ASEAN’s Missed Opportunity for Beleaguered Myanmar

SALEEM SAMAD

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) once again failed Myanmar at the summit in Kuala Lumpur from 26 to 27 May 2025 with a “Peace Formula”, when the country plunged into a bloody civil war with “revolutionary” armed ethnic groups.

ASEAN is an intergovernmental organization of ten Southeast Asian countries: Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. Host Malaysia, as the current chairman of ASEAN, delivered a meaningless statement on Myanmar and offered no new approaches to dealing with the crisis in the country, which has been beleaguered by a military dictatorship since 2021.

Instead of dusting off their hands, the summit offered a toothless Five-Point Consensus (5PC) as a road map for addressing Myanmar’s tribulations. The ethnic rebels are more concerned with holding their ancestral territories and establishing regional autonomy under a constitutional government. None of the rebels has a military plan to capture Myanmar’s capital.

To topple the military regime in Naypyidaw and form a national democratic government, the rebel groups have placed the responsibility upon the National Unity Government (NUG), a shadow government in exile under the political inspiration of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. The ousted leader is presently serving jail terms on charges of sedition.

Myanmar’s capital, Naypyidaw, is besieged by ethnic rebels who have taken two-thirds of the country from the military junta led by General Min Aung Hlaing, who has ruled Myanmar as the State Administration Council (SAC) Chairman since seizing power in the February 2021 coup d’état. In July 2024, he wore presidential robes in July 2024.

To the Myanmarese, the obsession with the failed peace plan is beyond frustrating. They simply can’t help wondering why ASEAN leaders remain so delusional when it comes to this “consensus”, which has delivered nothing for Myanmar.

Since ASEAN adopted the 5PC in 2021, the junta has never honoured it. First and foremost, the consensus calls for the immediate cessation of violence in Myanmar. This step has never been implemented by the junta. Instead of ending military rule, the regime has rained bombs on its citizens and blocked essential supplies, including healthcare facilities, not to mention the continued atrocities like arson and massacres.

Over the past four years, more than 6,000 civilians have been killed by the military, including children, prompting the UN early this year to say that the junta had ramped up its violence against civilians to a level that was unprecedented in the four years since the generals launched their coup.

Rather than taking the junta’s total disregard for its plan as a blatant insult, ASEAN’s leadership doggedly clings to the 5PC as its “main reference to address the political crisis in Myanmar,” writes Hpone Myat in anti-establishment news portal The Irrawaddy. The news organization Irrawaddy, named after a yawning river in Myanmar, operates in exile in a neighbouring country for the safety and security of its staff.

Myanmar has become the most dangerous place for journalists after the recent sentencing of Than Htike Myint to five years in jail under Myanmar’s Counter Terrorism Law on 3 April. The military was holding 55 journalists in detention in June 2024, according to a report by the International Centre for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL).

ASEAN’s continued faith in the 5PC in the face of the regime’s repeated intransigence is incomprehensible. In the light of this, the people of Myanmar are not sure whether to praise the bloc for its “consistency” or feel sorry for its naivety in dealing with the most ruthless regime on earth. Apart from the statement, remarks from the bloc’s current chair, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, were out of context and deliberately did not touch base, as the military junta is sinking into a quicksand.

In April, Anwar met with junta chief Hlaing in Bangkok and held virtual talks with Myanmar’s National Unity Government (NUG) in exile. Malaysian Premier Anwar Ibrahim should not have appeased Min Aung Hlaing, believing in the illusions that the General would restore peace in the country, riddled with civil strife. After a call from the ASEAN meeting in April, Hlaing promised a ceasefire by the Myanmar armed forces, Tatmadaw, and the ethnic rebels. His junta even signed an MOU with some rebels, but that ceasefire was broken within days.

