A closer look at the recent anti-Rohingya violence in Malaysia reveals familiar patterns of anti-refugee and anti-migrant politics around the world. Refugees and communities escaping genocide, statelessness and forced displacement are recast as social and economic threats through widespread disinformation campaigns. They become one of the many scapegoats for states and political elites to consolidate power and enforce social hierarchies.
In the past month, the Rohingya community in Malaysia faced an intensified wave of online violence and racist vitriol. Spurred by proposed restrictions on Rohingya public activities by Malaysian state governments and reforms to increase government surveillance over refugees, disinformation campaigns took over social media, demanding even stricter measures. These campaigns were accompanied by public petitions demanding the ‘removal’ of the Rohingya community by exposing locations where they live. The violence further escalated as videos of Malaysians intimidating and harassing Rohingya children began circulating, alongside calls for rallies to deport the community.
A background to the Rohingya genocide and displacement
The Rohingya are an indigenous Muslim community from Arakan, now Rakhine State, who became the target of ethnic cleansing by Myanmar’s military in 2017 where hundreds of thousands of Rohingya were forced to flee their homes to escape mass killings, sexual violence and the destruction of entire villages. The roots of this violence extend far beyond 2017. For centuries, Myanmar’s ethnonationalist politics, fueled by colonial border-making have cast the Rohingya as ‘outsiders,’ denying their indigeneity while using citizenship laws, movement controls and military violence to deny their belonging to ‘the nation.’
The 1982 Citizenship Law formalised this exclusion, rendering Rohingya people stateless in their own homeland and deepening decades of forced displacement, violence and discrimination. Today, more than one million Rohingya remain in Cox’s Bazar refugee camps in Bangladesh, while many others have sought refuge across Southeast Asia. For most, crossing borders have only meant further insecurity and violence. Most countries in Southeast Asia, including Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia, are not signatories to the 1951 Refugee Convention.
In Malaysia, the lack of legal protection means that the Rohingya community has long been vulnerable to arrest, extortion, exploitation and detention. However, the COVID-19 pandemic marked a turning point. During this period, the Malaysian state recast the Rohingya community as a ‘problem’ of public health and national security to intensify border militarisation. Accompanying these measures were racist and xenophobic media campaigns whose effects have been long-lasting in normalising violence against the Rohingya until today.
Anti-Rohingya narratives and increased securitisation
The racist narratives surfacing in the current anti-Rohingya attacks in Malaysia follow familiar patterns seen across the world. Governments often rely on and fuel the public’s racist and xenophobic tendencies to gain populist support and normalise increased securitisation and militarisation. The most common narratives describe Rohingya people using racist and dehumanizing language in Bahasa such as ‘kotor,’ and ‘pengotor’ or as ‘pendatang asing tanpa izin’ and ‘pengancam keselamatan.’ By framing Rohingya people as a public health and security threat, the dehumanisation of the community becomes “common sense.”
In this current wave of attacks, unverified allegations of violence by Rohingya people spread quickly online. AI-generated images portraying Rohingya communities as living in squalor were shared widely. Accompanying this disinformation were calls to arrest, detain and deport the entire community. Meanwhile, the violence Rohingya people have survived in Myanmar, and continue to face in host countries, disappears or gets distorted.
As we see in the US, Europe and elsewhere, by describing refugees as security and public health threats, the state manufactures public support to expand surveillance, policing and detention. Increasingly, discrimination, raids, detention and deportation are normalised as “cleaning up” or “protecting” society. Official numbers cite there are around 21,000 migrants and refugees held in Malaysian detention centers, around 5,000 of which are Rohingya. Since COVID-19, Malaysia has ramped up maritime patrols deployed to intercept boats carrying asylum seekers yearly, as well as immigration raids and detention.
Economic scapegoating of the Rohingya community
A familiar racist trope against impoverished communities everywhere is accusing them of draining public resources such as healthcare and aid, allegedly at the expense of the majority population. This trope went viral on social media, albeit it distorts the reality of Rohingya life in Malaysia. Rohingya people are denied legal status and lawful work. They cannot enrol in public education, nor do they have access to social protection and other basic services. They must pay a higher ‘foreigner’ rate to access healthcare services, rely on informal community schools, and survive through informal, underpaid and dangerous work that exploits their labour precisely because of their lack of legal status.
