Vatican newspaper laments plight of Myanmar’s Rohingya community
July 17, 2025
L’Osservatore Romano devoted the most prominent front-page coverage in its July 16 edition to the plight of the Rohingya community of Myanmar (map).
With the headline “Rohingya: Dramma senza fine“ [Rohingya: Drama without end], the Vatican newspaper reported that “another 150,000 members of the Muslim ethnic minority have arrived in the Bengali refugee camps of Cox’s Bazar.”
“Among the most overlooked displacement crises in the world is undoubtedly that of the Rohingya Muslim ethnic minority, forced to flee Myanmar due to the repeated violence of the ruling military junta,” Francesco Citterich wrote. “A crisis that rarely receives international media attention, it affects more than a million people.”
“The violence against the Rohingya—a forgotten, unpopular people who have quickly become the largest stateless ethnic group—is part of a broader pattern of decades-long violations and discrimination, in which the Muslim minority has been stripped of its social, political, and economic rights, resulting in serious violations of fundamental rights,” he continued. “Not only do the Rohingya receive no protection from Myanmar’s state authorities, but the government of this Southeast Asian country itself refuses to recognize them as a people, forcing them to endure harsh repression and forcing them to flee.”
Citterich added:
Victims of mass murder, rape, torture, and the systematic destruction of their homes and places of worship, the Rohingya are considered by the UN to be among the most persecuted ethnic minorities in the world.
In the past 18 months alone, according to a detailed report by UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, Bangladesh has seen the largest influx of Rohingya refugees since the mass flight from Myanmar’s western Rakhine State nearly a decade ago. The refugee agency said up to 150,000 Rohingya have arrived in Bangladeshi refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar since last year.
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