Statelessness, and What the Record Says

The 1982 citizenship law of Myanmar recognises a list of national races that does not include the Rohingya, and its effect has been to leave the great majority of them stateless in the country where they were born. Restrictions on movement, on marriage and on access to education and health care followed, and successive waves of people left for Bangladesh from the late 1970s onward.

In August 2017 military operations in northern Rakhine drove more than seven hundred thousand people into Bangladesh within weeks. The Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, established by the United Nations Human Rights Council, reported in 2018 that the operations included killings, sexual violence and the burning of villages, and recommended the investigation and prosecution of senior military figures for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. The Gambia then brought proceedings against Myanmar at the International Court of Justice under the Genocide Convention, and the court ordered provisional measures in January 2020.

The atlas states these as the findings and orders of the bodies that made them. Around a million Rohingya now live in camps near Cox's Bazar in Bangladesh, where religious life continues in temporary mosques and madrasas the community built, and where the destruction of mosques and shrines in Rakhine has removed the places that anchored it.