Indonesia and Rohingya Refugees: Examining the Origin of Hate Speech

The fate of the Rohingya people, both in their homeland Myanmar and in refugee camps, remains uncertain. Last October, the ASEAN conference in Kuala Lumpur also saw the issue of conflicts in Myanmar being discussed. As of May 2025, there are only around 2,600 Rohingya refugees in Indonesia. However, in the past few years, a few incidents indicate disharmony between them and locals. In 2023, for example, there were efforts to forcibly remove them in Banda Aceh. Even in social media these days hostile comments from Indonesian accounts have made it to a number of platforms, including in the social media page of the Rohingya women collaborative network. Noor Azizah, co-executive Rohingya women collaborative network, said that when she saw hateful comments about Rohingya refugees coming from the Indonesian, Malaysian and other communities, she would respond under the assumption that the other parties were under lack of information or under misinformation and would try to bring to conversation’s focus back to humanity.