Attrition

by

The Role of Identity Documents in
the Holocaust and the Genocidesof Rwanda and Myanmar

investigate
engagestrengthen

GenocideGenocide

Attrition

by

The Role of Identity Documents in
the Holocaust and the Genocidesof Rwanda and Myanmar

Cover:A Rohingya man holding his
household list or “family list,”
which provides details of family
members who live together.
Myanmar authorities, including
immigration officials and Border
Guard Police, have conductedannual household surveys ofRohingya households in northern
Rakhine State since the 1990s
to update the household “family
lists” and photograph family
members. ©Saiful Huq Omi,Counter Foto, Cox’s Bazar District,
Bangladesh, August 2019

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Warning

Graphic Content
This report contains some images
with graphic content that might not besuitable for all audiences.
• Dead bodies

Table of Contents

Summary ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 20

Methodology ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 29
Background ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 31
I. Identity Documents and Genocide: Case Studies ������������������������������������������������������������� 33
Holocaust of the Jewish People ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 34

Rwandan Genocide of the Tutsi People����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 38

Genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 42

Comparative Analysis ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 48

II. Post-Coup Human Rights Violations Related to National Verification Cards in
Myanmar����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������51
Restrictions on Nationality and Denial of Identity ����������������������������������������������������������������������������� 52
NVCs and Restrictions on Rights to Freedom of Movement and Livelihoods �������������������� 56

III. The International Legal Framework ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 59

Recommendations ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 61
To the Myanmar Junta ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 61
To the National Unity Government of Myanmar ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 61
To the United Nations and International Organizations in Myanmar and Bangladesh��� 62
To United Nations Member States �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 62

Acknowledgements ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 63

1933
March 22

Nazis establish the first
concentration camp in Dachau,
Germany to detain political prisoners
and later Jews and others. Between
1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany andits collaborators established morethan 44,000 sites to detain, facilitate
forced labor, and commit massmurder of Jews and others.

July 14

Law on the Revocation of
Naturalization and Deprivationof German Citizenship strips
citizenship from German naturalized
citizens and German citizens
residing abroad who are considered“undesirable,” including Jews.

1935

Holocaust
January 30

Adolf Hitler appointed
German chancellor

April

Nazis promote a nationwide
boycott of Jewish-owned
businesses. Law for
the Restoration of theProfessional Civil Service isenacted, barring Jews fromholding government positions.

June 16

National census completed in Germany, identifying
525,000 Jews in the country—less than 0.75 percentof the population. Nazi regime later links this census
data with a “marriage and family book” to develop a
special racial database and a registration system,
making it easier for the regime to “locate” its future
Jewish victims.

September 15

The Nazi regime enacts the Nuremberg Race Laws, which
define “Jewishness” in terms of ancestry, prohibit marriage
and sexual intercourse between Jews and Germans, andrestrict citizenship to “German or kindred blood . . . thatis both desirous and personally fit to serve loyally theGerman people and the Reich.”

1938

August 17

An executive order requires all Jews in Germany to add
either “Sarah,” if a woman, or “Israel,” if a man, on all
identity documents. The regime also publishes a list of“Jewish” names that parents must choose from whennaming their newborns.

October 5

All German passports held byJews are invalidated and replacedwith passports stamped with theletter “J” for “Jew.”

1939

1933-1939

In this period, regional, state, andmunicipal Nazi officials issue morethan 400 decrees regulations aimed
at restricting nearly all aspects of the
public and private lives of Jews.

OctoberFirst ghetto created in Priotrków
Trybunalski, Poland with Jews forced
to reside in a small, designated areaof the city. The Nazis created morethan 1,000 ghettos throughout
the occupied territories during the
Holocaust to separate and isolate
the Jewish population. Later, theNazis sealed off some ghettos—
including Poland’s Łódź ghetto on
April 30, 1940 and Warsaw ghetto on
November 15, 1940, confining morethan 160,000 and 350,000 Jews,
respectively.

November 9-10

Nazis in Germany and Nazi-occupied areas carry out
Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass in English,
killing almost 100 Jews, destroying hundreds of Jewish
synagogues, desecrating Jewish cemeteries, and looting
more 7,000 Jewish-owned businesses. Later, the regime
levies fines on German Jews for the destroyed property
and issues a decree banning Jewish-owned businesses.

September 1

Germany initiates World War II in Europe with theinvasion of Poland. Britain and France declare war
on Germany three days later.

1941
September 1

All Jews in Germany over six years old areordered to wear clearly visible symbols of
their identity. Yellow Star of David badges
and white armbands become the two mostwidely used symbols. Failure to comply withthis order resulted in fines, imprisonment, or
summary execution.

October 15
November 25

The Eleventh Decree officiallyended the possibility ofemigration for German Jews
and legalized the confiscationof Jewish property.

1942

Mass deportations begin with German, Austrian, andCzech Jews being transported to ghettos, shooting
sites, concentration camps, and killing centers
primarily located in German-occupied territories.
These deportations continue throughout the
Holocaust with hundreds of thousands of Jews andothers deported to various locations for detention,
forced labor, or extermination.

December 8

Chelmno killing center located outside of Łódź Poland
begins operations as the first stationary gassing
facility. Other extermination camps with gassing
facilities, included Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmo, Treblinka,
and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Nearly 2.7 million Jews were
killed in these centers.

January 20

The Wannsee Conferencemarks the public unveiling
oof the “Final Solution of theJewish Question” with thestated goal of exterminating
Europe’s 11 million Jews.

1943-44

Ghettos are “liquidated” andresidents are transferred toconcentration camps andkilling centers as part of the“Final Solution.”

1944
June 6: D-Day

Allied forces invade
Normandy on the coast ofnorthern France.

1945
As the allied forces advanceinto German-occupied territory,
Nazis initiate “death marches” toevacuate the concentration camp
population. Thousands die or are
killed on these marches.

May 8: V-E Day
November 20

The International Military Tribunalin Nuremberg begins with 21
Nazi leaders facing charges of crimes
against peace, war crimes, andcrimes against humanity. Less than ayear later, the tribunal sentences 12
to death, three to life imprisonment,
and four to prison terms of 10 to 20
years. Three are acquitted.

Germany surrenders to allied forces,
bringing an end to the war in Europe.
By the end of the war, the Nazi regime
succeeded in killing an estimatedsix million Jews through privation,
open-air mass shootings, and in
extermination camps.

1948
December 9

The U.N. Convention on thePrevention and Punishmentof Genocide is enacted,
defining “genocide” as one
or more specific acts “withintent to destroy, in whole orin part, a national, ethnical,
racial or religious group.”

RwandaBefore 1962

Rwanda is under colonial rule,
first by Germany between 1894
and 1918, then by Belgium
between 1924 and 1962. Bothcolonial rulers rely on Tutsi
monarchs to implement policies.

1959

A group of Hutu intellectuals
issue a manifesto calling for an
end to both Tutsi exploitation
and Belgian rule.

1961

January 28

The Tutsi monarchy is abolished andreplaced with a republic led by an allHutu provisional national government.

1973

July 5Major General Juvénal Habyarimana
assumes the office of the president
after overthrowing Gregoire
Kayibanda. Habyarimana remains in
power after winning subsequent reelections in unopposed contests.

1990

October 1

The Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic
Front (RPF) based in Uganda
launches an attack on Rwanda,
initiating a civil war and causing mass
displacement of Rwandans.

1933

Following a colony-wide census, Belgiancolonial administrators introduce anational identity card that includes
ethnicity, institutionalizing the now
monolithic “Hutu” and “Tutsi” distinction.

November 1

A “Hutu Uprising” leads to anti-Tutsi massacres
followed by outbreaks of inter-ethnic mass violencein the years leading up to the genocide. Hundreds ofthousands of Tutsi are forced to flee Rwanda.

1962

July 1

Rwanda gains independence from Belgium, andHutu leader Gregoire Kayibanda is elected president
on October 26, 1962. Kayibanda remains in power,
running unopposed in subsequent elections, until heis overthrown in a coup. on July 5, 1973 by his defense
minister Major General Juvénal Habyarimana.

1962

New national identity cards
introduced but still include ethnicity.

1993

August 4

The Hutu-led Rwandan government and the Tutsi-led RPF sign the
Arusha Accords to end the three-year civil war. In addition to providing
for a power-sharing arrangement, the establishment of a transition
government, and the repatriation of refugees, the Accords include anagreement to end ethnic identification requirements.

1994
April 30

The U.N. Security Council condemns
the killings in a resolution but refuses
to use the term “genocide.”

July 4

The genocide ends with the RPF
taking control of Kigali, Rwanda’s
capital city, after securingsignificant parts of the country.

November 8

The U.N. establishes theInternational Criminal Tribunal for
Rwanda (ICTR) to “prosecute persons
responsible for genocide.” Overthe course of its work, the Tribunal
indicted 93 and issued sentences to62 perpetrators. It also became thefirst tribunal to interpret the crime of
genocide and conceptualize rape asa method of genocide.

April 6

Rwanda President Juvénal Habyarimana iskilled when his plan is shot down over Rwanda’s
capital city, Kigali. The Tutsi-led RPF is accusedof being responsible and, within hours of theplane crash, state-sponsored radio announcers
call on Hutu “patriots” to kill Tutsi.
Over the next 100 days, Hutu perpetrators kill an
estimated 75 percevnt, or 800,000 Tutsi women,men, and children. Most killings are carried out
by hand, with machetes or clubs, and included
other acts of violence, such as rape.

July 19

A transitional government of national unity isestablished with Pasteur Bizimungu, a Hutu, aspresident and RPF leader Paul Kagame, a Tutsi,
as vice president.

1996

Rwanda’s post-genocide
government removes the“ethnic group” category fromits national identity cards.

1998

July 17

2001

A law is introduced toprevent “divisionism” inRwanda by making ethnic
self-identification a criminal
offense with penalties of up
to 30 years’ imprisonment
and fines up to US$8,000.

The Rome Statute is enacted to establish theInternational Criminal Court (ICC), the first permanent
judicial body mandated to prosecute atrocity crimes.

2003

June 27

The Organic Law of 2003 is enacted to forbid“ethnic ideology” and “genocide mentality.”

2008

Paper identification cards are replaced withplastic electronic ones that continue to
exclude racial categories. Further restrictions
are put into place to prevent the use of
the terms “Hutu” and “Tutsi” in public andparticularly in the political sphere.

Myanmar
1948

January 4

Union Citizenship Act is enacted,
under which Rohingya haveequal access to citizenship andare issued National Registration
Cards (NRCs). Prime Minister
U Nu recognizes Rohingya as
indigenous to Myanmar.

1978

February

Operation Naga Min (Dragon King)—
an exercise to identify and register
residents in specific locations as
either citizens or foreigners—
devolves into violent attacks on
Rohingya and the destruction of
Rohingya villages, forcing more than
200,000 Rohingya into Bangladesh.

1990

May 27

Myanmar holds multiparty national
elections, in which Rohingya
participate. The Myanmar military fails
to acknowledge the landslide victory
Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for
Democracy (NLD) party and puts her
under house arrest.

1962

March 2

General Ne Win overthrows U Nu, marking
the beginning of 26 years of military rulein Myanmar.

Mid-1970s

Foreign Registration Cards are issued
to some Rohingya under the Emergency
Immigration Act, categorizing themas “resident foreigners” without fullcitizenship rights.

1982

October 15

Myanmar passes a new Citizenship Law that
effectively denies Rohingya full citizenship. Rohingya
are not issued citizenship cards under the new law. Ne
Win says the law was intended to “clarify the positionof guests and mixed bloods” and that “only pureblooded nationals will be called citizens.”

1991

The Myanmar military launches Operation Pyi
Thaya (Clean and Beautiful Nation) in RakhineState, killing and raping Rohingya and razing
Rohingya villages and mosques, forcing tens of
thousands of Rohingya to Bangladesh.

