Guest contributor
Shafiur Rahman
Less than 72 hours after Human Rights Watch (HRW) released one of the most devastating investigations yet into the Arakan Army’s treatment of Rohingya civilians, Fortify Rights chose to shift the accountability spotlight elsewhere.
The HRW report, “Skeletons and Skulls Scattered Everywhere,” documents the alleged massacre of Rohingya Muslims carried out by the Arakan Army (AA) in Hoyyar Siri, also known as Htan Shauk Khan, on May 2 2024.
The 56-page investigation says AA fighters deliberately fired on unarmed Rohingya villagers, some waving white flags, before burning and looting the village.
HRW compiled a list of more than 170 people killed or missing, including about 90 children, and warned that the real toll may be much higher. Survivors, HRW found, remain unable to return, with some effectively detained by the AA.
Then came Fortify Rights.
On May 21, Fortify Rights promoted statements by its Leadership Council and seven unnamed Rohingya-led organisations urging the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor to seek an arrest warrant for Ata Ullah, the imprisoned leader of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA).
The Leadership Council itself deserves scrutiny. Its statement is not the product of a field investigation but a prestige instrument. It is a roster of recognisable international names deployed to give Fortify Rights’ appeal legal and moral weight.
In practice, it functions as an elite rubber stamp, allowing an international Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) to project an aura of global consensus while the actual local groups remain hidden behind redactions.
The statement says ARSA, under Ata Ullah’s command, committed killings, abductions, torture and other grave abuses against Rohingya civilians and others in Myanmar and Bangladesh.
No one seriously should deny that ARSA has committed grave abuses against Rohingya civilians. Victims of ARSA violence deserve justice. Rohingya who have been threatened, abducted, tortured or killed by ARSA deserve the same seriousness as victims of any other armed actor.
But timing matters. Political context matters.
Fortify Rights’ intervention has a clear political effect. It reframes the accountability conversation at exactly the wrong moment. Even if Fortify Rights’ campaign was weeks in the making, launching it into the immediate wake of the HRW report betrays a profound blindness to political context.
Its intervention did not arrive in a vacuum. It came immediately after HRW had placed the AA under rare and intense scrutiny for what appears to be a large-scale massacre of Rohingya civilians.
At precisely the moment when the central question should have been whether the AA, now a de facto authority across much of Rakhine State, can be trusted with Rohingya lives, Fortify Rights turned attention to an already-detained Rohingya militant leader in Bangladesh.
That shift is not neutral. It allows the accountability frame to move from a powerful armed movement exercising territorial control to a weakened and imprisoned Rohingya insurgent figure.
It risks creating a false symmetry between the AA’s alleged massacre, village destruction, forced labour, detention and movement restrictions, and ARSA’s crimes against Rohingya civilians.
Both deserve scrutiny. But they do not occupy the same political position today. One is an actor seeking legitimacy as a governing force in Rakhine. The other is a diminished and discredited armed group whose leader was arrested in Bangladesh more than a year ago.
The most convenient part of Fortify Rights’ package is also the least transparent – a statement attributed to “seven Rohingya-led organisations” whose names are redacted.
Fortify Rights says the organisations remain anonymous because of security concerns and fear of reprisals by ARSA. That explanation is understandable – up to a point. ARSA intimidation is real. Rohingya activists and community figures have often had to operate under threat and the fear of ARSA reprisal is tragically well-founded, as the assassinations of refugee camp activists have shown.
But anonymity also creates a serious problem of accountability. We are asked to accept that “Rohingya-led organisations” endorse this call without knowing who they are, where they are based, whom they represent, whether they are camp-based or diaspora-based, whether they are independent, or whether they are entangled in the very refugee camp power structures that have long shaped Rohingya public speech.
The issue isn’t that the Rohingya groups want to stay alive; the issue is that an international NGO is using anonymous, un-vettable consensus as political leverage to shift a narrative during a crisis, without providing the public any framework to judge the legitimacy or independence of those voices.