Hlaing’s air force continued to bomb civilian areas, causing immense suffering, pain, and agony for the villagers. At the summit, he (Anwar) described those talks as “significant”, saying both sides were open to engagement while highlighting Gen Hlaing’s supposed willingness to engage in peace efforts despite dubbing NUG as a “terrorist organization”.

In his opening remarks to the summit in Kuala Lumpur, Anwar said ASEAN had been able to “move the needle forward” in its efforts to achieve an eventual resolution to the Myanmar crisis, adding that the steps may be small and the bridge may be fragile, but “even a fragile bridge is better than a widening gulf.”

There is not even a “fragile bridge”, given his dishonesty and insincerity. His willingness to engage in peace talks is merely fictional and a hollow promise; Myanmar’s generals have historically never been known for sincerely engaging in peace efforts. They only engage or join dialogue as a pretext to ease external pressures. No such talks have ever borne fruit. Ask any ethnic armed resistance organization or opposition politician in Myanmar, and they will enlighten you as to how historically untrustworthy the previous generals and Min Aung Hlaing are, laments Hpone Myat.

ASEAN members have univocally urged the regime in Naypyidaw to extend a temporary ceasefire and engage in peace talks with its rivals at the summit, but did not spell out a timeline. Instead, the ASEAN urged that negotiations were needed and that Malaysia’s Foreign Minister Mohamad Hasan would visit Naypyidaw in June regarding the mitigation of the crisis.

Furthermore, the regional leaders’ statement on an extended and expanded ceasefire in Myanmar can only be greeted with dismay. The leaders further called for “the sustained extension and nationwide expansion of the ceasefire in Myanmar,” but the reality is the ceasefire has never existed on the ground, as the junta has consistently violated the truce from the very start, wrote The Irrawaddy.

Instead of being unrealistic about the reality of present-day Myanmar, ASEAN should have adopted a serious resolution against the regime. Such moves would have put pressure on the junta by making it harder for it to survive, but also would have helped move the currently stalled resolution mechanism for Myanmar’s crisis forward. To make that happen, the bloc must first drop its empty rhetoric and take meaningful steps, concludes Hpone Myat.

Last week, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) raised concern over the deteriorating human rights situation and economic collapse in Myanmar, with violent military operations killing more civilians last year than in any year since the 2021 coup. The military operations have sparked an unfolding humanitarian crisis.

“The country has endured an increasingly catastrophic human rights crisis marked by unabated violence and atrocities that have affected every single aspect of life,” said Volker Türk, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights. Myanmar’s economy has lost USD 93.9 billion over the last four years, with inflation surging and the kyat (local currency) losing 40 per cent of its value.

Over half the population now lives below the poverty line, facing food insecurity and soaring prices, which has worsened since the March 28 earthquake, according to the U.N. Possibly, ASEAN has lost all moral position to pressurise the military junta, since Justice for Myanmar accused 54 companies in Southeast Asian countries ASEAN of supplying the regime with funds, jet fuel and technology.

“ASEAN’s failure to address corporate complicity has allowed the [regime] to intensify its brutal campaign of terror that has killed thousands of civilians and displaced millions with total impunity,” said Yadanar Maung, spokesperson of Justice for Myanmar, while calling on the leaders of ASEAN to end their support to the regime in Naypyidaw.

First published in the Stratheia Policy Journal, Islamabad, Pakistan on 03 June 2025 

Saleem Samad is an award-winning independent journalist based in Bangladesh. A media rights defender with Reporters Without Borders (@RSF_inter). Recipient of Ashoka Fellowship and Hellman-Hammett Award. He could be reached at saleemsamad@hotmail.com; Twitter (X): @saleemsamad

Checkmate for Suu Kyi

Her failure to own up to the crackdown on the Rohingya has sullied her reputation

SALEEM SAMAD

A military coup in Myanmar was imminent for two reasons, which immediately invited widespread protests within the country and international condemnation.