1995

Myanmar begins issuing Temporary
Registration Cards (TRCs), also known
as “White Cards,” to Rohingya and otherminorities. The cards confer no citizenshiprights but later enable Rohingya toparticipate in the 2010 nationwide elections.

2011

March 30

The military-backed Union Solidarity
and Development Party wins flawed
national elections and former
military general Thein Sein becomespresident. Rohingya are able toparticipate in the election process,and Rohingya candidates are electedto parliament.

2014

March–April

Myanmar conducts a national
census that deliberately excludes
Rohingya Muslims and others.

June 25

Myanmar authorities begin
issuing Identity Cards of
National Verification to
Rohingya that confer no rights.
Some Rohingya are coerced orforced to accept the cards.

2016
October 9After Rohingya militant attacks
on Myanmar police officers inMaungdaw and Rathedaungtownships, Myanmar security forcesraze dozens of villages in Maungdaw
Township, killing, raping, andarresting Rohingya en masse, andforcing the displacement of morethan 90,000 Rohingya to Bangladesh.

March 24

The U.N. Human Rights Council
establishes the Independent
International Fact-Finding Mission(FFM) on Myanmar to investigate
human rights violations and abusesin Rakhine, Kachin, and Shan states.
The Myanmar government refuses tocooperate with the mechanism.

2012

June

Violent incidents between Buddhists andMuslims in Rakhine State spiral into targeted,state-sanctioned attacks on Rohingya andother Muslims, ultimately displacing more than
200,000 Rohingya. More than 125,000 Rohingya
and others are confined to dozens of internment
camps that remain in place at the time of writing.

Late 2012

Myanmar authorities begin a“citizenship verification” processtargeting displaced Rohingya in
Rakhine State and identifying themas “Bengali” or “Bengali/Islam.”

2015

Myanmar authorities revoke the White
Cards held by Rohingya ahead of thenational elections and issue White Card
receipts, which also confer no rights.

November 8

Rohingya are barred from voting or running for office innational elections. The NLD wins in a landslide victory.

Aung San Suu Kyi becomes
the de facto head of state
as State Counsellor. Under
her administration, ICNVs
are rebranded as National
Verification Cards (NVCs).

2017
August 25

In response to further Rohingya militant attacks
on police outposts, the Myanmar military kills
thousands of Rohingya civilians, razes hundredsof villages, and commits other atrocities
throughout northern Rakhine State. More than
745,000 Rohingya flee to Bangladesh.

2018

September 18

The FFM releases a 444-page report
cataloging Myanmar military-led
atrocity crimes in Myanmar andcalls for the ICC or an international
criminal tribunal to investigate andprosecute Myanmar security forces
for genocide, war crimes, and crimes
against humanity against Rohingya,
Kachin, Shan, and others.

November 13

Under the principle of universal
jurisdiction, the Burmese Rohingya
Organization U.K. and Latin American
human rights groups file a petitionin an Argentinian court to open acriminal investigation into Myanmar’s
atrocity crimes against Rohingya. The
judiciary has subsequently initiated aninvestigation and the case is currently
ongoing at the time of writing.

2021

Following the coup, tens of
millions of people in Myanmar
join protests and strikes in
opposition to junta rule. In its
effort to crush the opposition,
the junta kills more than 1,500
civilians, detains at least 12,000,
disappears untold numbers ofpeople, and forcibly displaces
more than 440,000 during thefirst year of the coup.

June 3

NUG announces its commitment to“abolishing” the NVC process. The
NUG further commits to ensuring
citizenship based “on birth inMyanmar or birth anywhere as a childof Myanmar citizens.”

September 6International Criminal Court (ICC) finds that it has jurisdiction
over the alleged deportation of Rohingya from Myanmar
to Bangladesh. The Office of the Prosecutor subsequently
initiates an investigation, which is ongoing at the time ofwriting, into crimes committed by the Myanmar military.

2019

November 11

The Gambia brings a case against Myanmar
at the International Court of Justice(ICJ) alleging violations of the Genocide
Convention. The ICJ subsequently issues
legally binding “provisional measuresof protection” for Rohingya. This case iscurrently ongoing at the time of writing.

2020

November 9

The NLD wins re-election in Myanmar’s second
democratic election. Rohingya are again denied
the right to participate in the election process.

February 1

Rejecting the election results, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing
launches a military coup and detains State Counsellor Suu Kyi andothers, declaring himself the head of the junta’s State Administration
Council (SAC) the following day.

April 16

The Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw (CRPH)—a group ofelected Myanmar parliamentarians who evaded arrest during the coup—
establishes the National Unity Government (NUG) of Myanmar to serve as
the legitimate elected government.

2022
July 17NUG submits a declaration to the International Criminal
Court (ICC) delegating jurisdiction to the Court to address
mass-atrocity crimes committed in Myanmar.

March 22

The U.S. government concludes that the
Myanmar military is responsible for committing
genocide against the Rohingya people, marking
the eighth time since the Holocaust that the U.S.
has recognized a genocide.

Map of Rakhine State

Cox’s Bazar
BANGLADESH
District

MYANMAR

Taungpyoletwea
Buthidaung

Kyauktaw

Maungdaw
Mrauk-U
Rathedaung
Mrauk-U

Maungdaw
District

DistrictPonnagyun

MinbyaSittwe Township
SittwePauktaw

MyebonKyaukpyu
District

Sittwe District

Ann
State Capital

Kyaukpyu

Main Town

Ma-Ei

Other Town

RamreeToungup

China

Munaung
Buthan
India

China

ThandweBANGLADESH

MYANMARThandweDistrict
Kyeintali

Lao PDR
Naypyidaw

ThailandGwa

Map of Europe in 1933
DanzigEast Prussia

BerlinNetherlands

Belgium

GERMANY

PolandLuxembourg

FranceSwitzerland

Czechoslovakia

AustriaMap of Rwanda
UgandaKigali

Democratic Republicof the CongoRWANDA

BurundiTanzania

Genocide by Attrition

Rohingya refugees from Myanmar walking throughpaddy fields and flooded land upon arriving in
Cox’s Bazar District in southern Bangladesh.
Patrick Brown ©Panos/UNICEF 2018

Summary

Summary
Genocide is an identity-based international crime. It is defined as an act or acts committedwith the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.
Perpetrators of genocide have long used identification documents to discriminate,
dehumanize, and then carry out mass violence against protected groups. In its Framework
for Analysis of Atrocity Crimes, the United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention foundthat “increased politicization of identity” and discriminatory “measures or legislation”
targeting protected groups serve as indicators in creating “an environment conducive tothe commission of atrocity crimes.” Genocidal states often use legal and administrative
tools to facilitate the destruction of a targeted group. This was the case during the
Holocaust of the Jewish population and the Rwandan genocide of the Tutsi population,and it is the case of the ongoing genocide of the Rohingya population in Myanmar.
This report provides comparative case studies of these three genocides and the useof identification documents to carry out the international crime of genocide, and it
provides new information on the Myanmar military junta’s ongoing targeting of
Rohingya people in Rakhine State.
Chapter I examines the instrumental role that identification documentation played in the
Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, and the genocide of Rohingya in Myanmar. These casestudies demonstrate how identification documents make it bureaucratically easier to identify,
persecute, and kill targeted populations on a widespread, systematic, and massive scale.
Genocide by attrition—which is the gradual destruction of a protected group by reducing
their strength through sustained, indirect methods of destruction—must consequently betaken seriously as part of the effort to understand past genocides and to prevent future ones.

20

The National
Verification
Card (NVC)—adocument that
confers no rights
and identifies
Rohingya as“foreigners” in
Myanmar. The
card is light bluein color andstates, in English
and Burmese
language, “Holding
this identity carddoes not testify
that ‘the card
holder is Myanmar
Citizen.’” ©Greg
Constantine, 2018

21

A Nazi-issued Kennkarte identity card stamped with the letter “J” to identify the card-holder as Jewish. The Nazi
regime used the Kennkarte as a tool for military, racial, and security controls that made the genocide bureaucraticallypossible. ©United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Ellen Zweig, January 24, 1939

A set of Rwandan identity papers outlines the individual’s ethnicity. ©Howard Davies CORBIS via Getty

Summary

For example, the Holocaust would not have been logistically feasible on such a rapid andmass scale without the initial definition and registration of Jews. The Nazis’ process ofusing official identification processes and documents made it possible to successively strip
Jews of their citizenship, expropriate their property, spatially restrict them to ghettos andcamps, and, then finally, commit mass murders. By the end of World War II, Hitler’s Nazi
regime had succeeded in killing an estimated six million Jews—two-thirds of all Jews in
the European territories controlled by the Nazis and their allies. These killings took placethrough privation—the systematic denial of adequate food, water, shelter, and medical
care—open-air mass shootings, and in extermination camps with gassing facilities,
including at Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmo, Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Identity documentation similarly contributed to the facilitation of the Rwandan genocide,which started shortly after the airplane carrying Rwanda President Juvénal Habyarimana
and Burundi President Cyprien Ntaryamira was shot down, killing both Hutu leaders. Initialreports accused a Tutsi-led rebel group of being responsible for the killings and, within
hours of the plane crash, state-sponsored radio announcers called on Hutu “patriots”
to kill members of the minority Tutsi population, who constituted approximately 14
percent of the country’s then 7.9 million people. Hutu perpetrators, in some cases, reliedon the Rwandan national identification card that included the holder’s ethnic profile
to carry out these killings. For example, Hutu militias constructed barricades in urban
areas and demanded travelers show their national identification card, massacring Tutsiidentified card-holders and those without documents. During the course of 100 days, Hutu
perpetrators killed an estimated 75 percent of the Tutsi population, or roughly 800,000
women, men, and children. Most killings were carried out by hand, with machetes orclubs, and included other acts of violence, such as rape.

22

An American
soldier watching
German civilians
remove deadbodies piled
behind thecrematoriumof the Dachau
concentration
camp in Germany.
©United States
Holocaust
Memorial
Museum, 1945

Summary

A yellow Star of David with “Jude,” which means“Jew” in the German-language, written on it.
During the Holocaust, Jews were ordered towear these badges as visible symbols of their
Jewish identity. ©United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum, circa 1941-1945

23

Summary

Like Jews in Germany and elsewhere in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s and the Tutsi in
Rwanda in the 1990s, the Myanmar military and past government authorities continue torely on identification documentation to commit international crimes against Rohingya,
an ethnic minority indigenous to western Myanmar. These crimes particularly took shapein 2016 and 2017 when the Myanmar military led widespread attacks on the Rohingya
civilian population. Soldiers massacred and killed women, men, and children, committed
mass rape, razed hundreds of villages, and forced more than 700,000 Rohingya to flee to
Bangladesh, where they joined more than 250,000 other Rohingya refugees and remain
in squalid conditions. The Myanmar junta continues to confine another 125,000 Rohingya
to more than 20 internment camps—modern concentration camps in Rakhine Stateestablished by Myanmar authorities in 2012.
For the past half-century, union-and state-level discriminatory laws, policies, andpractices in Myanmar marginalized and dehumanized Rohingya people. For example, in
1982, Myanmar passed a citizenship law that effectively denied Rohingya equal access tocitizenship rights, progressively creating the world’s largest stateless population within
a single country’s border. A litany of pre-genocidal human rights violations followed,
including strict denials of freedom of movement, education, access to health care, andlivelihoods. Such discriminatory laws, policies, and practices have rendered the vast
majority of Rohingya at high risk of abuse and large-scale mass atrocities.
Following the 2016 and 2017 Myanmar military-led attacks on Rohingya civilians,
Fortify Rights, a U.N. Fact-Finding Mission, successive U.N. special rapporteurs,
and governments—including most recently the U.S. government—as well as others
determined that these attacks amount to the crime of genocide. And like past genocides,
the pernicious use of identity documentation played a role in the genocide and must be
addressed to prevent future crimes.
Chapter II of this report exposes how, since a deadly attempted military coup d’état in Myanmar
launched on February 1, 2021, the Myanmar junta continues to deny the existence of theRohingya and is forcing or coercing Rohingya to accept National Verification Cards (NVCs)—adocument that confers no rights and identifies Rohingya as “foreigners” in Myanmar.

