UN and International Mechanisms Failing to Document Mass Atrocities Committed By Islamist Jihadist Groups Against Non-Muslims in Northern Arakan

Opinion,Kyaw Zan

Global Arakan Network|November 2, 2025

The silence surrounding the slaughter of non-Muslims in northern Arakan’s scarred townships is not merely an oversight; it is a calculated erasure. In Buthidaung and Maungdaw, where the air still carries the acrid memory of torched villages, Islamist jihadist factions—ARSA, RSO, RIM, and ARA—have carved a path of calculated terror through Rakhine, Hindu, Mro, Thet, and Khami communities.

Yet the grand machinery of international justice, from the UNCHR to the IIMM, from Special Rapporteur Tom Andrews to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Fortify Rights, remains eerily mute. These bodies, entrusted with the sacred duty of bearing witness, have instead perfected the art of selective blindness.

The pattern is as chilling as it is consistent. When the blade falls on Muslim flesh, the world is summoned with urgent dispatches, satellite imagery, and tear-streaked testimonies. But when the victims are Rakhine farmers dragged from their fields, Hindu women burned alive in their homes, or Mro elders beheaded for refusing to pay “zakat” to armed zealots, the reports vanish into bureaucratic ether.

This is not ignorance; it is ideology masquerading as impartiality. The jihadists’ atrocities—systematic executions, forced conversions, and the razing of ancient temples—are documented only in whispers, buried in footnotes, or framed in the passive voice: “violence occurred,” “clashes erupted,” “bodies were found.” Never the agent. Never the intent. Never the ideology that fuels the fire.

This selective outrage is not new. For years, the same institutions have treated non-Muslim suffering as collateral damage in a narrative that crowns one community as the eternal victim and casts all others as either perpetrators or props. The 2017 Hindu massacre in Kha Maung Seik—99 souls, including children, herded to a riverbank and slaughtered—earned a fleeting mention in a Human Rights Watch report, only because the evidence was too gruesome to ignore.

Even then, the killers were described as “armed men,” not ARSA militants wielding jihadist banners. The 2024 beheadings in Buthidaung, where Rakhine men were decapitated and their heads displayed on bamboo spikes, elicited no urgent UN press release, no IIMM investigation, no Amnesty campaign. The silence was deafening.

This bias is not merely unethical; it is lethal. By refusing to name the perpetrator, these mechanisms embolden the jihadists. ARSA’s propaganda videos—gleefully circulated in refugee camps—declare non-Muslims “kafir” and promise “cleansing” of the land. Since January 1, 2024, ARSA has killed more than 50 innocent civilians, injured another 10, and arrested 20 others. With no updates on the fate of those detained, they are almost certainly dead.

Yet when Fortify Rights finally acknowledged camp killings in 2025, it framed them as “internal disputes,” not the ethnic purging they were. The UNCHR’s 2024 Rakhine update devoted 47 pages to military abuses and three paragraphs to jihadist atrocities, two of which were hedged with “alleged.” This is not documentation; it is deflection.

The consequences are catastrophic. Entire villages—once vibrant with Rakhine festivals, Hindu prayers, and Mro songs—now lie in ashes. Survivors, displaced and destitute, watch as the world’s moral arbiters avert their gaze. The Khami, whose ancestral hills were seized for jihadist training camps, are erased from the humanitarian map. The Thet, whose children were abducted to fight as cannon fodder, receive no child-soldier reintegration programs. This is not universal human rights; it is partisan advocacy wearing the mask of justice.

ARSA Terrorist With Junta Weapon (photocrd)

The stakes could not be higher. When international mechanisms fail to confront jihadist ideology, they do not merely neglect victims—they legitimise the very forces that seek to extinguish pluralism. The Rakhine, who have coexisted with Muslims for decades, are now painted as oppressors to justify their extermination. The Hindus, whose temples were dynamited in 2024, are told their suffering is “communal tension.” This is not impartiality; it is complicity.

Those who claim to champion human rights must demand better. The IIMM must deploy investigators to the charred remains of Buthidaung’s Hindu quarter. Amnesty must interview the Mro widows whose husbands were crucified for refusing conversion. Human Rights Watch must satellite-map the jihadist checkpoints that extort non-Muslims at gunpoint. The UNCHR must issue a stand-alone report on ARSA’s ethnic cleansing campaign, not bury it in a footnote. And Tom Andrews must condemn the jihadists by name, not hide behind “all parties” rhetoric.

Until then, the blood of non-Muslims will continue to soak Arakan’s soil, unseen and unavenged. The world’s silence is not neutral—it is a death sentence.