Press Release
March 23, 2024

The Arakan Rohingya National Alliance (ARNA) would like to state that:

(1) The protest rally held on 19 March 2024 in Buthidaung town against the Arakan Army was organized by brutal Myanmar military with some helpless and hapless Muslim Rohingyas who had been forced to participate in. It was obvious that they were involuntary participants who are not to blame for what happened. The protest did not represent the voices and aspiration of the Rohingya people.

(2) The Arakan Rohingya National Alliance (ARNA) have repeatedly condemned the heinous plans of the Myanmar brutal military to divide the whole people of the country on ethnic and religious lines, especially in Arakan where the Muslim Rohingya are on the horns of dilemma. The ARNA had on many occasions warned the Rohingya and other compatriots not to fall into the harmful traps.

(3) As representatives of the Rohingya community of Arakan, we strongly declare our position as being with the freedom loving people of Myanmar, who are currently waging a historic resistance against the evil forces of the military junta throughout the country.

(4) Earlier on February 19, the ARNA issued a press release under the title ‘United we stand, divided we fall’. We had condemned the raising of so-called Village Defence Forces through forced conscription of Rohingya youth, which are nothing more than human shields with the more subtle strategy of continuing to fan the flames between the two communities of Arakan state.

(5) We would once again like to reinstate that Rohingya people are victims of the gravest genocide ever committed in contemporary times. We cannot and will not forget the mass atrocities carried out by the junta and its accomplices, the peak being in the years 2012 to 2017. Those who fight alongside the brutal military are complicit in the genocide against the Rohingya people.

(6) We are aware and completely against the military junta’s heinous plans to divide the people, and we reinstate our support to all forces fighting for a federal democratic Myanmar.

(7) We strongly wish to work together with NUG and ULA/AA. It is crucial that they declare unequivocal policies ensuring the Rohingya’s right to exist in Arakan on the basis of “full and effective equality”, their “right of return” and their inalienable “right to self-determination” consistent with other ethnicities.

Media contact: secretariat@thearna.org