24

Dead bodies ofTutsi massacre
victims inside
the vestibule of a
Catholic church in
Rukara in Rwanda
in 1994. ©Jack
Picone, 1994

Summary25
Since the coup, soldiers led by Senior General Min Aung Hlaing have murdered andimprisoned thousands of people throughout the country while intensifying attacks
on ethnic armed organizations and the People’s Defence Force (PDF)—civilian-led
militias formed in self-defense of the military’s attacks.
Amid these attacks, Rohingya in Myanmar’s Rakhine State, where the majority ofmore than 600,000 Rohingya remaining in the country reside, told Fortify Rights how
the junta is using NVCs to prevent them from identifying as “Rohingya.” Instead
the junta identify the Rohingya as “Bengali” or another foreign identity, fueling adangerous falsity that Rohingya are interlopers from Bangladesh.

Rohingya refugees
burying in Cox’s
Bazar District,
Bangladesh
Rohingya children
and adult victims
who died when
their boat sankin the Naf River
while they wereattempting to flee
Myanmar. Patrick
Brown ©Panos/
UNICEF 2018

The junta has continued the campaign to erase and destroy Rohingya people byimposing increasingly oppressive restrictions on the population to prevent Rohingya
from exercising basic rights. For example, a leaked administrative order obtained by
Fortify Rights and issued by the junta-run General Administration Department of
Buthidaung Township in Rakhine State on November 25, 2021 reiterates longstanding
restrictions that deny Rohingya residents freedom of movement, stating that “Bengali[Rohingya] people can only travel after obtaining legal permission” and that breaching
the order will result in “strong action being taken as per the existing law.”
Like other genocides, the Myanmar military has attempted to justify these restrictionsin the name of national security. For instance, the above-mentioned order statesthat the restrictions against “Bengali” are necessary to protect “township security
and the rule of law.”Rohingya refugees line up at a aid distribution center in Balukhali camp in Cox’s Bazar District, Bangladesh. ©Panos/UNICEF 2018

Decomposed bodies of Tutsi massacre victims left outside a Catholic church in Rukara, Rwanda in 1994. ©Jack Picone, 1994

Summary

27
Over several years, the connection between identification documents and international
crimes has been well-recognized. Yet, even amid genocidal attacks against the
Rohingya, certain U.N. officials, embassies, and others in Myanmar not only failed tocondemn the use of NVCs in targeting Rohingya but, in some cases, explicitly endorsed
NVCs as a pragmatic solution to Rohingya “statelessness.”
However, after experiencing the brutality of the military firsthand following the
February 1, 2021 coup, the general public in Myanmar showed signs of becoming more
open and accepting of the Rohingya people and more informed about the atrocities
they faced in Rakhine State. Tolerance for discriminatory laws, policies, and practices
affecting the Rohingya, including the NVC process, is waning. Notably, on June 3, 2021,
the National Unity Government (NUG) of Myanmar—the government established in April
2021 by elected parliamentarians who evaded arrest following the coup—announced its
commitment to “abolishing” the NVC process, describing the NVC as “a process thatthe military has used against the Rohingya and other ethnic groups coercively and withhuman rights violations.” The NUG further committed to ensuring citizenship based“on birth in Myanmar or birth anywhere as a child of Myanmar citizens,” which would
effectively restore or grant full citizenship rights to all Rohingya people.
In September 2021, Rohingya human rights defender and refugee leader Mohib Ullah
was assassinated in Bangladesh in September 2021 for his work defending the rights of
Rohingya. In March 2019, Mohib Ullah had the opportunity to address the U.N. Human
Rights Council in Geneva. He told U.N. member states:
For decades, we faced systemic genocide in Myanmar . . . They burned our houses,
took our land, they gang-raped women and girls, and they killed thousands of us.
Today, we are branded as “kalar” [a pejorative term in the Burmese language].
They call us “illegal immigrants,” “Bengali,” [and] “Muslim terrorist.” We are not
any of this. We are citizens of Myanmar. We are Rohingya.

Key Recommendations
The Myanmar military junta is committing international crimes including ongoing
genocide in Myanmar. This report makes 19 recommendations including:• U.N. member states should take action to deny the Myanmar military accessto weapons, financing and revenues, and political legitimacy. International
businesses should avoid engaging the Myanmar military and its associates at all
costs, and any businesses believed to be complicit in the junta’s crimes should beheld accountable in relevant jurisdictions.
• U.N. member states, particularly members of the Association of Southeast Asian
Nations (ASEAN), should engage the civilian-led NUG on solutions, provide it withmaterial support, and support existing international accountability mechanisms
to end and remedy ongoing atrocity crimes in Myanmar.
• More broadly, U.N. member states should publicly acknowledge, through formal
determinations, the Rohingya genocide and other atrocity crimes perpetrated in
Myanmar, including war crimes and crimes against humanity.
• U.N. member states should each establish dedicated departments focused on preventing
and ending mass atrocity crimes through domestic mechanisms and multilateralcoordination. Similarly, U.N. and international humanitarian organizations should
employ legal specialists to identify mass atrocity crimes, recommend emergency
responses, and educate the humanitarian community about prevention.

Two men with the Star of David sewn on their jackets inthe Łódź ghetto in Poland. During the Holocaust, Jews
were ordered to wear these badges as visible symbolsof their Jewish identity. ©United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum, courtesy of Dan Lenchner, 1942

Genocide by Attrition

Methodology

This report draws on historical research from past genocides, testimony from
Rohingya genocide survivors, Myanmar junta documents, and media analysis
of junta-backed news outlets.
The historical research conducted for this report informs the case study
analysis of the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, and the ongoing atrocities
affecting the Rohingya in Myanmar.
Fortify Rights also interviewed 23 Rohingya in Myanmar, Bangladesh, and among
the diaspora between February 2021 and April 2022 as well as five international
aid workers and researchers. Fortify Rights conducted most interviews in the
Rohingya language and, in some cases, with English interpretation. No one
interviewed for this report received compensation and all were informed of the
purpose of the interview, its voluntary nature, and how the information might
be used. All those interviewed provided informed consent prior to the interview.
The name, location, and other identifying details of those interviewed arewithheld or changed in this report for security reasons.
Fortify Rights obtained and analyzed five internal documents from the juntabacked Ministry of Social Welfare Relief and Resettlement, the Ministry of
Immigration and Population in Ponnagyun Township in Rakhine State, theMaungdaw Township Planning Administration Office in Rakhine State, and
the General Administration Department in Sittwe and Buthidaung townships,
Rakhine State. These documents relate to the citizenship-verification process
and are dated after the attempted military coup d’état on February 1, 2021.
Fortify Rights also reviewed and analyzed English-and Myanmar-language
junta-backed news media reports between February 2021 to March 2022.

Genocide by Attrition

Background

On February 1, 2021, the Myanmar military headed by Senior General Min
Aung Hlaing attempted to overthrow Myanmar’s new democratically elected
government on the opening day of parliament, arresting State Counsellor
Aung San Suu Kyi, President Win Myint, and others.1 The following day, Senior
General Min Aung Hlaing declared himself the head of the new junta’s State
Administration Council (SAC).2 While at the time of writing the Myanmar
military does not have effective control of Myanmar territory, the February
2021 coup d’état radically changed the political landscape in the country.
The coup prompted widespread peaceful protests and the launch of a nationwide
Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) involving government employees
nationwide refusing to report to work in order to demonstrate their opposition
to the junta.3 Since February 2021, tens of millions of people in Myanmar haveparticipated in demonstrations, strikes, and boycotts that have challenged andobstructed junta rule; the country is now on the brink of economic collapse.4
In its effort to crush the CDM and any popular resistance to military rule,
the junta killed more than 1,500 civilians, arbitrarily detained at least 12,000,
disappeared untold numbers of people, and forcibly displaced more than
440,000 during the first year alone following the coup.51Fortify Rights, “Myanmar: Release Government Officials and Human Rights Defenders
Detained in Military Coup,” February 1, 2021, https://www.fortifyrights.org/myainv-2021-02-01/. “Myanmar Coup: Aung San Suu Kyi Detained as Military Seizes Control,”BBC, February 1, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-55882489.

2“Republic of the Union of Myanmar Office of the Commander-in-Chief of Defence Services,”
The Global New Light of Myanmar, February 2, 2021, https://cdn.myanmarseo.com/file/clientcdn/gnlm/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/2_Feb_21_gnlm.pdf. Fortify Rights, “Myanmar:
Release Government Officials and Human Rights Defenders Detained in Military Coup.”
See also, “Myanmar Military Announces New State Administrative Council, Myanmar Times,
February 2, 2021, https://www.mmtimes.com/news/myanmar-military-announces-newstate-administrative-council.html.

3

Fortify Rights, “Countrywide Protests Against the Myanmar Military Junta,” February 8,
2020, https://www.fortifyrights.org/our_films/mya-inv-vdo-2021-02-08/. Fortify Rights,“Myanmar Junta Arbitrarily Arrests Civilians,” February 12, 2020, https://www.fortifyrights.
org/our_films/mya-inv-vdo-2021-02-12/. Fortify Rights, “Myanmar Police’s Use of
Excessive Forces against Peaceful Protestors,” February 12, 2020, https://www.fortifyrights.
org/our_films/mya-inv-vdo-2021-02-12-2/. Fortify Rights, “Myanmar Nationwide Protest,
Fortify Rights,” February 12, 2021, https://www.fortifyrights.org/our_films/mya-invvdo-2021-02-12/. Fortify Rights, “Protests Continue in Myanmar Despite Junta Violence,”
March 8, 2021, https://www.fortifyrights.org/our_films/mya-inv-vdo-2021-03-08/;
Fortify Rights, “50th Day of Myanmar Protest,” March 23, 2021, https://www.fortifyrights.
org/our_films/mya-inv-vdo-2021-03-23/.

4

U.N. Human Rights Council, Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights:
Situation of Human Rights in Myanmar Since 1 February 2021, U.N. Doc. A/HRC/49/72, March
15, 2022, para. 5.

5

U.N. Human Rights Council, Enabling Atrocities: UN Member States’ Arms Transfers to the
Myanmar Military, U.N. Doc. A/HRC/49/CRP.1, February 22, 2022, https://www.ohchr.
org/Documents/Countries/MM/CRP-31012022.docx, para. 1. See also, U.N. Office for theBackground32

On April 16, 2021, the Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw (CRPH)—a group of elected
Myanmar parliamentarians who evaded arrest during the coup—established the NUG as the legitimate
elected government to represent and act on behalf of the Myanmar people.6 Responding to the junta’s
lethal crackdown and refusal to reverse the coup, on May 5, 2021, the NUG announced the formation of
PDFs mandated to defend and protect the people of Myanmar.7
A 193-page report published on March 24, 2022 by Fortify Rights and the Schell Center forInternational Human Rights at Yale Law School documents how the Myanmar junta murdered,tortured, imprisoned, forcibly displaced, and persecuted civilians in acts that amount to crimes
against humanity.8 The junta has also reportedly issued a number of notices revoking the citizenshipof NUG leaders who oppose the coup.9
While these events have grabbed international attention, other forms of structural violence in
Myanmar continue to occur largely under the radar. This includes the Myanmar military’s continued
efforts to erase the identity of Rohingya—a predominantly Muslim ethnic minority populationindigenous to western Myanmar and largely living in Rakhine State. In addition to physical attacks
on the Rohingya community, this campaign is also being perpetrated through discriminatory laws,
policies, and practices, including, most notably, through the NVC process.

Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Myanmar: Humanitarian Update No. 15, February 15, 2022, https://themimu.
info/sites/themimu.info/files/documents/Sitrep_Humanitarian_Update_No.15_OCHA_15Feb2022.pdf. Assistance
Association for Political Prisoners, “AAPP 2021 Coup Daily Briefings,” 2021-2022, https://aappb.org/?cat=109.
Fortify Rights, “365 Days Under the #Myanmar Coup,” February 1, 2022, https://www.fortifyrights.org/our_films/
mya-inv-vdo-2022-02-01/.
6

Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw, “Formation of the National Unity Government,” Announcement No.
23/2021, April 16, 2021, https://crphmyanmar.org/ formation-of-the-national-unity-government/.

7

National Unity Government, “People’s Defence Force,” website, https://mod.nugmyanmar.org/en/peoples-defenceforce/. “Myanmar’s Anti-Coup Block to Form a ‘Defence Force,’” Al Jazeera, May 6, 2021, https://www.aljazeera.com/
news/2021/5/6/myanmars-anti-coup-bloc-to-form-a-defence-force.

8

Fortify Rights and Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School, Myanmar Human
Rights Project, ‘Nowhere is Safe:’ The Myanmar Junta’s Crimes Against Humanity Following the Coup d’État, March 24,
2022, https://www.fortifyrights.org/mya-inv-rep-2022-03-24/.

9“‘Using Citizenship as a Weapon’ Myanmar Military Targets Critics,” Al Jazeera, April 20, 2022, https://www.
aljazeera.com/news/2022/4/20/citizenship-as-a-weapon-myanmar-military-targets-critics.

Genocide by Attrition

I.	 Identity Documents and
Genocide: Case Studies

This chapter highlights three case studies on the use of identity documentsin three separate genocides: the Holocaust of the Jewish people in the 1930s
and 1940s, the Rwandan genocide of the Tutsi people in 1994, and the ongoing
genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar.10 Disturbing similarities exist
across these three cases regarding the role official identity documents play inthe efficient and effective marginalization, dehumanization, and, ultimately,
the rapid extermination of populations targeted for genocide.
While history indicates that genocidal policies are not necessarily predicatedon problematic official identification documentation, such documentation
can contribute to the creation of monolithic, essentialized identity categories
for the facilitation of atrocity crimes when exploited by governments or
regimes in highly polarized societies to subdivide a country’s population.
Identification documents can symbolically and bureaucratically reinforce an“us” versus “them” ideological framing of real and imagined group differences
in intentionally divisive terms. Such binary framing combined with discoursethat relies on fear and hate to portray the targeted group as sub-human or nonhuman may be used to justify official and unofficial forms of discrimination,persecution, and/or violence. Government solutions to the perceived threatsthat the “other” allegedly poses often take the form of apartheid-like
conditions, wholesale domination, and/or physical extermination.
Identification documentation can also contribute to “genocide by attrition”—
the gradual destruction of a protected group by reducing their strength
through sustained, indirect methods of destruction.11 In such contexts, thelong-term systematic denial of human rights results in “a slow process ofannihilation rather than the immediate unleashing of violent death.”12 For
example, identification documentation helps facilitate restrictions on basic
rights, such as the right to freedom of movement, which, in turn, can limit
access to livelihoods, education, health services, and so on. Such tactics may
contribute or amount to the genocidal act of “deliberately inflicting on thegroup conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction inwhole or in part.”1310The discussion of each case is strategic and, thus, highly limited in scope.

11

Sheri Rosenberg, “Genocide is a Process, Not an Event,” Genocide Studies and Prevention,
Vol. 7, No. 1, 2021, p. 19.

12

Ibid.

13

Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Genocide
Convention), adopted December 9, 1948, G.A. Res. 260 A (III), U.N. Doc. E/447, 1951, Art. II(c).
Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (Rome Statute), adopted July 17, 1998, U.N.
Doc. A/CONF.183/9, 2002, Art. 6(c).

I. Identity Documents and Genocide: Case Studies

34

These patterns, where they occur in combination with several of the common risk factors identified
in the U.N. Office of Genocide Prevention’s Framework of Analysis for Atrocity Crimes, signal a muchhigher likelihood of mass atrocity crimes, ranging from ethnic cleansing to genocide. In the case of
Myanmar, when the military junta’s attempted coup ends and civilian leadership returns to a new,federal democracy, domestic reforms will be urgently needed. Renewed international pressure isalso urgently needed to prevent the junta from committing further genocidal acts against Rohingya.

Holocaust of the Jewish People“The Nazis examined him and when they found that he had been circumcised they branded a Jewish
star on his left hand so that everyone would know that he was Jewish.”- From the book, Wartime Rescue of Jews by the Catholic Clergy: The Testimony of Survivors
and Rescuers14

The development of methods for recording and classifying people according to different categories
within Germany predates the rise of the Nazi regime in 1933.15 But by the mid-1930s, the Nazi regime
had fixed a person’s official identity in “racial” terms, which made one’s categorization a matter oflife and death, especially for Jews.16 This process of dehumanization rapidly accelerated after 1939.
It reached its apotheosis in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland, where Jews andother social “undesirables,” including political prisoners and homosexuals among others, received
black numerical tattoos. The tattoos represented the ultimate shift from “people-with-names” to“units-with-numbers” that could be worked to death or simply killed outright.17 But out of all the
populations targeted, it was “the Jew” that remained the most reviled and feared by those whoshared the Nazi’s racist ideology that Jews were “a lethal and active threat to all nations, to the
Aryan race, and the German Volk [people].”18
Again, the Nazis were not the first group to regard Jews in this manner, but they took it to the logicalextreme as part of what its leaders called the “Final Solution”—the genocidal plan to exterminate
all Jews throughout Europe.19 To do so, the Nazi regime created a vast bureaucracy, including Naziissued identity cards (Kennkarte), as a tool for “military, racial, and security controls” that made thegenocide bureaucratically possible.20

14

Mark Paul (ed.), Wartime Rescue of Jews by the Catholic Clergy: The Testimony of Survivors and Rescuers, (Toronto: Polish
Education Foundation in North America, 2020), p. 36.

15

All modern states, not just Germany, used similar practices to govern their populations. See, for example, James Scott,Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University, 1998).

16

Jane Caplan, “‘Ausweis Bitte!’ Identity and Identification in Nazi Germany,” Identification and Registration Practices inTransnational Perspective: People, Papers, and Practices, eds. Ilsen About, James Brown, and Gayle Longergan, (London: Palgrave
MacMillan, 2013), p. 224. The terms “race” and “ethnicity” are often used interchangeably. However, race is commonly
regarded as reflecting objective biological or genetic traits, whereas ethnicity is regarded as reflecting subjective culturalor religious traits. The Jewish people are commonly regarded as both a racial group as well as an ethnic group. Regardless,international jurisprudence increasingly looks to subjective understandings of groups in conjunction with an analysis ofobjective elements. The Genocide Convention lists four types of protected groups: national, ethnic, racial, and religious. As
expressed by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the case of Jelisić, there is increasing
skepticism of the accuracy of objective definitions of the four protected groups under the Genocide Convention, particularly
the ethnic, racial, and national categories. Prosecutor v. Goran Jelisić, ICTY, Case No. ICTY-95-10-T, Judgment (Trial), December
14, 1999, para. 70. See also, Prosecutor v. Rutaganda, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), Case No. ICTR-963-T, Judgment (Trial), December 6, 1999, para. 56.

17

Ibid.

18

Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945, (New York: Harper Collins
Publishers, 2007), p. xix.

19

See, George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978).

20

Caplan, “‘Ausweis Bitte!’ Identity and Identification in Nazi Germany,” In Identification and Registration Practices inTransnational Perspective: People, Papers, and Practices, p. 225.

Genocide by Attrition

35

However, the Nazi government did not initially have a singular approach for the first several years of its
rule. By one count, state, regional, and municipal officials issued more than 400 different decrees andregulations between 1933 and 1939 restricting nearly all aspects of the public and private lives of Jews.21
Some of the decrees and regulations were centralized, but many were not.22 The diversity reflected
the infighting and competition among factions within the Nazi party, the military, and different
government institutions at the time.23 One German lawyer, who conducted his research within Nazi
Germany during this period, attributed these dynamics to what he termed the “Dual State.”24
The Dual State consisted of a “normative state” (Normenstaat) and a “prerogative state”(Maßnahmenstaat).25 The normative state was based on the legislative, judicial, and law-enforcing
bodies that the Nazi regime had inherited from its predecessor government, the Weimar Republicthat governed Germany between 1919 and 1933.26 By contrast, the prerogative state, established by the
Nazis in 1933, exercised “unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees”
against people considered to be enemies of Nazism.27 Due to the initial infighting and competition,
the Dual State often functioned at cross-purposes, as the “prerogative state ignored or annulled
implicitly exactly those laws and law-enforcing bodies that the normative state sustained.”28 The
situation changed significantly by the late 1930s as the Nazi regime increased its ability to centralize
its power, both by garnering more widespread support for its racist ideology and by expanding useof “terror through uncertainty.”29
The Nazi regime’s first effort to document the entire country’s population began with a national
census in 1933.30 Interestingly, the census did not classify people by race at this time but rather
by religion in conjunction with other biographical data. The census revealed that approximately
525,000 Jews lived in Germany, 80 percent of whom enjoyed full citizenship, while the remainder,
primarily German-born Polish Jews, held permanent resident status.31 The figure, when comparedagainst the country’s population of 67 million people at the time, meant that Jews then constituted
a little less than 0.75 percent of Germany’s total population.32
The 1933 census was later linked with a “marriage and family book,” which included genealogical
data for both the paternal and maternal lines, a new system of residential registration for tracking
movement, and the subsequent development of special racial databases.33 Together, theseidentification systems made it progressively easier for the regime to “locate” its future Jewish
victims for the purposes of persecution, resettlement, and mass murder.34

21

U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Antisemitic Legislation 1933-1939,” website, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/
content/en/article/antisemitic-legislation-1933-1939.

22

David Martin Luebke and Sybil Milton, “Locating the Victim: An Overview of Census-Taking, Tabulation Technology,
and Persecution in Nazi Germany,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Vol. 16, No. 3, 1994, p. 30.

23

Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship, trans. E.A. Shils, (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2017).

24

Fraenkel, The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship.

25

Ibid.

26

Ibid.

27

Id. at p. xxiii.

28

Fortify Rights email communication with Thomas Kühne, September 27, 2020.

29

Ibid.

30

Luebke and Milton, “Locating the Victim: An Overview of Census-Taking, Tabulation Technology, and Persecution
in Nazi Germany,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing.

31

U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Germany: Jewish Population in 1933,” website, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/
content/en/article/germany-jewish-population-in-1933.

32

Ibid.

33

Ibid.

34

Luebke and Milton, “Locating the Victim: An Overview of Census-Taking, Tabulation Technology, and Persecution
in Nazi Germany,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, p. 25.

