With Rohingya Muslims gone, Myanmar remodels Rakhine state

With the Rohingya purged from their villages, the Myanmar government, military and local ethnic Rakhine Buddhists are methodically reshaping the scarred Myanmar state in their absence with any hope of significant numbers of refugee repatriation looking increasingly unlikely. Some one million Rohingya-- around two-thirds of their entire stateless community -- have been forced over the border to refugee camps in Bangladesh by successive waves of persecution. Rohingya seeking citizenship must agree to be classified as “Bengali” in a notorious verification process which denies them constitutional rights as a separate ethnic minority and leaves them vulnerable to expulsion.