First, the Tatmadaw (Myanmar army) since they took the reign of the country in 1962 failed an “election engineering” plan in favour of a pro-military political party. Secondly, Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi gained popularity which brought her confidence in further reforms to democratize the nation, which the military generals were watching with frowns.

Suu Kyi, who spent 15 years under house arrest in the struggle to bring democracy to Myanmar, has been detained along with other leaders of her political party in a military coup.

Meanwhile, the anti-military coup protests swell in Myanmar, and riot police battle demonstrators in Myanmar’s capital Naypyidaw and cities and towns across the country.

The supporters of Suu Kyi, leader of the pro-democracy National League for Democracy (NLD), call for a campaign of civil disobedience -- amidst a blockage of Facebook, fearing further anti-military street protests.

The Buddhist monks, doctors, nurses, teachers, have openly joined protests against the Myanmar coup, which has surprisingly grown louder every hour, since the military coup on February 1.

Myanmar has been a country of military coups and military rule -- shortly since independence from British colonialists in 1948.

In an uneasy power-sharing agreement in 2008, the military made a political partnership in running the country. The army had 25% of the seats in parliament.

Well, the 2015 elections established the road to democracy and installed the first civilian government after 50 years of global isolation and a ruthless military regime.

The February coup derails years of Western-backed efforts to establish democracy in Myanmar, where neighbouring China also has a powerful influence.

China was conspicuously silent in condemning the military coup, which occurred hours before parliament was due for the maiden session since the NLD’s landslide win in a November 8 election.

China was sceptical in strengthening bilateral relations with Myanmar, keeping Suu Kyi in power.

Suu Kyi’s party, the NLD won 396 seats out of 476 in the upper and lower houses of parliament, which has been interpreted by political observers as a referendum on Suu Kyi’s fledgling democratic rule.

Well, the main opposition party, the military-aligned Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), bagged only 33 seats (nearly 7%) in the last elections, eight fewer seats than in 2015.

In response to military chief General Min Aung Hlaing’s claim that the November poll was an “election fraud,” however, Myanmar’s Union Election Commission rejected the claims of voter fraud.

The defenders of democracy fear that Myanmar’s army is likely to scrap the constitution, despite the army chief Gen Hlaing saying the 2008 constitution was “the mother law for all laws” and should be respected.

Its guarantee of military power makes the constitution a “deeply unpopular” document, according to Yangon-based political analyst Khin Zaw Win.

On top of the military junta’s strings of accusations against the pro-democracy leader, Suu Kyi is already accused of ethnic cleansing and genocide of the ethnic Rohingya Muslim population, which the United Nations said had “the hallmarks of genocide.”

She took the responsibilities for the infamous military crackdown on the Rohingya and denied genocide at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, and explained the claims as “incomplete and misleading.”

Soon after shouldering responsibilities of the Myanmar military, Suu Kyi fell from the grace of world leaders and as an icon of democracy, primarily because she mishandled the crisis when more than a million ethnic Rohingya fled the restive Rakhine state into neighbouring Bangladesh in 2016 and 2017, which the United Nations dubbed as a “textbook ethnic cleansing.”

While still hugely popular at home -- the daughter of the independence hero Aung San (who was assassinated in 1947) -- her international reputation has been damaged after she failed to stop the forced expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya from the western Rakhine State in 2017.

To judge whether she has failed the world, the democratization of the country, or is a saviour of the nation from the yoke of the military, is a matter of time.

First Published in the Dhaka Tribune, 10 February 2021

Saleem Samad is an independent journalist, media rights defender, recipient of Ashoka Fellowship and Hellman-Hammett Award. He can be reached at saleemsamad@hotmail.com. Twitter @saleemsamad

Myanmar polls a step closer to China

Will a Suu Kyi win help Myanmar stay in China’s good graces?

SALEEM SAMAD

When the world was extremely preoccupied with the tense Trump-Biden American elections, Myanmar held its parliamentary polls on Sunday (November 8), which are expected to deliver a government with a strong popular mandate in Southeast Asia.

Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party (NLD) won a landslide in 2015 and established the first civilian government after 50 years of global isolation and ruthless military regime. Five years later, Suu Kyi remains popular, but 2020 has widened the image from 2015.

Suu Kyi has fallen from the grace of world leaders and is no longer a democracy icon, primarily because she mishandled the rogue military crackdown against the ethnic Rohingya Muslim population, which the United Nations said had “the hallmarks of genocide.”

More than a million Rohingya fled from Rakhine State into neighbouring Bangladesh in 2016 and 2017 after the military waged a campaign of persecution, which the United Nations dubbed as “textbook ethnic cleansing.”

The Rohingya’s citizenship rights were deliberately and permanently erased, restricting them to vote under the discriminatory 1982 Citizenship Law. Even the Rohingya political parties were banned from contesting the elections.

In the face of global criticism, last year Suu Kyi defended her country’s military crackdown and denied genocide at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, explaining that the claims were “incomplete and misleading.”

Many international observers fear that the November elections will not be free, fair, and credible, citing disenfranchisement and campaign restrictions imposed by the Union Election Commission (UEC).

Military chief Gen Min Aung Hlaing’s warnings to the UEC on electioneering directives soured relationships with the government. President U Win Myint stated that the military’s “remarks over the election were inciting instability and causing public concern.”

Bertil Lintner, a Swedish journalist who has written extensively about Myanmar’s armed conflicts, politics, and ethnic crises for nearly 40 years, says it is unfortunate that elections have been suspended in several constituencies, primarily in ethnic areas where armed conflict rages against the Myanmar regime.

China wants Suu Kyi to win Myanmar’s polls. China’s interests will be better served by the Suu Kyi-led status quo than a return to military-dominated rule. Much has changed since the leaders in Beijing favoured Myanmar’s authoritarian military regime and were deeply suspicious of then opposition leader Suu Kyi.

The Chinese Communist Party has made no secret that they would prefer to see Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD) win and are wary of the military top brass, whom they find increasingly difficult to influence and control.

Lintner also agrees that the Myanmar foreign policy will likely take its course after the poll -- towards a stronger and closer relationship with China. While the Tatmadaw sees it as their pledge to defend the nation’s sovereignty and seeks to lessen dependence on China, Suu Kyi turned to Beijing for the economic and controversial Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) after her allies and admirers in the West distanced themselves from her over the Rohingya refugee crisis.

First published in the Dhaka Tribune on 10 November 2020

Saleem Samad, is an independent journalist, media rights defender, recipient of Ashoka Fellowship and Hellman-Hammett Award. He could be reached at saleemsamad@hotmail.com. Twitter @saleemsamad

Discontent Against Myanmar For Rohingya Crisis

SALEEM SAMAD

Finally, Myanmar will begin to feel the pinch for its failure to provide meaningful accountability for its security forces' widespread and systematic violence and atrocities against the Rohingya Muslims in northern Rakhine state.

Despite global outcry, Myanmar refused to bring to account government and military officials implicated in the genocide, gang rapes, mutilations, and forced eviction by security forces on the Rohingya.

There is growing international frustration among several countries planning economic and legal measures against Myanmar.

The state-sponsored atrocities killed at least 10,000 Rohingya, left scores with physical disabilities, and caused the largest exodus of civilians since the Rwandan genocide. An estimated more than a million Rohingyas are living in refugee camps in Bangladesh for the last two and half years.

Myanmar has demonstrated its defiance against the international move toward meaningful accountability of the demands.

In the past weeks, there were signs of growing international support for the Gambia's International Court of Justice (ICJ) genocide complaint against Myanmar.

In response to Gambia's official complaint of Myanmar's violation of the United Nations' 1948 Genocide Convention initiated in November 2019, the Myanmar government statement to the ICJ asserted that the Gambia's allegations were based on "incomplete and misleading factual picture of the situation in Rakhine state."

