Introduction — When Neutrality Becomes Collusion

Where Humanitarian and policy experts are expected to defend justice, protect civilians, and stand above factional politics. Yet in the arena of Myanmar’s Arakan state (Rakhine) crisis, a troubling pattern has emerged.

A network of so called Rakhine specialists has emerged—people who, in pursuit of money and influence from drug mafia terrorist Arakan army (AA), have chosen to glorify the Arakan Army while ignoring its crimes against humanity. Through their commentary and policy work they have helped and still helping legitimize the group on the international stage, trading integrity and justice for access and visibility and interest. The names of these actors, who have whitewashed the record of a militia financed by narcotics and implicated in atrocities, are listed below.

Profiles

1. Thomas Kean – Senior Consultant for Myanmar and Bangladesh at the International Crisis Group (ICG); Director and Editor-at-Large at Frontier Myanmar, and former Editor-in-Chief.

2. Steve Ross – Senior Fellow at the Stimson Center (Washington D.C.), leading the Crisis in Myanmar’s Rakhine State Project. Formerly with the Richardson Center for Global Engagement, Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue (CHD Myanmar), and The Carter Center.

3. Dr. Emma Leslie – Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies (CPCS), Cambodia.

4. Eva Buzo – Executive Director of Victim Advocates International (VAI), Australia; member of the New South Wales Bar Association Human Rights Committee; former consultant with World Vision and Save the Children.

They have shaped a narrative that quietly legitimizes the Arakan Army (AA/ULA). Through policy briefs, interviews, and public forums, they present the AA as an inevitable governing power, a partner for humanitarian access and even a broker of refugee repatriation. In reality, the group has followed the junta’s very blueprint of persecution, replicating the same machinery of displacement and violence against the Rohingya that the military perfected over decades. Yet these Devil advocates continue to glorify the AA’s rise as “local governance” or “inclusive stability.” In doing so, they normalize a force widely involved with war crimes, narcotics financing, and systematic repression, recasting the persecutor as a legitimate political actor while the victims’ suffering is pushed to the margins of international concern.

From Atrocity to Administration

The Arakan Army’s record is unambiguous. Independent human-rights bodies document its responsibility for massacres such as the August 2025 Maungdaw killings of more than 175 Rohingya civilians, the April Buthidaung atrocities, and specilly In Htan Shauk Khan (also spelled Tan Shwe Khan) village of Buthidaung Township, northern Rakhine State, rights groups and media outlets reported that around 600 Rohingya men, women, and children were massacred by the Arakan Army on 2 May 2024 during a wave of anti-Rohingya attacks.

Over 200,000 have been displaced internally and at least 118,000 forced across the border into Bangladesh. Despite this record, policy analyses like these people since 2022 have rebranded the AA as a de facto authority or proto-state commanding “stability” in Rakhine (Arakan). This rhetorical shift, adopted by multiple institutions, converts territorial control into administrative legitimacy and recasts an drug mafia faction into a governance partner.

The Architects of Normalization

Thomas Kean argued in an August 2022 policy brief that Dhaka

“should consider engaging the Arakan Army” because “any large-scale repatriation will need their backing.” In later commentary he urged that the AA “demonstrate it can govern Rakhine State in the interests of all communities.”

These statements, framed as realism, effectively crown the AA as the gatekeeper of refugee return. The same logic recurs in Steve Ross’s analyses. Writing in 2024, he asserted that

“addressing insecurity is essential to both Bangladesh’s security and prospects for repatriation.” Since the AA now controls the borderlands, his formulation makes engagement synonymous with peace. In practice, it equates forced stability with legitimate governance and displaces the Rohingya from the center of the repatriation debate.

Instead of arguing from a humanitarian or neutral standpoint, these individuals are normalizing the drug-funded Arakan Army (AA), a terrorist militia, by echoing narratives that align with the interests of a group sustained through narcotics revenue and implicated in grave atrocities.