In the Rohingya context, organisational labels are not innocent. They are often used to manufacture community consent. Anonymous endorsement may protect individuals, but it also prevents scrutiny. And when such a statement is deployed by an international NGO at a politically sensitive moment, that lack of transparency is significant.
Fortify Rights may argue that its position is simple – accountability must apply to all perpetrators. In principle, that is correct. But in practice, “all perpetrators” can become a way of dispersing pressure just when one perpetrator is finally facing scrutiny.
The issue is not whether ARSA should be investigated. It should. The issue is why this particular ICC appeal was amplified immediately after HRW documented an AA massacre of Rohingya children, women and men.
This matters because Fortify Rights’ intervention lands within a broader narrative environment in which the AA is increasingly treated as the “reasonable” actor in Rakhine – the pragmatic partner, the lesser evil, the force that must be engaged because it controls territory.
That framing has become self-reinforcing. The AA is said to be unavoidable because it controls much of Rakhine; its control is then used to justify diplomatic caution; and diplomatic caution in turn softens scrutiny of the violence through which that control has been consolidated.
In that context, shifting attention from the AA to ARSA does not simply broaden accountability. It helps restore the very frame that HRW’s report should have shattered.
The beneficiary of this timing is not hard to identify. Bangladesh can welcome an accountability process against Ata Ullah while avoiding deeper scrutiny of camp governance, armed group manipulation, intelligence relationships and the wider security economy of the refugee camps.
For years, Dhaka publicly denied or minimised the presence of ARSA even as the group operated inside a camp system under heavy state surveillance. Any serious accountability process would therefore have to ask not only what ARSA did, but how it was able to operate, whom it served at different moments, and why its presence was politically convenient until it was not.
Casting Bangladesh as a straightforward partner in justice is therefore a potential blind spot. If Fortify Rights is pushing for ICC intervention through Bangladesh, it cannot ignore the history of a state actor that has spent years securitising, restricting and manipulating the very camps in which Ata Ullah operated.
The AA, meanwhile, benefits from anything that blunts the force of the HRW report and returns the conversation to Rohingya militancy. The AA is actively trying to court international recognition, humanitarian aid, and diplomatic legitimacy from regional actors (like China and India) and Western donors as the new rulers of Rakhine State.
The group seeks international legitimacy by presenting the conflict as a choice between its own disciplined governance and an element it routinely labels as radical/extremist Muslim Rohingya terrorists. By shifting the focus to Ata Ullah, Fortify Rights hands the AA its favourite talking point on a silver platter.
For Myanmar resistance circles already reluctant to confront AA abuses, Fortify Rights’ intervention offers an easy escape route – yes, the AA may face allegations, but what about ARSA?
This is how asymmetry gets laundered. A detained Rohingya rebel leader becomes the face of accountability, while the AA, accused of massacring villagers and controlling their return, is packaged into a generalised “all sides” narrative.
Does that sound even-handed? It is not. Again, to repeat, it risks obscuring the fact that the AA is now a governing power over Rohingya lives in large parts of Rakhine State.
Fortify Rights chose not to pause or adjust their rollout in light of the massive HRW bombshell. Their inability or refusal to read the room is the failure.
Not the demand for ARSA accountability itself, but the way it has been staged – immediately after a major report on AA atrocities, with redacted Rohingya names, with Bangladesh cast as a potential partner in justice, and with the political effect of softening the blow against the AA.
Victims of ARSA deserve justice. But victims of the Arakan Army also deserve more than a brief moment of attention before the conversation is redirected elsewhere.
Shafiur Rahman is a journalist and documentary filmmaker focused on the Rohingya crisis, displacement, and border politics across Bangladesh–Myanmar. He publishes the Rohingya Refugee News newsletter,
DVB publishes a diversity of opinions that does not reflect DVB editorial policy. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our stories: [email protected]
