From Perpetrators to Proxies

ဖိုင် 009: How Crisis Group Recasts the Rohingya Crisis to Fit a New Engagement Agenda

International Crisis Group’s June 2025 report on the Rohingya insurgency presents itself as serious conflict analysis. It is not. It is a strategic artifact. Not examination, but misdirection. The Myanmar military disappears. The genocide is reduced to a footnote. And the danger of radical Rohingya fighters suddenly looms large.

The word genocide appears only once, in quotation marks. Not as a crime. Not as a fact. Not as a frame. Just something “commemorated” by refugees. It is never recognised for what it was. Never confronted. Never treated as the origin of the violence.

And it’s not just that genocide is avoided. The report steers clear of every term that might locate agency or intent. There is no mention of ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, or mass atrocities. No reference to coordination, scale, or command. The 2017 campaign is described as a “crackdown” or a “response”, as if a weather event caused the mass displacement, not a state-directed act of destruction. Even the word violence is rare, diffused into phrases like “conditions deteriorated” or “a new phase of displacement began”.

This isn’t analytical restraint. It’s erasure. The report refuses to name what happened, and in doing so, reclassifies atrocity as atmosphere. What happened to the Rohingya becomes something that passed through, not something inflicted. The result is a warped frame. State violence becomes community tension. Justice becomes “security management”. And accountability is quietly reassigned, not to the perpetrators, but to those left unprotected in its wake.

An Insurgency They Say Won’t Win But Can’t Stop Talking About

Crisis Group insists the Rohingya insurgency is unlikely to succeed. It has fractured leadership, weak coordination, and no real chance of victory. And yet, the report devotes over 20 pages to chronicling its growth, its risks, its implications. Breathless detail. Intelligence-style speculation. If the threat is so marginal, why is it the centrepiece?

That ambiguity isn’t caution. It’s cover. Either the threat is inflated to justify surveillance and security engagement, or amplified now to hedge later. A setup for “we warned you” diplomacy. But neither is innocent. Both serve the same function, to shift the lens away from the military that committed mass atrocity and reframe the displaced as the emerging danger. You don’t call a movement insignificant, then frame it as the region’s central threat, unless your goal is to make the victims look like the problem.

The report never decides whether the insurgency is marginal or growing, and that indecision isn’t analytical uncertainty, it’s strategy. The threat is kept vague enough to manage, inflated just enough to justify engagement. This isn’t conflict analysis. It’s narrative flexibility. And it comes at the cost of truth. The military is rendered invisible. The displaced become the risk. And the reader is left with a report that claims to clarify, but instead prepares the ground for whatever strategy comes next.

Radicalised or Coerced? The Refugee as Contradiction

The report can’t decide what the Rohingya refugee represents. Are they radicalised foot soldiers answering the call of jihad? Or victims trapped, extorted, silenced by local militants? The report claims both, but explains neither. It conflates willingness with victimhood, risk with resistance, casting refugees as either fanatics or pawns but never as full political actors. It denies them complexity, flattens them into a fog of “risk”, and reduces their trauma to a recruitment pipeline.

Tellingly, the report quotes camp residents saying, “No one in my community supports the armed groups, but we all fear them”. This line appears in slightly varied form multiple times, suggesting narrative orchestration more than spontaneous insight.

What’s missing? No space for those who reject violence but still support resistance. No clarity on what “radicalisation” means in a context of statelessness, surveillance, and abandonment. No effort to distinguish despair from ideology. The report offers just enough vagueness to turn fear into logic, and logic into strategy. Once fear becomes logic, containment becomes policy.

Blame Bangladesh, Then Ask for Its Help

The contradictions don’t stop at the camps. Crisis Group critiques Bangladesh for its “limited control” over Cox’s Bazar, implicitly blaming it for the conditions that allow Rohingya armed groups to operate. Yet, in the same report, it urges Dhaka to pursue deeper, informal engagement with the Arakan Army, an armed ethnic organisation with territorial control across Myanmar’s western frontlines.

This isn’t pragmatic diplomacy. It’s cognitive dissonance in policy clothing. If Bangladesh is portrayed as unable to manage its own camps, how can it be expected to coordinate cross-border diplomacy with a non-state military force?