The Hypocrisy of Selective Morality

A deep hypocrisy runs through the arguments of those who call themselves policy realists yet act as the Devil’s Advocates of the terrorist Arakan Army (AA/ULA). These voices, driven by institutional agendas and Western strategic interests, have quietly normalized the very militia whose conduct mirrors the junta’s machinery of repression. Under the banner of “engagement” and “inclusive peace,” they seek to legitimize the AA internationally, selling the language of pragmatism while abandoning moral clarity and justice for the Rohingya.

In their commentaries and forums, they condemn the Myanmar military’s atrocities yet glorify the Arakan Army’s advance as “local governance” or “ethnic resistance.” This double standard exposes their selective ethics: when the persecutor wears the uniform of the junta, they demand accountability; when the same brutality is repackaged under an ethnic flag, they call it stability. Such moral duplicity just to protect some of their interest in the Arakan (rakhine).

By normalizing the AA, they accept one armed actor as a “stakeholder” while dismissing Rohingya groups struggling for rights as “insurgent” or “impractical.” They praise the AA’s “fight against the junta,” yet condemn any Rohingya attempt to resist genocide as extremism. This duality reveals a politics of convenience where armed dominance is rewarded and the oppressed are silenced.

Through this selective advocacy, they reshape the narrative of Arakan (Rakhine): replacing accountability with accommodation, replacing justice with access, and replacing the memory of Rohingya suffering with the myth of the AA as a liberator. Their so-called realism is not peacebuilding—it is complicity dressed in diplomacy.

Evidence Matrix of Influence

Between 2022 and 2025, these devil advocated collectively reshaped international perceptions of the Arakan Army (AA) by taking their narco money

Thomas Kean consistently recommended that regional actors “engage the AA for repatriation and stability.” By describing the militia as an indispensable stakeholder, his position effectively elevated the AA to the level of a legitimate negotiating party, legitimizing an entity already under war-crimes investigation.

Steve Ross, writing in 2024, echoed this framing by asserting that “security and repatriation viability” were inseparable. His argument positioned the AA as the controller of border stability, rendering dialogue with the group seemingly unavoidable and, in doing so, downplayed its ongoing persecution of Rohingya civilians.

Dr. Emma Leslie, through her 2024 peacebuilding initiatives, proposed a national Truth and Reconciliation Commission that would include all conflict actors. While couched in the language of inclusion, this approach effectively treated the AA as a legitimate participant in reconciliation, creating an informal amnesty pathway and weakening prosecutorial pressure.

Why the Language Matters

Terms such as “non-state counterpart,” “proto-state,” and “de facto governing authority” are not neutral descriptors; they carry legal and political weight.

They imply administrative legitimacy, enabling donors to channel aid and governments to open dialogue without formally recognizing culpability.

For the AA, each appearance in diplomatic papers or humanitarian coordination frameworks converts battlefield control into political capital.

For victims, it signals that accountability has been postponed indefinitely.

The Broader Consequences

If the Arakan Army is granted legitimacy, it will enshrine a profound injustice: without recognition of their crimes there can be no meaningful justice for the Rohingya and no credible pathway to safe, voluntary repatriation. Granting political space to an active persecutor substitutes negotiated returns for accountability, silences victims’ demands, and effectively hands control of any “repatriation” process to the very actors who drove the displacement. This hypocrisy will close off legal redress and lock the Rohingya into a permanent state of insecurity.

Conclusion — The Price of Complicity

The humanitarian and policy community now faces a moral reckoning in Arakan State Because of these devil advocates. Those who claim to speak for peace cannot keep justifying engagement with a militia whose power rests on narcotics wealth and civilian terror. By dressing political convenience as realism, the so-called advocates of neutrality have traded the blood of the Rohingya for influence and access. Every paper, panel, and policy that presents the Arakan Army as a partner instead of a perpetrator deepens this betrayal. The time has come for these voices to stop excusing atrocity under the language of pragmatism. Justice and dignity for the Rohingya must be restored to the center of the world’s conscience, and those who helped normalize violence must answer for the harm their narratives have caused.