I. Identity Documents and Genocide: Case Studies

36

Due to the dynamics of the Dual State during the early period of Nazi rule, the bureaucraticeffort was initially “beset by clashes of interests and problems of coordination and labor power,”compounded by insufficient staff to use the collected data.35 The clashes additionally reflected
the conflicting priorities of the military, which wanted to be able to quickly mobilize men for its
purposes, and those groups pushing a eugenics agenda, which sought to purify the “race” througha combination of positive and negative measures (e.g. pro-natalist policies in the case of pure“Aryans” and marriage prohibitions and forced sterilizations for all others).36
The next major development towards the racialization of identity in Nazi Germany occurred in
September of 1935 with the unanimous passage of two pieces of legislation commonly known as
the Nuremberg Race Laws.37 The laws officially defined “Jewishness” for the first time and didso solely in terms of ancestry, meaning that religiosity, cultural practices, and self-identification
were rendered irrelevant.
The first, the “Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor,” forbade marriage
and sexual intercourse outside of marriage between Jews and Germans.38 Security forces relied on
ordinary people serving as informants to identify cross-racial relationships and then punishedthose who violated the law.39 Interestingly, the Nazi regime did not dissolve already existing interracial marriages. However, it did discriminate against them and apply pressure on the non-Jewish
spouse to divorce the Jewish spouse.40
The second, the “Reich Citizenship Law,” restricted citizenship to “only one who is of German
or kindred blood, and who, through his behavior, shows that he is both desirous and personally
fit to serve loyally the German people and the Reich.”41 As part of this effort, the Nazis partiallydenaturalized everyone already categorized as Jewish. However, these individuals were not renderedstateless. They were stripped of their citizenship rights, but able to retain their passports.42
These two laws, in combination with those already in place as well as those that soon followed,
had devastating socio-economic impacts on the Jewish community. Non-Jews stopped purchasing
goods at Jewish-owned businesses, and Jews working for the civil service or regulated professions(e.g., law, education, and medicine) were fired.43
The Nazi regime compounded these financial pressures with several further orders. In August 1938,
for instance, an order required all Jews in Germany to change their names to include either Israel, if
a man, or Sarah, if a woman, on all of their identity documents. The regime also published a list of“Jewish” names that parents had to henceforth choose from when naming their newborns.44
A later order, issued in September 1941, required all Jews in Germany, six years old and older, towear clearly visible symbols of their identity. Yellow badges in the shape of the Star of David sewn
35

Caplan, “‘Ausweis Bitte!’ Identity and Identification in Nazi Germany,” Identification and Registration Practices inTransnational Perspective: People, Papers, and Practices, p. 227.

36

Gotz Aly, The Nazi Census: Identification and Control in the Third Reich, trans. Edwin Black, (Philadelphia: Temple
University, 2017).

37

On September 15, 1935, the Nazi regime announced two laws: The Reich Citizenship Law, 1935; and the Law for theProtection of German Blood and Honor, 1935.

38

Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, 1935, secs. 1 and 2.

39

Id. at Sec. 5.

40Many inter-racial married couples refused to divorce, and the continued union provided protection to and enabled
the survival of the Jewish partner. Fortify Rights communication with Lindsay MacNeill, U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum, May 13, 2022.

41

The Reich Citizenship Law, 1935, Art. II, no. 1.

42See, Ibid.

43

The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, passed earlier, provided the basis for these dismissals
which occurred over time. Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, 1933. See also, U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum, “Timeline of Events,” website, https://www.ushmm.org/learn/timeline-of-events/1933-1938/
law-for-the-restoration-of-the-professional-civil-service.

44

Robert Rennick, The Nazi Name Decrees of the Nineteen Thirties (New York: Taylor and Francis, 1970), p. 76.

Genocide by Attrition

37

onto their clothing and white armbands on the sleeve became the two most widely used symbols.45
Failure to comply with this order resulted in severe penalties, including fines, imprisonment, or
summary execution.46 The requirement augmented an already existing one that all paperwork had
to identify the holder’s religion, the purpose of which was to prevent people who did not lookstereotypically “Jewish” from removing their badges or armbands in an effort to pass as “Aryans.”47
The Nazis did not invent the practice of requiring Jews to wear badges. The use of badges dates to theMiddle Ages when some Christian and Muslim communities forced Jews to wear them to instantly
identify Jews from others, making them more open to scrutiny and/or abuse.48 But the Nazis not
only revived the practice; they expanded its symbolic use beyond the everyday stigmatization andhumiliation—a strategy that official propaganda continually reinforced. Adolf Hitler’s own writing
exemplified this. He wrote:[The Jew] is and remains the eternal parasite, a parasite that spreads more and more likea harmful bacillus, as well as inviting only a favorable culture medium. The effect of its
existence, however, is similar to that of parasites: where it occurs, the host people die after ashorter or longer time.49
The badges, in combination with the racialized identity documents, made it easier for perpetrators to
directly control the physical movements of Jews in and out of the ghettos and to coordinate their forced
deportations on a massive scale.50 As part of this process, the regime issued the Eleventh Decree in
November of 1941, which was specific to German Jews.51 The decree officially ended the possibility ofemigration, and it legalized the confiscation of Jewish property, including bank accounts, homes andapartments, and other personal belongings, as the Nazis began to send Jews east to German-occupied
Poland and parts of German-occupied Soviet territory for extermination.52
Historians widely agree that the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” was not the result of any one
single decision.53 By 1942, the war, then being fought on multiple fronts, posed both opportunities andobstacles to the “Final Solution.” However, the infamous Wannsee Conference in 1942, held outside ofBerlin, marked the public unveiling of the “Final Solution.”54 By the conference’s end, the Schutzstaffelor SS, Hitler’s elite paramilitary “political soldiers,” assumed centralized control over all aspects of
the Final Solution with the stated goal of killing approximately 11 million Jews.55 This figure included
not only Jews residing in German-occupied Europe, but also those living in Great Britain as well as
Europe’s six neutral countries.56 By the end of the war, the Nazi regime had succeeded in killing an
estimated six million Jews through privation (i.e., the systematic denial of adequate food, water,
shelter, and medical care), open-air mass shootings, and in extermination camps with gassing
facilities, including at Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmo, Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau.57
45

Yad Vashem, “Badge, Jewish,” website, https://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%205953.pdf, p. 1.

46

Ibid.

47

U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Jewish Badge: During the Nazi Era,” website, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/
content/en/article/jewish-badge-during-the-nazi-era.

48

Ibid.

49

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Munich: Eher Verlage, 1942), p. 334.

50

Ibid.

51

Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 66;
Martin Dean, “The Development and Implementation of Nazi Denaturalization and Confiscation Policy Up to the
Eleventh Decree to the Reich Citizenship Law,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 16, No. 2, 2002, p. 225.

52

Ibid.

53

Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 – March 1942
(New York: Bison Books, 2007).

54

Ibid.

55

Ibid.

56

Ibid. U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Wannsee Conference and the “Final Solution,’” website, https://encyclopedia.
ushmm.org/content/en/article/wannsee-conference-and-the-final-solution.

57

British Library, “Anti-Jewish Decrees,” website, https://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/voices/info/decrees/decrees.html.

I. Identity Documents and Genocide: Case Studies

38

However, none of the atrocities committed against the Jewish people by the Nazis would have been
logistically feasible on a rapid and mass scale without the initial definition and registration of theJews. Horrifically, it was Jewish communities, under threat of violence by the Nazi regime, whocompiled these very lists. The data collection process, in turn, made it possible to successively strip
the Jewish people of their citizenship rights, expropriate their property, spatially restrict them toghettos and camps, and, then finally, murder two-thirds of all Jews in the European territories
controlled by the Nazis and their allies.58

Rwandan Genocide of the Tutsi People“Witness AEU, a Tutsi woman, who went to great lengths to secure a Hutu identity card in 1979, foundthat in 1994 this Hutu identity card saved her life. Four times she was taken to the edge of a hole that
had been dug for bodies, some killed while others were buried alive. When she was about to be killed
and thrown in this hole herself, her would-be killers looked at her identity card, which stated she wasa Hutu, and let her live.”- International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Prosecutor v. Ferdinand Nahimana, JeanBosco Barayagwiza, Hassan Ngeze59“Witness AWX statement to the Tribunal [describes] him telling Interhamwe [a Hutu paramilitaryorganization] to flush out the Inyenzi [‘cockroaches,’ a derogatory term for Tutsis] . . . ‘To get out of thevehicle’ and ‘get to work’ meaning to kill the Tutsis, whereupon the Interhamwe ‘would start checking
identity cards and the killings would start.’”- International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Prosecutor v. Tharcisse Renzaho60“Witness KBZ, a Tutsi, [was] stopped at a roadblock. She and about four other Tutsi women who did
not have identity cards were separated and taken to outside the home of the Kimihuruna conseiller[an official of a neighborhood in the Rwandan capital of Kigali] . . . Two Interhamwe raped her behindthe church after she was unable to produce an identification card upon her arrival. No one intervened.”- International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Prosecutor v. Tharcisse Renzaho61

The assassination of President Juvénal Habyarimana of Rwanda on April 6, 1994 triggered the
genocide that immediately followed. The country’s state-sponsored radio station, Radio Télévision
Libre Mille Collines, immediately accused the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a Tutsi-led rebel group,of shooting down President Habyarimana’s plane as it approached Kigali International Airport forlanding.62 The station’s announcers then called on all Hutu “patriots” to kill Tutsi, the minority
group that constituted approximately 14 percent of the country’s 7.9 million people.63“You have missed some enemies [Tutsi],” an announcer demanded in one infamous radio
broadcast at the start of the Rwandan genocide. “You must go back there and finish them off. The
graves are not yet full!”64
58

Raoul Hillberg, The Destruction of European Jews, (Teaneck: Holmes & Meie, 1985); U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum,“Remaining Jewish Population of Europe in 1945,” website, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/
remaining-jewish-population-of-europe-in-1945.

59

Prosecutor v. Ferdinand Nahimana, Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza, Hassan Ngeze, ICTR, Case No. ICTR-99-52-T, Judgment and
Sentence (Trial), December 3, 2003, para. 119.

60

Prosecutor v. Tharcisse Renzaho, ICTR, Case No. ICTR-97-31-T, Judgment (Trial), July 14, 2009, p. 189, fn. 802.

61

Id. at p. 179, para. 690 and 691.

62

The Prosecutor vs. Jean-Paul Akayesu, ICTR, Case No. ICTR-96-4-T, Judgement (Trial), September 2, 1998, para. 123.
U.N., “Outreach Programme on the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda and the United Nations,” website,
https://www.un.org/en/preventgenocide/rwanda/historical-background.shtml#:~:text=By%201994%2C%20
Rwanda%27s%20population%20stood,and%20the%20Twa%20(1%25).

63

Ibid. Details regarding the very small third ethnic group, Twa, are not included in the discussion.

64

Bill Berkeley, The Graves Are Not Yet Full: Race, Tribe, and Power in the Heart of Africa (New York: New Republic Book, 2001).

Genocide by Attrition

39

Over the course of the next 100 days, perhaps as many as one-quarter of the Hutu majority
participated in the mass and often extremely brutal killing of Tutsi.65 Most killings were carriedout by hand with machetes or clubs.66 There were also staggeringly high incidents of rape of
women and girls.67 When the invading RPF ended the genocide in July, an estimated 72 percent,approximately 800,000 people, of Rwanda’s Tutsi population lay dead.68 Some 63,000 Tutsi fled the
genocide to neighboring Burundi, while another 500,000 crossed into Tanzania.69 Large numbers ofthese refugees began to return to the country after the RPF consolidated control in Rwanda, which
prompted more than one million Hutu, fearing retributive genocidal violence by Tutsi, to seek
safety either in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) or Burundi.70
The 1994 genocide in Rwanda was not an isolated event. Nor did the 1994 genocide preclude future
violence. Since independence, Tutsi have faced massacres resulting in mass refugee flows out of thecountry.71 Such violence continued through 2000, and the fighting played a major role in sustaining
multiple armed conflicts throughout Africa’s Great Lakes Region, most notably the Democratic Republicof Congo, where as many as 5.4 million conflict-related deaths occurred between 1998 and 2002.72
Explanations for the repeated outbreaks of mass violence, including the 1994 genocide, typically emphasize
the critical importance of ethnic difference, expressed in racialized terms, to the exclusion of othercontributing factors.73 National identification cards, a by-product of colonial rule, played an importantrole in the process of institutionalizing prejudice and creating and radicalizing hatred over time.
The origin of the “Hutu” and “Tutsi” distinction is still disputed. Some scholars argue that theethnonyms originally referred to occupational categories: Hutus as farmers and Tutsis as herders.74
Others assert that the terms reflected political divisions, as Tutsis controlled most of the positionsof power before and during the colonial period.75 However, there is widespread agreement that the65

One estimate puts the figure at between 25 to 30 percent. Allette Smeulers and Lotte Hoex, “Studying the Microdynamics of the Rwandan Genocide,” The British Journal of Criminology, Vol. 50, No. 3, 2010, p. 436.