The deeper pattern is familiar: international actors often cast regional states as both the obstacle and the answer, whichever role best suits the sentence. Bangladesh is faulted, then tasked. Criticised, then handed responsibility. The report demands engagement but offers no corresponding shift in power or capacity. “Realism” becomes a tool not to face hard truths but to avoid them, to lower ambition, outsource responsibility, and step around the real source of violence. Convenience replaces accountability, and Bangladesh is left holding the mess.

The AA as Proxy Partner but Never Fully Seen

Here is the report’s real move: it elevates the Arakan Army as both unavoidable and undefined. The AA is described as an “inescapable interlocutor”. That phrase does a lot of heavy lifting. It recasts the AA as a gatekeeper, the actor through whom repatriation, stability, and access must now flow.

But here’s the deeper contradiction: by placing the AA at the centre, the report quietly removes the military from the frame. Responsibility is shifted. Culpability is blurred. The junta disappears, no longer held accountable, no longer expected to answer for the displacement it caused. Not because it has been confronted, but because it has been avoided. The report knows the military cannot be part of any meaningful return — not morally, not legally, not even militarily, given its loss of control in northern Rakhine. But rather than face those realities, it writes them out. The problem isn’t solved. It’s sidelined.

A complete inversion of moral logic follows. A group that did not cause the crisis is now expected to fix it, to provide vision, accountability, and cooperation, while the military that orchestrated mass atrocities fades from view. And by naming the AA as “inescapable”, Crisis Group quietly admits what it refuses to confront: that the junta no longer governs northern Rakhine. That its defeat is already operational, even if undeclared.

If the AA were truly being treated as a political authority, the report would demand more: a vision for return, a policy on Rohingya rights, a public stance on coexistence. But instead, the AA is engaged without being interrogated — not legitimised, but instrumentalised. It is treated as a corridor, not a political actor with beliefs, history, and goals.

Crisis Group avoids the hard questions not out of deference to sovereignty, but out of logistical convenience. True engagement would require naming what international actors still refuse to admit: that the junta rules in name, but not in reality. That the resistance is no longer just fighting, it is governing. That any serious roadmap must reckon with both power and principle.

The AA becomes legible only as infrastructure: a checkpoint, a channel, a conduit through which aid, returns, and quiet diplomacy might flow, so long as no one asks too many questions. Legibility without legitimacy. Just enough recognition to move aid, but not enough to demand rights.

The Endgame: Disappearance by Design

This report isn’t just flawed. It is structurally dishonest. It uses the Rohingya insurgency to justify surveillance and containment. It uses the AA to launder diplomacy and wash away blame. And it quietly shifts the centre of danger from the military that engineered the crisis to the stateless refugees it left behind.

The report does not explain the insurgency, it uses it. To explain would be to confront collapse. To name protection failures. To account for withdrawal, abandonment, complicity. But if you remove the military, reframe the issue, and recast the risk, you clear the path. You make Rakhine re-enterable. You turn a site of atrocity into a space for strategy. You don’t resolve the crisis. You repackage it for consumption.

This isn’t how military violence ends. It’s how it is erased, rerouted, renamed, and repackaged as policy logic. Not with slogans. But with reports like this. Calm. Technical. Hollow.

Before Power can be Engaged, Memory must be Erased.

The Crisis Group report should not be mistaken for a neutral or coherent analysis. It is a strategic document, designed to reframe a crime scene as a security site. It redirects attention from the architects of violence to the actors forced to navigate its aftermath. Radical or rational? Militants or messengers? The report never decides. This isn’t just a reporting failure. It’s a green light for engagement. It offers diplomats a way back in — with new partners, no accountability, and no hard truths. The military slips out of the frame. The original crime is no longer central. The stateless become the suspected. And the architects of their destruction? They’ve already left the page.

သတိထားပါ (Take Heed):

When those who committed the original violence vanish from the frame, and new power brokers are treated as inevitable, ask: what kind of future is being quietly rehearsed? When control is rewarded over justice, and coordination is prized above truth, the question isn’t who can protect the people, it’s who can be engaged without consequence. Power is not being questioned. It’s being reallocated, from perpetrators to proxies. And what disappears in the process is not just memory, but responsibility.

Article Referenced:

International Crisis Group. Bangladesh/Myanmar: The Dangers of a Rohingya Insurgency. Asia Report No. 348. June 18, 2025.