The ICJ delivered a harsh rebuke of that narrative on January 23 by supporting the Gambia's request for urgent provisional measures to protect the Rohingya population while the court undertakes the longer-term judicial consideration of the Gambia's genocide allegations.

That statement peddled by the Myanmar military's long-discredited narrative that its activities in northern Rakhine state in August 2017 constituted legitimate "clearance operations" in response to attacks on police posts by the banned Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA).

Myanmar's de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi told ICJ justices last December that what transpired in northern Rakhine in late 2017 was mere "an internal armed conflict started by coordinated and comprehensive attacks by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, to which Myanmar's Defence Services responded."

On February 25, Maldives announced that it would file a written "declaration of intervention" at the ICJ in support of the Gambia's genocide complaint.

Maldives' minister of foreign affairs, Abdulla Shahid, said that intervention - the details of which are yet to be made public - demonstrated his country's support for "the ongoing efforts to secure accountability for the perpetrators of genocide against the Rohingya people."

Last November 13, Rohingya and Latin American human-rights organisations filed a case with an Argentine court against Myanmar government and military officials under the principle of universal jurisdiction, which allows that people implicated in the most serious international crimes may be arrested, prosecuted, and convicted in countries other than their own.

The Argentine court filing seeks "the criminal sanction of the perpetrators, accomplices, and cover-ups of the genocide" perpetrated by Myanmar security forces against the Rohingya.

Germany's development minister, Gerd Müller, announced that

Berlin was suspending development cooperation with Myanmar because of its "ethnic cleansing" of its Rohingya minority.

Although Müller didn't specify the financial cost of that suspension, he simultaneously announced an additional German government contribution of €15 million (US$16.5 million) to support Bangladesh's Rohingya refugee population.

Other states are likely to initiate similar ICJ interventions over the coming weeks, including Canada and The Netherlands, whose governments announced in December that they planned to "jointly assist the Gambia at the International Court of Justice."

The biggest challenge remains with the international effort to trigger an ICC investigation of the atrocities that have been complicated by the fact that Myanmar is not a signatory to the Rome Statute that established the court.

Unfortunately, an ICC probe through a resolution of the UN Security Council has been stymied by the opposition of Russia and China.

Meanwhile, the UN-created Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar officially began operations in September 2019 to gather evidence of crimes against humanity against Myanmar's ethnic minorities, including, but not limited to, the Rohingya, nationwide over the past eight years.

That message is that Myanmar should stop obstructing Rohingya accountability efforts, or pay the price of pariah-state status synonymous with murderous impunity.

First published in The New Nation on 19 March 2020

Saleem Samad, is an independent journalist, media rights defender, recipient of Ashoka Fellow (USA) and Hellman-Hammett Award. Twitter @saleemsamad, Email: saleemsamad@hotmail.com

How likely is Myanmar to make policy changes after the ICJ ruling?

Myanmar’s denial of organized human rights abuses hold little water Photo: REUTERS

SALEEM SAMAD

Does Myanmar have any obligation to take the world court -- the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague – seriously?

The second question is whether Myanmar’s quasi-military ruler has the political will to implement the landmark judgment of January 23. Myanmar has officially rejected the International Court of Justice’s historic ruling and accused international rights groups of making exaggerated statements about the prevailing situation. It also rejected the UN fact-finding mission’s report on the basis of being “one-sided.”

It is well understood that the ICJ has no legal jurisdiction over Myanmar or any individual nation.

The ICJ ordered Myanmar to implement vital measures to protect its Rohingya population from facing any further atrocities. This ruling has been hailed as an “accomplishment of international justice.” The court further ordered Myanmar to ensure protection from the destruction of any evidence of “possible” genocide.

The ruling means that a global body, for the first time, has officially recognized the threat of abuse against the Rohingya, and ordered Myanmar to protect the community.

