The Rohingya people are an ethnic minority that live mainly in the northern region of Myanmar's Rakhine State (formerly Arakan) and have been described as one of the world's most persecuted minorities. They describe themselves as descendants of Arab traders who settled in the region many generations ago. However, French scholar Jacques Leider has stated that "the forefathers of the overwhelming majority of Muslims in Rakhine have migrated from Bengal to Rakhine ... their descendants and the Muslims as whole had in fact been rather uncontroversially referred to as 'Bengalis' until the early 1990s", and that they were also referred to as "Chittagonians" during the British colonial period. Others such as Chris Lewa and Andrew Selth have identified the group as ethnically related to the Bengalis of southern Bangladesh while anthropologist Christina Fink uses Rohingya not as an ethnic identifier but as a political one.

With the Japanese invasion and withdrawal of the British administration, tensions in Arakan before the war erupted. The war caused inter-communal conflicts between the Arakanese Muslims and Buddhists. Muslims fled from Japanese-controlled and Buddhist-majority regions to Muslim-dominated northern Arakan with many being killed. In return, a "reverse ethnic cleansing" was carried out. The Muslim attacks caused the Buddhists to flee to southern Arakan. Attacks by Muslim villagers on Buddhists also caused reprisals. With the consolidation of their position throughout northern Arakan, the Rohingyas retaliated against Japanese collaborators, particularly Buddhists. Though unofficial, specific undertaking were made to Arakanese Muslims after World War II. V Force officers like Andrew Irwin expressed enthusiasm to award Muslims for loyalty. Rohingya leaders believed that the British had promised them a "Muslim National Area" in present-day Maungdaw District. They were also apprehensive of a future Buddhist-dominated government. In 1946, the leaders made calls for annexation of the territory by Pakistan. Some also called for an independent state. The requests to the British government were however ignored.

After the colonial period, the first mass exodus from what was then East Pakistan took place towards the 1970s. In the 1950s, a "political and militant movement" rose to create "an autonomous Muslim zone", and the militants used Rohingya to describe themselves, marking the "modern origins" of the term. The persecution of Rohingyas in Myanmar dates back to the 1970s. The term "Rohingya" has gained currency since 1990s after "the second exodus" of "a quarter-million people from Bangladesh to Rakhine" in the early 1990s.

The Rohingya were denied citizenship in 1982 by the government of Myanmar, which sees them as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. Since then, Rohingyas have regularly been made the target of persecution by the government and nationalist Buddhists.

In May 1946, Muslim leaders from Arakan met with Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, and asked for the formal annexation of two townships in the Mayu region, Buthidaung and Maungdaw, into East Bengal (present-day Bangladesh). Two months later, the North Arakan Muslim League was founded in Akyab (present-day Sittwe, capital of Rakhine State), which also asked Jinnah to annex the region. Jinnah refused, saying he could not interfere with Burma's internal matters. After Jinnah's refusal, proposals were made by Muslims in Arakan to the newly formed post-independence government of Burma, asking for the concession of the two townships to Pakistan. These proposals were rejected by Burma's parliament.

Local mujahideen totalling an estimated 2,000 to 5,000 fighters were subsequently formed to fight against the Burmese government. Led by Mir Kassem, the mujahideen began targeting government soldiers stationed in the region and capturing territory, in the process driving out local ethnic Rakhine communities from their villages, some of whom fled to East Bengal.

In November 1948, martial law was declared in the region, and the 5th Battalion of the Burma Rifles and the 2nd Chin Battalion were sent to liberate the area. By June 1949, the Burmese government's control over the region was reduced to the city of Akyab, whilst the mujahideen had possession of nearly all of northern Arakan. After several months of fighting, Burmese forces were able to push the mujahideen back into the jungles of the Mayu region, near the country's western border.

In 1950, the Pakistani government warned its counterparts in Burma about their treatment of Muslims in Arakan. Burmese Prime Minister U Nu immediately sent a Muslim diplomat, Pe Khin, to negotiate a memorandum of understanding so that Pakistan would cease assisting the mujahideen. Kassem was arrested by Pakistani authorities in 1954, and many of his followers subsequently surrendered to the government.

The post-independence government accused the mujahideen of encouraging the illegal immigration of thousands of Bengalis from East Bengal into Arakan during their rule of the area, a claim that has been highly disputed over the decades, as it brings into question the legitimacy of the Rohingya as natives of Arakan.
Between 1950 and 1954, the Burma Army launched several military operations against the remaining mujahideen in northern Arakan. The first military operation was launched in March 1950, followed by a second named Operation Mayu in October 1952. Several mujahideen leaders agreed to disarm and surrender to government forces following the successful …

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Under Ne Win's military rule, Burmese authorities turned increasingly hostile towards the Rohingyas and implemented policies to exclude them from having citizenship. On 26 April 1964, the Rohingya Independence Front (RIF) was established with the goal of creating an autonomous Muslim zone for the Rohingya. The name of the group was changed to the Rohingya Independence Army (RIA) in 1969 and then to the Rohingya Patriotic Front (RPF) on 12 September 1973. In June 1974, the RPF was reorganised with Muhammad Jafar Habib as self-appointed president, Nurul Islam, a Rangoon-educated lawyer, as vice-president, and Muhammad Yunus, a medical doctor, as secretary general. The RPF had around 70 fighters.

Moulvi Jafar Kawal founded the Rohingya Liberation Party (RLP) on 15 July 1972, after mobilising various former mujahideen factions under his command. Kawal appointed himself chairman of the party, Abdul Latif as vice-chairman and minister of military affairs, and Muhammad Jafar Habib, a graduate of Rangoon University, as secretary general. Their strength increased from 200 fighters at their foundation to 500 by 1974. The RLP was largely based in the jungles near Buthidaung and was armed with weapons smuggled from Bangladesh. After a massive military operation by the Tatmadaw in July 1974, Kawal and most of his men fled across the border into Bangladesh.

In February 1978, government forces began a massive military operation named Operation Nagamin (Operation Dragon King) in northern Arakan, with the official focus of expelling so-called "foreigners" from the area prior to a national census. The primary objective of the Tatmadaw during the operation was to force RPF insurgents and sympathisers out of Arakan. As the operation extended farther northwest, hundreds of thousands of Rohingyas crossed the border seeking refuge in Bangladesh.

Later, in a meeting between Burma's then-president Ne Win and Bangladesh's then-president Ziaur Rahman, Ziaur threatened to provide arms and training to the Rohingya refugees if Burma did not repatriate them. Ne Win subsequently agreed to repatriate the Rohingya refugees under the supervision of the UNHCR, and accepted the Rohingyas as "lawful residents of Burma".

In 1982, radical elements broke away from the Rohingya Patriotic Front (RPF) and formed the Rohingya Solidarity Organisation (RSO). It was led by Muhammad Yunus, the former secretary general of the RPF. The RSO became the most influential and extreme faction amongst Rohingya insurgent groups by basing itself on religious grounds. It gained support from various Islamist groups, such as Jamaat-e-Islami, Hizb-e-Islami, Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, Angkatan Belia Islam sa-Malaysia and the Islamic Youth Organisation of Malaysia.

The Burmese Citizenship Law was introduced on 15 October 1982, and with the exception of the Kaman people, Muslims in the country were legally unrecognised and denied Burmese citizenship.

In 1986, the RPF merged with a faction of the RSO led by the former vice-president of the RPF, Nurul Islam, and became the Arakan Rohingya Islamic Front (ARIF).

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