Media Release from the Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK (BROUK)
For Immediate Release – 19 November 2025
A new report by the Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK (BROUK), “The Rohingya Genocide: starvation and forced labour as tools of erasure,” reveals how deliberately imposed famine and escalating human rights abuses are being used to destroy and drive out the Rohingya population in Rakhine State, Burma.
The report comes just days after a new UN hunger hotspots assessment warned that Buthidaung Township in northern Rakhine State is at imminent risk of ‘IPC Phase 5 Catastrophe/Famine’ – the same classification currently applied in parts of Gaza. A military-imposed trade and aid blockade- combined with severe restrictions by the Arakan Army- is preventing life-saving humanitarian assistance from reaching Rohingya communities.
With the Arakan Army now controlling much of Rakhine State, Rohingya face two oppressors instead of one. BROUK’s research documents grave abuses committed by both the Burmese military and the Arakan Army, forcing tens of thousands to flee.
Key Findings
- Forced labour and forced recruitment by both the Burmese military and the Arakan Army, including coerced military service and the use of Rohingya for menial and dangerous tasks.
- Widespread abuses by the Arakan Army, including enforced disappearances, arbitrary detention, movement restrictions, extortion, torture, extrajudicial killings, and restrictions on humanitarian aid and religious freedom.
- Deliberately imposed famine, driven by the military’s aid and trade embargo and compounded by additional Arakan Army restrictions.
- Displacement and overcrowding, as hunger forces families into smaller, unsafe areas.
- Dangerous sea crossings, with Rohingya fleeing famine and persecution despite the risk of drowning.
In Sittwe, 112,000 Rohingya- half of them children- have been confined to camps since 2012. Military forced recruitment has intensified since early 2024, while cuts to international aid led the World Food Programme to suspend food distributions for three months, deepening already severe malnutrition.
Rohingya forcibly recruited from the camps report being pushed into front-line fighting, with some returning with gunshot or landmine injuries and still facing the threat of renewed conscription.
International Failure to Act
The deliberately imposed famine and ongoing abuses violate the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) provisional measures to protect the Rohingya, issued more than five years ago.
The UN Security Council is responsible for upholding the Court’s decisions, but the British government, as the Council’s penholder on Burma, has so far ignored repeated calls to convene a meeting to address the persistent breaches.
“The consistent approach of the international community is to ignore warnings of famine and atrocity crimes,” said Tun Khin, President of BROUK. “We urgently need action, not words, to prevent mass starvation and death.”
With hearings in The Gambia’s genocide case against Myanmar scheduled at the ICJ for January 2026, BROUK warns that international inaction continues to embolden perpetrators.
“When the British government and other UN Security Council members don’t act to enforce the provisional measures to protect the Rohingya ordered by the ICJ, the message received by the Burmese military and Arakan Army is that they can do what they like to Rohingya,” said Tun Khin. “The British government must use the measures as a tool for leverage to save lives and end atrocity crimes, before it’s too late and there is nobody left to save.”
The report is available here
For media inquiries:
Please contact Tun Khin +44 (0)7888714866 or email info@brouk.org.uk