The verdict was indeed a significant triumph for the forcefully displaced Rohingya currently in refuge in Bangladesh. This ruling was also hailed by the government of Bangladesh, as the country is host to more than 1 million displaced Rohingya presently languishing in camps.

A lawsuit was brought to the ICJ by the Gambia, an impoverished Muslim state in Africa. The legal process was backed by the 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in November at the highest body -- the United Nations -- for dispute resolution between states.

The OIC accused Myanmar of genocide against the Rohingya, in violation of a 1948 Genocide Convention. The Islamic body, as well as the United Nations, has condemned Myanmar’s refusal to repatriate the Rohingya as citizens of the country. Both bodies have raised concerns over the appalling human rights violations.

The challenges that remain the most significant impediments to the ICJ are that it has no power to execute its decisions and that it is voluntary in nature.

In 1993, the ICJ issued similar measures against Serbia after Bosnia had accused it of genocide. Just two years later, Serb forces killed thousands of Bosnian Muslim men and boys in what has become known as the Srebrenica massacre.

The ruling could not stop a second genocide in Europe after World War II.

Myanmar established an Independent Commission of Enquiry (ICOE) which acknowledges committing war crimes but not genocide during the military campaign.

The Myanmar government, headed by Nobel laureate for Peace Aung San Suu Kyi, has strongly denied organized human rights abuses. The regime systematically said that the military action, which followed militant attacks on Myanmar security forces in August 2017,  was “a legitimate counter-insurgency operation.”

The ICOE inquiry report mentions that nearly 900 people were killed. The commission failed to find assertions of gang-rape, or evidence to presume any intent of genocide. No one was surprised at the discrepancy between Myanmar and the international community over committing genocide.

The head of a UN fact-finding mission in Myanmar warned that there was a serious risk of genocide, and the mission did not hesitate to state in its final report, submitted in September 2019, that Myanmar should be held responsible in international legal forums for alleged genocide against the Rohingya.

Myanmar has questioned the legitimacy of the world court but is obliged under international law to comply with the ICJ ruling to provide regular reports to the ICJ, starting next May, to say what steps it has taken to prevent further abuse against the Rohingya.

It is highly unlikely that Myanmar will make any major policy changes to combat the discrimination against the Rohingya community, or provide support for international justice efforts. The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) has been paralyzed over the Rohingya crisis so far, with China shielding Myanmar from censure, which makes enforcement more difficult.

In this regard, an effective measure could be exerting diplomatic pressure by the international community, which has political and economic clout within the UN Security Council and can bring Myanmar to justice. The Convention against Genocide imposes a duty on states that are signatories to “prevent and to punish” genocide, as seen by Gambia’s ability to bring the case to the ICJ.

Until then, Myanmar will have an excuse to not take any measures for the repatriation, as well as the rehabilitation, of the displaced Rohingya. This difficultly will continue with a possible veto from China.

Whether Myanmar abides by the ICJ rulings remains to be seen. 

First published in Dhaka Tribune, 17 February 2020

Saleem Samad is an independent journalist, media rights defender, and is a recipient of the Ashoka Fellow and Hellman-Hammett Award. He can be followed on Twitter @saleemsamad

Militants in Myanmar: Endangered Lives Of Ordinary Rohingyas

SALEEM SAMAD

Two years ago on August 24, Reuters news agency reported that Muslim militants in Myanmar staged a coordinated attack on 30 police posts and an army base in Rakhine State, and at least 59 of the insurgents and 12 members of the security forces were killed.

The Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), a group previously known as Harakah al-Yaqin, which instigated the October attacks, claimed responsibility for the early morning offensive and warned of more.

Nonetheless, the attack caught the Myanmar government by surprise. Its military, known as the Tatmadaw, responded with full-blown pogroms, including attacks on Rohingya villages and acts of arson.

State violence conducted in Rakhine State, what the United Nations has described as "a textbook case of ethnic cleansing" against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar's Rakhine State.