66

Ibid.

67

U.N., “Outreach Programme on the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda and the United Nations, Supporting
Survivors,” website, https://www.un.org/en/preventgenocide/rwanda/supporting-survivors.shtml.

68

Smeulers and Hoex “Studying the Micro-dynamics of the Rwandan Genocide,” p. 436. The total number of Tutsi
killed remains in debate. However, according to some calculations, 333.3 killings took place per hour, or 5.5 per
minute, throughout the country for the duration of the genocide. Hollie Nyseth Brehem, “Subnational Determinantsof Killing in Rwanda, Criminology, Vol. 55, No. 1, 2017, p. 5.

69

Center for Disease Control, “Morbidity and Mortality Surveillance in Rwandan Refugees–Burundi and Zaire, 1994,”
Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, February 9, 1996, https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00040202.htm.

70

Ibid.

71

Deborah Mayersen, “‘Deep Cleavages that Divide’: The Origins and Development of Ethnic Violence in Rwanda,”
Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, Vol. 8, No. 2, 2012, pp. 10-11. Hutu-Tutsi violence in neighboring Burundi also
produced tens of thousands of Tutsi deaths and large out-flows of refugees in 1972, 1988, and between 1991 to 1992.
Peter Uvin, “Ethnicity and Power in Burundi and Rwanda: Different Paths to Mass Violence,” Comparative Politics, Vol.
31, No. 3, 1999, pp. 58-59.

72

International Rescue Committee, “Mortality in the Democratic Republic of Congo: An Ongoing Crisis,” May 1, 2007,https://www.rescue.org/report/mortality-democratic-republic-congo-ongoing-crisis, p. ii.

73

Overpopulation is also pointed to as another contributing factor to explain the repeated outbreaks of violence inRwanda. High rural population densities driving increasingly fierce socio-economic competition for limited
agricultural land in a mountainous country where hunger and malnutrition is commonplace and famines relatively
frequent can lead to heightened tensions. Paul Magnarella, “Explaining Rwanda’s 1994 Genocide,” Human Rights &Human Welfare, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2002, p. 34. North-South regional tensions among Hutu over political representation andeconomic affairs was a significant issue as well. André Guichaoua, From War to Genocide: Criminal Politics in Rwanda,
1990-1994, trans. Don Webster (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015), p. 4.

74

Timothy Longman, “Identity Cards, Ethnic Self-Perception, and Genocide in Rwanda,” Documenting Individual
Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World, eds., Jane Caplan and John Torpey, (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2001), p. 350.

75

Ibid.

I. Identity Documents and Genocide: Case Studies

40

two social identities were “relatively flexible” before the early 20th century.76 The Banyarwanda
people, as the two groups were collectively known, shared a same language, held similar religious
beliefs, maintained integrated political structures, engaged in widespread intermarriage, andmembership in one group could shift to the other over time.77
Nevertheless, substantial evidence indicates that the categories of “Hutu” and “Tutsi” became
increasingly fixed in “racial” terms following colonization, first by Germany between 1894 and 1918
but then especially by Belgium between 1924 and 1962.78 Both sets of colonial administrators ruledindirectly, relying upon Tutsi monarchs and the leaders of their respective clans, which included
both Hutu and Tutsi households, to implement policies.79 However, Belgian racial stereotypes—
identifying Tutsi as being taller, lighter-skinned, and thinner than Hutu and, therefore, superior—acquired a veneer of official legitimacy as its personnel “instituted a system of rigid classification,
involving such ‘modern science’ methods as the measurement of noses and skull size, and theattribution of obligatory papers stating one’s ethnicity.”80
The national identification card, first introduced in Rwanda by Belgian colonial administratorsin 1933 following a colony-wide census, institutionalized the now monolithic “Hutu” and “Tutsi”
distinction, laying the groundwork for more systematic forms of discrimination and, later, genocide.81
The document, compulsory for everyone over the age of ten, was known as the carte d’identité inFrench or Indanggamuntu in Kinyarwanda, the language spoken by both groups.82 The card included aline listing the person’s ethnicity, or ubwoko in Kinyarwanda, directly underneath the photo locatedon the top of page two.83 Identifying as “mixed,” the result of intermarriage, was not an option; theofficial designation was instead based on the ethnicity of the card holder’s father.84
The ethnic categorization also informed differential treatment. Under Belgian rule, for example,
Tutsi had access to education and administrative positions as civil servants, whereas Hutu generally
had neither.85 Over time, these practices produced a Tutsi-dominated elite that further polarized
Rwandan society during the years leading up to independence in 1961.86
In 1957, a group of Hutu intellectuals issued a manifesto calling for an end to both Tutsi exploitation
and Belgian rule.87 The subtitle of the document, “Note on the Social Aspect of the Native Racial
Problem in Rwanda,” set the tone for an increasingly ethno-nationalist movement decrying the76

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Historical Perspective: Some Explanatory Factors,
1996, https://www.oecd.org/countries/rwanda/50189653.pdf, p. 22. Human Rights Watch, “Leave None to Tell the
Story”: Genocide in Rwanda, March 1999, https://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/rwanda/Geno1-3-09.htm.

77Longman, “Identity Cards, Ethnic Self-Perception, and Genocide in Rwanda,” p. 351; J.J. Carney, “Beyond Tribalism:
The Hutu-Tutsi Question and Catholic Rhetoric in Colonial Rwanda,” Journal of Religion in Africa, Vol. 42, 2012, p. 174.

78

Tom Dannenbaum, “War and Peace in Rwanda,” Kristen Eichenseer and W. Michael Reisman (eds.), Wars and Making
Peace: Studies in International Intervention (Boston: Martinus Nijihoff Publishers, 2009), p. 79.

79

Magnarella, “Explaining Rwanda’s 1994 Genocide,” Human Rights & Human Welfare, p. 25; David Newbury, “The Clansof Rwanda: An Historical Hypothesis,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 50, No. 4, 1980, p. 389.

80

Peter Uvin, “Prejudice, Crisis, and Genocide in Rwanda,” African Politics Review, Vol. 31, No. 3, 1999, p. 95. In the eyesof the Belgian authorities, the “Hamitic hypothesis” explained this state of affairs and warranted its continuation
under its close supervision. The hypothesis, then popular across Europe, maintained that the ruling groups in
Africa, such as the Tutsi, were the migratory descendants of Noah’s son, Ham, and were thus racially superior to theindigenous “negro” populations, such as the Hutu. Nigel Eltringham, “‘Invaders Who Have Stolen the Country’: The
Hamitic Hypothesis, Race, and the Rwandan Genocide,” Social Identities, Vol. 12, No. 4, 2006, pp. 425-446.

81

Official Bulletin of the Congo-Belgium, “Décret sur les Circonscription Indgènes,” October 27, 1933.

82

Prosecutor v. Jean-Paul Akayesu, ICTR, Case No. ICTR-96-4-T, Judgement (Trial), September 2, 1998, para. 83, 702.

83

Prevent Genocide International, “Group Classification on National ID Cards as a Factor in Genocide and Ethnic
Cleansing,” November 15, 2001, http://www.preventgenocide.org/prevent/removing-facilitating-factors/IDcards/.

84

Magnarella, “Explaining Rwanda’s 1994 Genocide,” Human Rights & Human Welfare, p. 26.

85

OECD, “Historical Perspective: Some Explanatory Factors,” p. 27.

86

Id. at pp. 27-28.

87

Id. at 28. Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 43-44.

Genocide by Attrition41

social, political, and economic “monopoly, which is held by one race, the Tutsi.”88 Two years later,
the first major anti-Tutsi massacres occurred as part of the “Hutu Uprising.” Repeated outburstsof mass violence against Tutsi followed in 1963, 1973, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, and, of course, 1994.89
These outbreaks of violence served several purposes that reinforced one another over time. First,
Hutu elites, who had consolidated political power at nearly all levels of government following the1962 elections, directly benefited from the violence, providing an incentive to exploit anti-Tutsi
feelings again and again when it served their strategic interests.90 Second, popular perceptions that
Tutsi—increasingly and dehumanizingly labelled as inyenzi, or cockroaches, in official discourse—
represented an existential security threat to Hutu became widely entrenched.91 Third, the resulting
polarization framed the only solution to the “racial problem” in zero-sum terms, meaning “througha ‘victory’ of one group at the expense of the other.”92 These factors marginalized moderates onboth sides of the “racial” divide.93 Consequently, compromise and power-sharing came to be seen
as impossible—an ideological position that the Belgian colonial authorities and, later, the U.N.
failed to combat despite the warning signs.94
The problematic identification requirements, which identified all Banyarwanda as either “Hutu”
or “Tutsi,” remained in place for decades, even after the 1993 Arusha Accords included provisions toremove them as part of the agreement to end armed conflict in the Great Lakes Region.95
The ethnic-based identification documents also allowed Hutu perpetrators to carry out mass
targeted killings during the 1994 genocide. For example, Hutu militias constructed barricades
in urban areas and demanded travelers to show their national identification cards before letting
people pass.96 One survivor explained, “I was obliged to chew my identity card when I reached aroadblock so that killers do not identify my ethnic group and kill me.”97 Other eyewitness accounts
indicate that Tutsi were “generally killed on the spot.”98 Similarly, people traveling without theiridentification card were usually regarded as Tutsi by default and massacred as such.99
One eyewitness to the killings described how soldiers collected the identification cards from their
victims as a record of kills:
Soldiers had orders to take identity cards from those whom they killed. Captain IldéphonseNizeyimana regularly received these cards from his men as they reported on the progressof the killings. They often appeared at his house shortly after a volley of gunfire was heard
and handed the cards to the captain with the report, ‘Mission Accomplished.’ In the captain’s
absence, his wife received the cards.100
88

Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, pp. 43-44.

89

Deborah Mayersen, “‘Deep Cleavages that Divide’: The Origins and Development of Ethnic Violence in Rwanda,”
Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, Vol. 8, No. 2, 2012, pp. 8, 13.

90

Id. at pp. 7-13.

91

Ibid.

92

Ibid.

93

Ibid.

94

Id. at p. 5.

95

Prosecutor v. Jean-Paul Akayesu, ICTR, Case No. ICTR-96-4-T, Judgement (Trial), September 2, 1998, para. 83.

96

Jean de la Croix Tabaro, “The Passport to Death: Story of Rwanda’s Notorious ID,” KTPress, July 13, 2015, https://www.
ktpress.rw/2015/07/the-passport-to-death-story-of-rwandas-notorious-id/. The situation for people in Rwanda’s
rural areas was different since neighbors generally knew one another’s ethnic identity. Hollie Nyseth Brehem,“Subnational Determinants of Killing in Rwanda,” Criminology, Vol. 55, No. 1, 2017, pp. 5-31.

97

Tabaro, “The Passport to Death: Story of Rwanda’s Notorious ID,” KTPress.

98

Ibid.

99

Longman, “Identity Cards, Ethnic Self-Perception, and Genocide in Rwanda,” p. 351.

100 Human Rights Watch, Leave None to Tell the Story, p. 92, fn. 60. See also, Magnarella, “Explaining Rwanda’s 1994
Genocide,” Human Rights & Human Welfare, p. 27; Guichaoua, From War to Genocide, pp. 214-215.

