As of 2025. Camp populations and movement restrictions have shifted since the Arakan Army took control of most of Rakhine State in 2024-25, and current numbers are not independently verifiable.
After communal violence in 2012 displaced more than 140,000 people in Rakhine State, Myanmar authorities moved Rohingya and Kaman Muslims into camps in central Rakhine and did not allow them to return home, maintaining the camps with barbed-wire fencing, checkpoints, curfews and a permission system that in practice prevents residents from leaving. A 2019 survey found that 99.6 per cent of Rohingya respondents reported being prevented from travelling outside their township, and residents have described paying bribes and passing through multiple checkpoints to reach hospitals or markets. The confinement rests on a wider legal architecture: the 1982 Citizenship Law, which ties citizenship to membership of recognised national races and requires proof of pre-1948 residence, has been applied to exclude the Rohingya and render them stateless across generations. From 2017 the government announced a camp-closure programme, but it has largely built permanent structures on or near existing camp sites without restoring freedom of movement or land, an approach that UN assessments have said contributes to permanent segregation. Human Rights Watch characterises the regime as apartheid and persecution amounting to crimes against humanity; Myanmar's governments have rejected this, describing the arrangements as temporary humanitarian shelter and security management. Since the Arakan Army took control of most of Rakhine State in 2024 the camps have changed hands but restrictions on movement, arbitrary arrest and denial of citizenship have continued, and the state is largely cut off from humanitarian access.
Myanmar state and Rakhine State authorities, and since 2024 the Arakan Army, confining Rohingya and Kaman Muslims to camps and villages under movement restrictions and statelessness imposed by the 1982 Citizenship Law
Rohingya were excluded from Myanmar's 2014 census, so all figures are estimates: about 1.0-1.4 million lived in Rakhine State before 2017, concentrated in the northern townships where they were 80-98 per cent of the population. Around 140,000 were confined to camps in central Rakhine after the 2012 violence, more than 740,000 fled to Bangladesh in 2017, and roughly 300,000-600,000 remain in Rakhine.
No source quantifies mortality attributable to the confinement regime as such. The 2012 violence that produced the camps killed a number Myanmar's government put in the low hundreds, with Human Rights Watch documenting at least 70 Rohingya killed in a single day at Yan Thei and bodies dumped in mass graves; deaths in the camps from denied healthcare, and deaths at sea among those who fled by boat between 2012 and 2015, are documented qualitatively by UNHCR, MSF and the UN Fact-Finding Mission but have never been enumerated. The mass killings of the 2016-17 clearance operations are a separate event.
Documented by Human Rights Watch in 'All You Can Do is Pray' (2013) — at least 70 killed at Yan Thei, mass graves, mass round-ups of Rohingya, at least 4,862 structures and nine Sittwe mosques destroyed, and the denial of citizenship under the 1982 Citizenship Law — and by the UN Fact-Finding Mission (2018) on segregation, confinement and denial of legal status.
Myanmar