Operation King Dragon: A Case Study

The 1978 “Operation King Dragon” was a watershed moment in the history of the Rohingya people. While tensions have always existed since the 1950s where ethnic Rakine and Muslim communities demanded autonomy from the Myanmar government (Smith, 1999), “Operation King Dragon” culminated in legislative action that stripped all Rohingya of citizenship in 1982. Since then, there have been intermittent moves by the Myanmar state to impose forced labour, inflict violence and enforce policies of discrimination on the Rohingya. Such patterns of persecution have continued till today, and have actually worsened as Myanmar undertakes democratic reforms. This has resulted in many Rohingya being targeted for killing and increased the number of refugees seeking refuge in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia (Singh, 2014).

There has been much work done on issues such as gender-based violence, historical origins of conflict, responsibility to protect and the international refugee regime (Akhter, & Kusakabe, 2014; Ullah, 2011; Southwick, 2015; Hathaway, & Neve, 1997). A significant amount of research into the Rohingya crisis has focused on the tension between state interests and international refugee law (Tran, 1996), articulating a state’s fear in committing to refugee flows that are unpredictable in magnitude (Tran, 1996). Studies of this type often focus on variations in asylum policies as a function of national security concerns, tracing refugee approaches in countries such as Malaysia (Van Selm, 2015, Singh,