I. Identity Documents and Genocide: Case Studies

42

The reason behind the brutal mass killings cannot be reduced to ethnicity alone. Research conductedwith ordinary Hutu perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide, as opposed to the genocide’s planners,
indicates that they killed for many reasons, including: “opportunism, the urge to gain materially or
personally from the downfall of a certain group, careerism, a sincere belief that the country was indanger or simply the desire to be part of something.”101 The national identification card as a symbolof Hutu-Tutsi divisiveness objectified these differences.
Rwanda’s post-genocide government took steps to address the problematic national identification cardin 1996 when it removed the “ethnic group” category from the cards.102 The government, which wasthen becoming increasingly authoritarian, also sought to replace these categories with the “shared orsuperordinate identity” of “Rwandans” to promote national reconciliation through non-legal means.103
In 2001, the government took the approach further by introducing a law to prevent “divisionism” bymaking ethnic self-identification a criminal offense with penalties of up to 30 years’ imprisonment
and fines up to US$8,000.104 The Organic Law of 2003 went on to forbid “ethnic ideology” and“genocide mentality” entirely.105 The government put further restrictions in place in 2008 toprevent the use of the terms “Hutu” and “Tutsi” in public, but especially in the political sphere.106
The government replaced the paper identification cards with plastic electronic ones that continued
to exclude racial categories.107
As one Rwandan put it, nearly 90 years after the Belgians first required Rwandans to identify
themselves solely as either “Hutu” or “Tutsi,” “We celebrate an ID card which does not allow anyone
to hunt us on basis of our ethnicity.”108

Genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar“[The National Verification Card (NVC)] is the latest step of genocide against the Rohingya.”- Statement by the Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights, March 2019109

For the past half-century, union-and state-level laws and policies in Myanmar have contributed
to the marginalization and dehumanization of the Rohingya people, leaving them at high riskof abuse. Periodically, the discriminatory laws and policies targeting Rohingya aided in thecommission of large-scale mass atrocities, including crimes against humanity and genocide.110 At
the union-level, the 1982 Citizenship Law effectively removed the de facto citizenship rights of theRohingya that they had enjoyed since the early decades of independence, eventually leaving them

101 Smeulers and Hoex, “Studying the Micro-Dynamics of the Rwandan Genocide,” p. 445.
102 Prevent Genocide International, “Group Classification on National ID Cards as a Factor in Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing.”
103 Sigrun Marie Moss, “Beyond Conflict and Spoilt Identities: How Rwandan Leaders Justify Single Recategorization
Model for Post-Conflict Reconciliation,” Journal of Social and Political Psychology, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2014, p. 435.
104 Id. at p. 438.
105 Id. at p. 436.
106 Ibid.
107 Tabaro, “The Passport to Death: Story of Rwanda’s Notorious ID,” KTPress.
108 Ibid.
109 Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights, “History of Rohingya Citizenship in Myanmar,” March 2019.
110 See, for example, Fortify Rights, “They Gave Them Long Swords”: Preparations for Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity
Against Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine State, Myanmar, July 2018, https://www.fortifyrights.org/downloads/Fortify_
Rights_Long_Swords_July_2018.pdf. Fortify Rights, Policies of Persecution: Ending Abusive Policies Against Rohingya
Muslims in Myanmar, February 2014, https://www.fortifyrights.org/downloads/Policies_of_Persecution_Feb_25_
Fortify_Rights.pdf, p. 5-6.

Genocide by Attrition

43

without full citizenship, rendering them stateless and thus with few international protections.111
Changes to different categories of identity documents since independence, combined with theunion government’s decision not to enumerate Rohingya during the controversial 2014 national
census, put the Rohingya in an even further precarious legal situation.112
Meanwhile, state-level laws and policies worked in an opposite, but still complementary, direction.
These laws and policies carefully documented, counted, and enabled the close control of theeveryday lives of Rohingya via discriminatory measures that have drastically limited their rights
to movement, marriage, childbirth, state education, and employment.113 The result, according to
the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) on Myanmar—the U.N. mechanism
mandated by the U.N. Human Rights Council to investigate human rights violations perpetrated by
the Myanmar military in Rakhine, Kachin, and northern Shan states—“was a continuing situationof severe, systemic, and institutionalized oppression from birth to death” for Rohingya.114
In recent years, the number of Rohingya in Myanmar have dropped precipitously due to the effectivenessof the Myanmar authorities’ genocidal campaign and policies of persecution against Rohingya. The
estimated population of Rohingya in Myanmar, at the time of writing, is approximately 600,000.115
In contrast, before the military-led and self-described “clearance operations” in 2016 and 2017, theestimated population of Rohingya in Myanmar was approximately one to 1.3 million, with the vast
majority of Rohingya concentrated in three townships—Maungdaw, Buthidaung, and Rathedaung—in the northern part of Rakhine State adjacent to the Bangladesh border.116 Rohingya constituted
approximately 80 to 95 percent of the population in these three northern townships in Rakhine State.117

111 Maung Zarni and Alice Cowley, “The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingya,” Pacific Rim & Policy Journal,
Vol. 23, No. 3, 2014, pp. 695-697. Many Rohingya reject the term “stateless,” saying they already have a “State” andare indigenous to Myanmar. For example, Mohib Ullah, who was assassinated in 2021, presented information on thesituation of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh during the March 2019 session of the Human Rights Council. He saidin his remarks: “We are not stateless. Stop calling us that. We have a state; it is Myanmar. So, we want to go home to
Myanmar with our rights and our citizenship.” See, Fortify Rights, “Bangladesh: Investigate Assassination of Rohingya
Human Rights Defender Mohib Ullah,” September 29, 2021, https://www.fortifyrights.org/bgd-inv-2021-09-29/.
112 The Government of Myanmar excluded Rohingya and other marginalized ethnic minorities from the 2014 national
census. The Republic of the Union of Myanmar Ministry of Immigration and Population, The 2014 Myanmar Populationand Housing Census: Rakhine State, May 2015, https://myanmar.unfpa.org/sites/default/files/pub-pdf/Rakhine%20
State%20Census%20Report%20-%20ENGLISH-3.pdf, p. 8.
113 U.N. Human Rights Council, Report of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, U.N. Doc. A/
HRC/39/64, September 12, 2018, Section IV, para. 20. Fortify Rights, Policies of Persecution.
114 Ibid.
115 U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Young People in Myanmar’s Rakhine State Tackle Ethnic Divisions, March
23, 2022, https://www.unhcr.org/news/stories/2022/3/623992014/young-people-myanmars-rakhine-state-tackleethnic-divisions.html. U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, The Displaced and Stateless of Myanmar in the Asia-PacificRegion, January 2021, https://reporting.unhcr.org/sites/default/files/The%20Displaced%20and%20Stateless%20
of%20Myanmar%20in%20the%20Asia-Pacific%20Region%20-%20January%202021.pdf, p. 2.
116 The Myanmar Ministry of Immigration and Population and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) excluded
Rohingya from the 2014 national census, Myanmar’s first census in 30 years. The government’s census report clarifies
that “members of some communities [in Rakhine State] were not counted because they were not allowed to self-identify
using a name that is not recognized by the Government.” That “name” is “Rohingya,” an ethnic identity the government
rejects and claims does not exist. The government estimated that approximately 1,090,000 people were not countedin Rakhine State during the census—they were presumably Rohingya. The census cost more than US$75 million andwas supported, via UNFPA, by multiple donor governments, including the U.S., U.K., and Australia. Many viewed it as adebacle for multiple reasons, not least of all the way in which it collected data on ethnicity. The authorities have yet torelease ethnic data from the census. Myanmar Ministry of Immigration and Population, The 2014 Myanmar Population andHousing Census. See, Mary P. Callahan, “Distorted, Dangerous Data? Lumyo in the 2014 Myanmar Population and Housing
Census,” SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, Vol. 32, No. 2, 2017, pp. 452-78.
117 Eleanor Albert and Lindsay Maizland, “The Rohingya Crisis,” Council on Foreign Relations, January 23, 2020, https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/rohingya-crisis.

I. Identity Documents and Genocide: Case Studies

44

The military-led atrocities forced more than 745,000 Rohingya, including more than 400,000 children,
to flee Myanmar in 2017.118 Rohingya survivors of the genocide who fled to neighboring Bangladesh
largely remain living in sub-standard conditions in refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar District, Bangladesh.
In its first report to the U.N. Human Rights Council, in September 2019, the FFM concluded, “there issufficient information to warrant the investigation and prosecution of senior officials in the Tatmadaw[military] chain of command, so that a competent court can determine their liability for genocide in
relation to the situation in Rakhine State.”119 More recently, on March 22, 2022, the U.S. government
concluded that the Myanmar military is responsible for committing genocide against the Rohingya
people, marking the eighth time since the Holocaust that the U.S. has recognized a genocide.120
Welcoming the U.S. genocide determination, the NUG notably issued a statement acknowledging “thatdiscriminatory practices and rhetoric against the Rohingya also laid the ground for these atrocities”
and that “[t]hose crimes against the Myanmar people continue until today by the military.”121
Many factors have contributed to the multi-generational attempts by Myanmar’s junta andgovernment leaders to erase and destroy Rohingya people. Identity politics in Myanmar have a strong“racial” as well as religious component and, while not the sole cause of the atrocities, were and are acontributing factor.122 Successive Myanmar juntas and governments, including the current junta andthe government led by Aung San Suu Kyi, failed to recognize the Rohingya population as a legitimategroup, claiming instead that the Rohingya are “illegal Bengali immigrants” from Bangladesh.123
Laws, policies, and practices instituted by Myanmar’s military and government leaders reinforced
the idea of Rohingya as foreigners, effecting the administrative erasure of Rohingya.
Following Myanmar’s independence from Great Britain, the 1948 Union Citizenship Act granted
citizenship to a “non-exhaustive list of ethnic groups,” then known as “indigenous races,” provided

118 Fortify Rights, “Tools of Genocide: National Verification Cards and the Denial of Citizenship of Rohingya, September
2019,
https://www.fortifyrights.org/downloads/Tools%20of%20Genocide%20-%20Fortify%20Rights%20-%20
September-03-2019-EN.pdf. See, Fortify Rights, “They Gave Them Long Swords.” Fortify Rights and U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum, “They Tried to Kill Us All”: Atrocity Crimes against Rohingya Muslins in Rakhine State, Myanmar,
November 2017, https://www.fortifyrights.org/downloads/THEY_TRIED_TO_KILL_US_ALL_Atrocity_Crimes_
against_Rohingya_Muslims_Nov_2017.pdf.
119 U.N. Human Rights Council, Report of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, U.N. Doc. A/
HRC/39/64, September 12, 2018, para. 83.
120 See, Fortify Rights, “U.N. Member States: Acknowledge the Rohingya Genocide, Refer Myanmar to the International
Criminal Court,” March 21, 2022, https://www.fortifyrights.org/mya-inv-2022-03-21/; Fortify Rights and Refugees
International, “Rohingya Refugees React to the U.S. Genocide Determination,” film, April 25, 2022, https://www.
fortifyrights.org/our_films/bgd-inv-vdo-2022-04-25/.
121 NUG, “Announcement No.(5/2022)–Statement on the Determination by the United States Government of Genocideand Crimes Against Humanity against the Rohingya,” March 22, 2022, https://gov.nugmyanmar.org/2022/03/22/
announcement-no-5-2022-statement-on-the-determination-by-the-united-states-government-of-genocideand-crimes-against-humanity-against-the-rohingya/.
122 Anthony Ware and Costas Laoutides, Myanmar’s ‘Rohingya’ Conflict, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 137-196.
Rohingya were not always not recognized. Statements by officials even mention the Rohingya by name for example ayear before the 1962 coup in 1961, Brigadier General Aung Gyi mentioned the Rohingya in a public speech saying:
The ethnic group that reside on the west of Mayu District boundaries are Pakistani. And the people who resideon the east side of this border are called Rohingya . . . I want to openly and publicly tell you this: we consider [theRohingya people] of Mayu District an ethnic minority integral to the Union of Burma . . . Towards the goal ofestablishing the region’s security, I urge Rohingya religious leaders, Rohingya men, Rohingya leaders, Rohingya
politicians to keep the military and administration in the Mayu District region informed [about the remaining
insurgencies]. If possible, please join our efforts to repel insurgents. If possible, I urge you to join hands with
the Burmese Armed Forces and fight the insurgents.
Unofficial Transcript of the Address delivered by Brigadier General Aung Gyi Vice Chief of Staff, “The Union of Burma
Armed Forces Mujahid Insurgents, Surrender Ceremony,” Maungdaw Township, Rakhine, Burma, July 4, 1961. See also,
Carlos Sardina Galache, The Burmese Labyrinth: A History of the Rohingya Tragedy (New York: Verso, March 10, 2020), p. 176.
123 Fortify Rights, “Tools of Genocide,” pp. 16-17; Francis Wade, Myanmar’s Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence and the Making
of a Muslim “Other” (London: Zed Books, 2017).