The reality is this: accelerated development in Malaysia (and across Southeast Asia) in the past decades is built on the mobility and disposability of migrant workers in low-paid, dangerous and labour-intensive sectors, such as construction, manufacturing, agriculture, and plantation work. While Malaysian consumers and business owners benefit from cheap labour, middle class and working class Malaysians are increasingly feeling the weight of economic insecurity stemming from stagnating wages, rising living costs, weakened bargaining power and increased privatisation of services. As in many places around the world, by turning refugees into scapegoats, anti-Rohingya narratives redirect public discontent from unfettered neoliberal policies benefiting political and economic elites and corporations, towards those who are already exploited.
On the other hand, a contradictory narrative to the ‘resource thief’ also emerges. It claims that the Rohingya are secretly rich, own businesses, or live better than Malaysians. When communities run informal businesses, raise emergency funds, organise mutual aid or support community schools, survival of refugees is recast as fraud. They are punished for poverty and then punished again for trying to find ways to survive.
The Rohingya as a demographic threat
Recent disinformation claimed Rohingya leaders were demanding Malaysian citizenship or special rights. Fake social media pages, fabricated posters and misleading content were used to suggest Rohingya organisations wanted to control specific areas of the capital, appropriate Malay culture, remove Malay privileges or replace Malaysians. A video of Rohingya children singing Malaysia’s national anthem was twisted into a conspiracy about citizenship fraud. Across social media, demands for forced sterilisation were widely circulated, as the number of children borne by Rohingya families were increasingly scrutinised.
The ‘demographic threat’ narrative imagines Rohingya women’s bodies as weapons against ‘the nation,’ and Rohingya children are treated as evidence of invasion. Calls for forced sterilisation echo the control of Rohingya family life, including marriage and childbirth in Myanmar, where reproductive control has long been part of their persecution. In Malaysia, this narrative also intersects with the intensification of Malay ethnonationalism, where the figure of the ‘pendatang’ is used to mark racialised ‘outsiders’ as permanent threats to Malay political dominance, culture and belonging. Even though anti-Rohingya sentiments are not limited to the Malay community, it often draws heavily from the specifically Malay ethnonationalist claim that Malays are being displaced, diluted or replaced in their own homeland.
This reproductive racism mirrors anti-migrant politics elsewhere. In Tunisia, President Kais Saied’s 2023 remarks claimed that migration from sub-Saharan Africa was part of a plot to change Tunisia’s demographic composition. The result was a surge of racist violence against Black migrants, refugees and Black Tunisians. The same logic appears in Europe’s “replacement” conspiracies and in far-right anti-migrant movements globally, that the reproduction of racialised people are threatening the nation. Migrant and refugee women are made into sites of national panic, while their labour in sustaining families and communities is erased.
Rohingya feminists at the frontline, demanding accountability and justice
Against dehumanisation and genocide, Rohingya feminists continue to organise for accountability and justice, while supporting their communities through mutual aid. In conversation with AWID, Yasmin Ullah, a Rohingya feminist activist and Executive Director of the Rohingya Maìyafuìnor Collaborative Network (RMCN), challenges the notion within the humanitarian sector that Rohingya women are only victims of genocide and displacement.
“Rohingya women have held this community together after being endlessly desecrated, just constantly being bombarded with attacks, and policies and practices that do not just discriminate but also really destroy the connection between people in the community. Carrying our culture and our traditions across the river and across the borders, trying to ensure that the community still remains to this day: that is the work of Rohingya women.”
At the heart of Rohingya feminist politics, and the work of RMCN, is survival rooted in care and community. From setting up community schools to raising emergency funds, Rohingya women have been crucial to the survival of the Rohingya community around the world, even when states have tried to erase them. For Rohingya feminists, safety and legal protection in host countries cannot be separated from the wider struggle for dignity, their right to return and self-determination in their homeland.
As Yasmin Ullah highlights, “We want the right to return: the right to return with dignity, citizenship guaranteed and ethnic nationality recognised. We are indigenous to our homeland and a lot of people don't understand this. We are told we are not from here. We are indigenous to this region far more than you think we are, and the entirety of ASEAN needs to know this.” The same racist structures and border violence that deny Rohingya people safety in Malaysia are connected to Myanmar’s attempt to erase the Rohingya community through the denial of citizenship, and right to return. As such, Rohingya survival requires confronting the impunity of the genocidal regime in Myanmar, and the role of ASEAN states in enabling the displacement, exclusion and continued statelessness of Rohingya communities across the region.
