Stateless Rohingya rue Myanmar’s election from exile

AFP

Rohingya refugees walk in a street in a makeshift camp in Kutupalong, Ukhiya Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, 13 March 2025. Photo: EPA

Myanmar’s military portrays its general election as a path to democracy and peace, but the vote offers neither to a million Rohingya exiles, robbed of citizenship rights and evicted from their homeland by force.

“How can you call this an election when the inhabitants are gone and a war is raging?” said 51-year-old Kabir Ahmed in Bangladesh’s Kutupalong, the world’s largest refugee camp complex.

Heavily restricted polls are due to start Sunday in areas of Myanmar governed by the military, which snatched power in a 2021 coup that triggered civil war.

But for the Rohingya minority, violence began well before that, with a military crackdown in 2017 sending legions of the mostly Muslim group fleeing Myanmar’s Rakhine state to neighbouring Muslim-majority Bangladesh.

The month-long election will be the third national poll since they were stripped of their voting rights a decade ago, but comes amid a fresh exodus fuelled by the all-out war.

Ahmed once served as chairman of a village of more than 8,000 Rohingya in Myanmar’s Maungdaw township, just over the border from Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh.