhine teacher accepting Muslim students, a Muslim trader selling rice to AA checkpoints, both sides agreeing to punish the next person who burns a house, no matter whose side he claims. Every time an overseas activist screams “genocide continues,” a frightened mother cancels her plan to return. Every viral thread accusing the AA of fresh atrocities makes a village elder think twice before sitting next to his former enemy.

The real threat to peace in Arakan today is not the old military. It is the laptop warrior ten thousand kilometres away who needs the war to stay alive so the donations keep flowing. Until their megaphones fall silent, every small bridge built between communities remains at risk of being burned down by people who will never have to walk across it.

The land is healing. Let it heal.