In April 2026, Yasmin, together with THEMIS Indonesia, the Myanmar Accountability Project and Indonesian allies, filed a complaint alleging genocide against Min Aung Hlaing, the president of Myanmar and head of the Junta, before Indonesian courts. The complaint draws on Indonesia’s new penal code and the principle of universal jurisdiction, to argue that architects of genocide must be investigated and prosecuted even when the crimes were committed beyond Indonesia’s borders.
The case builds on years of survivor testimony, Rohingya-led documentation and human rights reporting that have documented mass killings, sexual violence, forced displacement, denial of citizenship and other acts aimed at ethnically cleansing the Rohingya people. Even as enforcement may bring challenges, by demanding justice and accountability for the genocide, Rohingya feminists refuse silence, while asserting the right to their history, dignity, return and self-determination. The complaint also seeks to open a legal pathway within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) states that have long shielded itself behind the doctrine of non-interference, and are actively complicit in enabling, normalising and profiting from Myanmar’s violence and impunity.
Visibilising the complicity of states and corporations benefiting and profiting from the genocide and the diplomatic ties with the Junta has been a key component of Yasmin’s work:: “You see a conglomerate of companies from across the region that extract resources from our homes and don’t care about whose human rights they violate in the process.”
RMNC has documented that the same states and companies that marginalise Rohingya refugees across the region are also linked to the business networks, arms flows, energy revenues, aviation fuel and surveillance technologies that sustain Myanmar’s military and enabled the violence that displaced them. From the region, over 1 billion USD a year flows into Myanmar’s state oil & gas company, the junta’s lifeline. They also exploit the precarity of refugees for labour. As highlighted earlier, countries such as Malaysia often rely on the exploitation of the Rohingya for capitalist development and construction.
The reality is that governments such as Malaysia remain complicit so long as they uphold global systems of economic and political power, oppress refugees, and participate in the military-industrial complex. No amount of diplomatic whitewashing can cover this. For example, while issuing public statements against the Junta in the UN, surveillance tools, dual-use technologies and military-related equipment from Europe and the US have continued to reach Myanmar’s military.
Malaysia claims to be in solidarity with Palestine, but a closer look reveals the performative nature of this solidarity. The moment Palestinians arrive in Malaysia, they are subject to detention and suspicion, similar to the Rohingya. Recently, the prime minister of Malaysia announced that Malaysia is increasingly eying a role in the global defence supply chain. In April 2026, Malaysia hosted the Defence Services Asia (DSA) exhibition and National Security Asia (Natsec) 2026 trade show where arms companies profiting from both the Palestinian and Rohingya genocide, such as Lockheed Martin, participated.
A reflection for feminists
The struggle against the genocide in Myanmar is connected to all of our feminist struggles: it personifies how racism, border violence, militarisation and patriarchy are a part of the same oppressive structure that serves to exclude and target those who are most marginalised. Our feminist politics must fight for struggles for gender justice as struggles against racialised borders, against reproductive violence, against racism and ethnonationalism.
The Rohingya shows how the liberation of Palestine, Congo and West Papua are all connected. In refusing fragmentation and co-optation of our collective struggles, Yasmin says “In Myanmar, the Rohingya were guinea pigs in many ways, in terms of testing weapons, scorched earth campaigns in the region and fragmentation of groups in the region. In reality, all perpetrators work together. One group of people can never be liberated over another- it’s either we are all free or none of us are.”
What feminists can do:
- Amplify Rohingya-led and Rohingya women-led voices. Follow, share and resource the RMCN, a refugee-led, Rohingya-led and women-led organisation working on justice, accountability, protection, education, gender-sensitive care and urgent support: ourrohingya.org.
- Contribute to mutual aid and fundraising initiatives directly supporting food, aid, shelter and schools for the Rohingya community over the world
- Learn more about the history of the Rohingya community
- Learn more and support initiatives monitoring and calling for accountability of the Junta, such as Altsean Burma
- Feminist working in international advocacy can support Rohingya feminists to pressure ASEAN and the private sector to cut financial, military, technological and extractive ties that sustain the junta and its allied networks.
Image credits: Rohingya Young civil rights defender Murshid khan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
