The Radical Islamic Core of the So-Called Rohingya Movement: Beyond Human Rights and Citizenship

Kyaw Zan, Opinion

Global Arakan Network October 2, 2025

ARSA Terrorist Training and Bangagya Speaker at UN

In the labyrinthine corridors of international discourse, the narrative surrounding the turmoil in northern Rakhine State—once known as Arakan—often reduces to a poignant tale of human rights violations and statelessness. Superficial observers, swayed by emotive pleas at global forums, perceive the plight of the self-proclaimed Rohingya as a straightforward saga of exclusion and persecution.

Yet, beneath this veneer lies a more insidious reality: a calculated campaign rooted in radical Islamic expansionism, far transcending mere citizenship disputes. This movement, masquerading as a quest for dignity, harbors ambitions to carve out an autonomous Islamic enclave from the ancestral heartlands of indigenous communities, echoing the jihadist fervor that has plagued the region since Burma's independence in 1948. By dissecting its historical origins, dual-pronged strategies, and contemporary manifestations, one discerns not a cry for justice, but a blueprint for conquest, threatening the fragile mosaic of ethnic harmony in Southeast Asia.

The seeds of this discord were sown during the British colonial era, when unchecked migration from Bengal flooded the fertile plains of northern Arakan. What began as labor inflows for rice cultivation and basic infrastructure projects under imperial policies morphed into a demographic deluge, with tens of thousands of Chittagonian Bengali Muslims crossing porous borders. Far from transient workers, many settled with designs on permanence, their allegiances tethered not to the soil of Arakan but to the nascent Islamic state of Pakistan.

Mro Ethnic Civilians Arrested and Killed by ARSA

As Burma edged toward sovereignty, these settlers—derisively termed "Rohingya/Bangagya" by locals for their Chittagong origins—escalated their irredentist yearnings. In 1947, mere months before independence, the Mujahid Party emerged as their vanguard, explicitly demanding the secession of Buthidaung and Maungdaw townships to join East Pakistan. This was no benign separatist whisper; it was a clarion call for jihad, framed in religious zeal to "liberate" Muslim brethren from Buddhist-majority rule.

The Mujahid rebels, armed and ideologically inflamed, launched insurgencies that ravaged villages, targeting Rakhine Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, and animist minorities like the Mro and Daingnet. Critics from human rights circles counter that such policies of 1982 citizenship law perpetuate a cycle of marginalization, ignoring centuries-old Muslim presence in Arakan.

Yet, archival records and eyewitness accounts underscore the peril: these mostly in northern Arakan were not indigenous kin but colonial imports, their post-independence fidelity pledged to an Islamic ummah rather than the Union of Burma. The Mujahid ethos, blending irredentism with holy war, set a pernicious precedent, transforming economic grievances into existential threats against Arakan's pluralistic fabric.

This historical undercurrent surges into the present, where the so-called Rohingya movement bifurcates into a sophisticated, two-streamed offensive: velvet-gloved diplomacy abroad and iron-fisted militancy on the ground. Extremist factions like the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA)—once Harakah al-Yaqin, evoking al-Qaeda's nomenclature—and the Rohingya Solidarity Organisation (RSO) unabashedly pursue an "Islamic state" in northern Rakhine, purging non-Muslims through orchestrated violence.

ARSA's 2017 onslaught on police outposts, which precipitated mass displacements, was no desperate revolt but a jihadist provocation, complete with fatwas urging martyrdom against "infidel" Rakhines. In tandem, RSO cadres have torched Hindu and Buddhist hamlets, enforcing a de facto caliphate through beheadings and forced conversions—tactics reminiscent of ISIS enclaves in the Levant. These ground-level atrocities, often dismissed as "clashes," systematically erode indigenous presence, with Mro tribespeople fleeing ancestral groves amid ARSA death squads.

Diaspora Activists Lobbying for Islamic Jahidist Movement in Arakan

Complementing this sanguinary theater is the diaspora apparatus, a cadre of exiles ensconced in Western capitals who polish the movement's image with human rights gloss. Figures like Nay San Lwin of the Arakan Rohingya National Council and Tun Khin of the Burmese Rohingya Organisation-UK traverse UN chambers and NGO salons, amplifying narratives of “genocide” to secure aid and sympathy. Their advocacy, ostensibly secular, veils deeper entanglements: leaked communiqués reveal advisory roles in ARSA training camps, funneling funds disguised as humanitarian relief.

The Arakan Rohingya National Alliance, a 2023 coalition binding Nay San Lwin, Tun Khin, and operatives like Ko Ko Lin of RSO, exemplifies this nexus—publicly decrying "persecution" while privately endorsing jihadist manifestos. Nay San Lwin's public disavowals of ARSA as "criminals" ring hollow against reports of shared logistics in Bangladesh refugee sprawls, where militants recruit amid squalor.

Human rights proponents argue these links are overstated, attributing violence to Myanmar's military provocations rather than inherent radicalism. Nonetheless, the symbiosis endures: diaspora rhetoric sustains the oxygen for on-ground infernos, transforming victimhood into a weapon for territorial aggrandizement.

This duplicity crystallized at the High-Level Conference on Rohingya Muslims and Other Minorities in Myanmar, convened at UN Headquarters in New York on September 30, 2025—just days ago as of this writing. Amid solemn invocations of justice, Shwe Maung, a prominent exile voice, unveiled a partition blueprint: northern Rakhine as an exclusive "Bangagya homeland," severing it from indigenous Arakans with OIC-backed "safe zones."

Echoing Mujahid reveries, this proposal demands demographic engineering—expelling Buddhists and minorities to forge an Islamist redoubt. Between November 2023 and September 2025, at least 40 civilians have been killed by the ARSA and RSO terrorists but none of the speakers in recent UN conference had mentioned these atrocities.

Concurrently, ARSA commanders broadcast jihadist edicts from border redoubts, vowing "holy war" against Rakhine defenders. Nay San Lwin and Tun Khin, flanking Shwe Maung in solidarity photos, cloaked these overtures in pleas for repatriation, yet their alliance betrays the endgame: not coexistence, but domination under Sharia veils. The conference's New York Declaration, lauding "minority protections," unwittingly lent legitimacy to this schism, as speakers lamented aid cuts while eliding the militants' role in perpetuating chaos.

New ARSA Leader Calling for Jahidist Movement in Arakan

At its essence, the Rohingya movement is no humanitarian crusade but a radical Islamic vanguard, aspiring to resurrect a caliphate fragment in Southeast Asia's underbelly. Its architects, from Mujahid forebears to ARSA zealots, envision Arakan not as a shared patrimony but a conquered frontier for ummah expansion—an ISIS archetype grafted onto Bengal's fringes.

This peril imperils not merely Rakhine's Buddhists and animists, but regional stability, as Bangladesh's camps breed transnational jihad, spilling into India and beyond. International myopia, fixated on Myanmar's junta sins, blinds it to this hydra: addressing it demands piercing the human rights shroud, bolstering indigenous defenses, and dismantling diaspora-militant pipelines. Only then can Arakan's ancient pluralism endure, unyielding against the tide of theocratic ambition. The clock ticks; complacency courts catastrophe.