The atrocities ignited fresh exodus of another 700,000 Rohingya civilians to flee to Bangladesh since August 25, killing an estimated 3,000 people and burning 288 Rohingya villages, according to rights groups and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and Human Rights Watch.

However, Myanmar does not hesitate to argue that its actions were counter-terrorism operations, but its response to the threat posed by Rohingya militants is disproportionate and is likely to fuel militancy for years to come, predicts writes Prof Zachary Abuza at the National War College where he focuses on Southeast Asian security issues.

The Rohingya Solidarity Organization (RSO) was active in the mid-1980s to 1990s. The RSO achieves very little militarily, but its ties to the Jamaat-e-Islami and Harkat-ul-Jihad-al Islami (HuJI) in Bangladesh and Pakistan caused concern to regional security. By the mid-2000s, the RSO was defunct.

The Rohingyas literally hoped that the country's democratic transition would address their legal rights. While democratic freedoms also unleashed extreme Buddhist nationalism.

In 2015, Attullah Abu Amar Jununi, also known as Hafiz Tohar, founded Harakah al-Yaqin, the Faith Movement, to "defend, save, and protect [the] Rohingya community … in line with the principles of self-defense".

Attullah was born in Karachi, Pakistan to Rohingya parents, and raised in Saudi Arabia, where he was a cleric in a mosque. He moved to Bangladesh, crossing into Rakhine State in late 2015 or early 2016 via Pakistan.

Attullah led Harakah al-Yaqin was an offshoot of Aqa Mul Mujahideen (Faith Movement of Arakan), which itself emerged from another organization, Harakat ul-Jihad Islami-Arakan, headed by Abdus Qadoos Burmi, a Rohingya from Pakistan.

Disgruntled members of RSO, defected to Harakah al-Yaqin. By 2015, Attullah's group was actively recruiting youths from the refugee camps.

In early 2017 Harakah al-Yaqin rebranded to ARSA and was initially engaged in hit-and-run tactics in a bid to stockpile armory from Myanmar security forces.

The rebranding as the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army was apparently to soundless Islamist and more as a legitimate ethno-nationalist group fighting in self-defense.

But ARSA continued to recruit through its network of clerics and mosques, and there is a far more religious basis to the movement than they publicly admit.

On August 18, 2017, Attullah released a video statement justifying ARSA's actions, stating that his group was established only in response to government and paramilitary abuses against the Rohingya community. "Our primary objective under ARSA is to liberate our people from dehumanized oppression perpetrated by all successive Burmese regimes," he said.

Possibly ARSA leaders hastily decided the attacks on border police check posts only two days after UN Special Representative Kofi Annan submitted his report stating several pragmatic recommendations, and Myanmar tacitly agreed on some issues towards a conflict resolution but disputed with most recommendations on the status of Rohingya Muslims citizenship.

ARSA knew very well that the Myanmar military's response would be heavy-handed. Despite understanding their limitation, the ragtag foot soldiers are poorly funded and possess only limited light weapons and dare not confront the Myanmar military, currently the 11th largest in the world, with its long track record of repression against ethnic minorities.

The duffers in ARSA leadership had no understanding of the consequences of hit-and-run tactics that will endanger the lives of more than a million Rohingyas in Rakhine State.

The two-month long campaign of ethnic cleansing, with even senior officials in the government of de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi justifying the military's attacks on civilians, seems to have caught ARSA off guard, writes Prof Zachary Abuza at the National War College.

Possibly the ARSA did not benefit from Rohingyas languishing in sprawling refugee camps - as UNHCR claimed to the largest refugee camps in the world.

First published The New Nation, 1 October 2019

Saleem Samad is an independent journalist, media rights defender, recipient of Ashoka Fellow (USA) and Hellman-Hammett Award. Twitter @ saleemsamad; Email: saleemsamad @ hotmail.com