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45

that their ancestors had permanently settled within the territory of the Union prior to 1823.124
Successful applicants received a National Registration Card (NRC) granting de facto citizenship.125
After General Ne Win overthrew the democratic administration of U Nu in 1962, marking the
beginning of 26 years of military rule in Myanmar, the military instituted a series of xenophobic
policies.126 These policies made it increasingly difficult for Rohingya to obtain NRCs, even when
meeting the requirements.127 During the mid-1970s, the military government began issuing Foreign
Registration Cards to some Rohingya under the Emergency Immigration Act, which categorized themas “resident foreigners” without citizenship rights.128 These policies served as a prelude to operation
Naga Min—“Dragon King” in English—in 1977, during which the military set about identifying
and registering residents as either citizens or foreigners.129 Later the operation devolved into violent
attacks on Rohingya and the destruction of Rohingya villages, forcing more than 200,000 Rohingya
into Bangladesh.130
But it was the 1982 Citizenship Law that fundamentally changed the definition of citizenship in
Myanmar.131 The 1982 Citizenship Law made race the sole criteria to qualify for full citizenshiprights.132 The law specifies eight “national ethnic groups” that are considered full citizens by birthand provides authority to the government to “decide whether any ethnic group is national ornot.”133 The authorities have repeatedly denied that Rohingya exist, let alone acknowledge them as
an official ethnic group eligible for citizenship rights.134
124 The Union Citizenship Act, 1948. See also, Nick Cheesman, “Problems with Facts about Rohingya Statelessness”,
E-International Relations, December 8, 2015, https://www.e-ir.info/2015/12/08/problems-with-facts-about-rohingyastatelessness/, p. 1.
125 José María Arraiza and Oliver Vonk, Report on Citizenship Law: Myanmar (San Demenico di Fiesole: European University
Institute, 2017), https://cadmus.eui.eu/bitstream/handle/1814/48284/RSCAS_GLOBALCIT_CR_2017_14.pdf, p. 6.
126 Sarah L. Clarke, Sung Aung Sein Myint, and Zabra Yu Siwa, Re-examining Ethnic Identity in Myanmar, May 31, 2019,https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/Ethnic-Identity-in-Myanmar.pdf, pp. 23-25. Furthermore,in 2022, Rohingya poet and author Mayyu Ali told Fortify Rights “[G]enocide is not just about the method of killing.
The Myanmar government first targeted our culture and language. In 1964, Burmese dictator U Ne Win [banned] the
Rohingya language [on] radio broadcast, and he launched operations against my people. Every operation resulted
in the exodus.” See, Fortify Rights, “A Rohingya Poet Transforms Pain into Power,” April 5, 2022, https://www.
fortifyrights.org/mya-inv-pro-2022-03-05/.
127 Fortify Rights, “Tools of Genocide,” p. 34.
128 UNHCR, Citizenship and Statelessness Myanmar: An Analysis of International Standards and the Myanmar Citizenship Legal
Framework, 2017. See also, Shehmin Awan, “The Statelessness Problem of Rohingya Muslims,” Washington University
Global Studies Law Review, Vol. 19, No. 1, 2020, pp. 85-110.
129 William L. Scully and Frank N. Trager, “Burma 1978: The Thirtieth Year of Independence,” Asian Survey, Vol. 19, No.
2, February 1979, pp. 147-156.
130 In Rakhine State, Naga Min reportedly degenerated into violent attacks on Rohingya by both the Myanmar army
and local civilian perpetrators. See, Human Rights Watch, Burma: The Rohingya Muslims, 1996, p. 11, 12. Bertil Lintner,“Diversionary Tactics: Anti-Muslim Campaign Seen as Effort to Rally Burmans,” Far Eastern Economic Review, August29, 1991. The feature-length documentary film, “The Venerable W.,” directed by Barbet Schroeder, includes rare
historical footage of Rohingya survivors of Naga Min in Bangladesh. Barbet Schroeder, “The Venerable W.,” LesFilms du Losange et al., 2017.
131 Nick Cheesman, “How in Myanmar ‘National Races’ Came to Surpass Citizenship and Exclude Rohingya,” Journal ofContemporary Asia, Vol. 47, No. 3, 2017, pp. 461-483.
132 Burma Citizenship Law, Pyithu Hluttaw Law No. 4, October 15, 1982. The 1982 Citizenship Law created three levelsof citizenship: citizen, associate citizenship, and naturalized. None of these citizenship levels are applicable toRohingya. Fortify Rights, “Tools of Genocide,” pp. 37-38.
133 The 1982 Citizenship Law provides that citizens are: “Nationals such as the Kachin, Kayah, Karen, Chin, Burman,
Mon, Rakhine or Shan and ethnic groups as have settled in any of the territories included within the State as theirpermanent home from a period anterior to 1185 B.E., 1823 A.D.” Burma Citizenship Law, Art. 4.
134 Jane Ferguson, “Who’s Counting? Ethnicity, Belonging, and the National Census in Burma/Myanmar,” Journal of the
Humanities and Social Sciences in Southeast Asia, Vol. 171, No. 1, 2015, pp. 1-28. Furthermore, the denial of citizenship toRohingya after 1982 was a key mechanism used to institutionalize the belief that Rohingya were outsiders, and it
was accompanied by popular discourses that drew on references to Rohingya as “Bengali” and that saw “Rohingya”
as a fabricated identity. For example, in 2012, a series of violent incidents between Buddhist and Muslim residents
in Rakhine State escalated into state-sanctioned, coordinated attacks on Rohingya and other Muslims in RakhineState. Following the 2012 violence between Rakhine and Rohingya in western Myanmar, a group by the name of“Group of Wuntharnu Ethnic Peoples” circulated a statement warning that international aid groups that had assisted

I. Identity Documents and Genocide: Case Studies

46

The exclusion of Rohingya has led observers to conclude that the 1982 Citizenship Law and the 1983
procedures for its implementation purposefully stripped Rohingya of their citizenship. Although thelaw is not “retroactive”—meaning people with citizenship before the law’s enactment, including
Rohingya, should be able to “transfer over to the new [citizenship] regime without having to provetheir lineage” under the new rules—the law continues to put into question the citizenship statusof anyone who is not eligible under the law.135 This is because the 1982 Citizenship Law enables
discrimination based on “racial and religious grounds.”136
As part of the implementation of the 1982 Citizenship Law, the military government launched a“nationwide citizenship scrutiny exercise” in 1989 and began issuing three different official colorcoded identity documents in line with the three-tiered citizenship categories specified under thelaw.137 With few exceptions, the government denied full citizenship rights to Rohingya.138
In 1995, significant international pressure from the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)
prompted the government to finally grant Temporary Registration Cards, also known as “White
Cards,” to several undocumented groups, including some Rohingya.139 However, these cards were
temporary and failed to provide citizenship rights.140 In 2015, the government revoked the White
Cards ahead of the national elections and issued White Card receipts to Rohingya who surrendered
their White Cards.141 Like the cards, the White Card receipts conferred no rights.142
The citizenship documentation situation in Myanmar remained largely unchanged for anothertwo decades—until the 2014 national census, the first census in 30 years. Despite the technicaland financial support of the U.N. Population Fund, enumerators in Rakhine State only included
Rohingya willing to self-identify themselves as “other” on the census forms.143 Those Rohingya
who refused went uncounted and were thus fully disenfranchised in the process.144
State-level laws and policies have further compounded the oppression of Rohingya by extending the
intrusive reach of the authorities into all aspects of their daily lives. Research by Fortify Rights indicatesthat discriminatory and repressive practices, which have had the effect of creating ghetto-like conditions
for Rohingya in Rakhine State, dating back to at least the mid-1990s with new ones added through 2009.145
In 2014, Fortify Rights published a report of state-government orders endorsed by high-ranking
union-level officials from 1993 to 2013, exposing discriminatory policies targeting the reproductive
and sexual freedoms of Rohingya. The policies ranged from forced birth control and coercive limits
Rohingya had “watered poisonous plants.” The statement said: “Not only Rakhine but also all the people knowthat Kalar’s have grown up thanks to U.N. and NGOs that have watered poisonous plants. We recognize those, whowork for the further development of Kalars by earning dollars, as traitors.” See, Group of Wuntharnu Ethnic Peoples,“Beware! NGOs that Came Here to Assist Bengali Kalar,” 2012, on file with Fortify Rights.
135 Cheesman, “Problems with Facts about Rohingya Statelessness, E-International Relations”, p. 2.
136 Id. at p. 35.
137 UNHCR, Study on Community Perceptions of Citizenship, Documentation, and Rights in Rakhine State, 2016, https://themimu.info/sites/themimu.info/files/assessment_file_attachments/Community_Perceptions_FINAL. PDF, p. 6.
138 Fortify Rights, “Tools of Genocide,” p. 42.
139 Burmese Rohingya Organization UK, “The Rohingya, the Citizenship Law, Temporary Registration, andImplementation of the Rakhine State Action Plan,” April 2, 2015, https://www.burmapartnership.org/2015/04/therohingya-the-citizenship-law-temporary-registration-and-implementation-of-the-rakhine-state-action-plan/.
140 Chris Lewa, “North Arakan: An Open Prison for the Rohingya in Burma,” Forced Migration Review, 2009, p. 12.
141 Fortify Rights, “Tools of Genocide,” p. 12.
142 In August 2019, a Rohingya refugee woman from Buthidaung Township, who refused to exchange her White Card
receipt for an NVC, told Fortify Rights: “The NVC is another policy of our government to persecute us in a newway. It’s like many of the old polices and old cards that didn’t give us benefits . . . The NVC is for [foreigners] notfor Rohingya. I had a three-fold card [NRC citizenship card]. [The Myanmar government] then gave me a White
Card, and after, the [Myanmar government] replaced it with a White Card receipt. I don’t need a new card.” See,
Fortify Rights, “Tools of Genocide,” p. 45.
143 Fortify Rights, “Policies of Persecution,” p. 21.
144 International Crisis Group, Counting the Costs: Myanmar’s Problematic Census, 2014, p. 16.
145 Fortify Rights, “Policies of Persecution,” p. 22.

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on childbirth (two per family), to restrictions on marriage and private relationships, all of which
are tracked and enforced using bureaucratic forms of documentation.146
Formal and informal restrictions on the right to freedom of movement for Rohingya have exacerbatedthese restrictions. Restrictions on movement include requirements for formal permissions totravel, curfews, checkpoints, restricted zones, and requirements for “security” escorts to travel toother townships.147 These restrictions pose time-consuming and expensive obstacles for Rohingya
to access schools, mosques, medical facilities, markets, and livelihood activities.148
As part of a citizenship verification process initiated under Myanmar President Thein Sein’s administration
Myanmar government began to issue Identity Cards of National Verification (ICNV).149 The application
process to obtain an ICNV required Rohingya to identify as “Bengali” or other foreign identity.150
Following a landslide victory by Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) party
during the 2015 elections, from which Rohingya ICNV-card holders were excluded from participatingor voting in, the new democratically elected Government of Myanmar reinforced the previous
administration’s discriminatory identification documentation policies, rebranding the ICNVs as
NVCs.151 While the government asserted that the NVC was “the first step before the scrutinisationof citizenship, in accordance with the 1982 Citizenship Law,” in reality, the NVC fails to guarantee
citizenship in Myanmar, and holders are still required to apply for citizenship under the 1982
Citizenship Law.152 On the back of the card, the NVC states in the English and Burmese languages“[h]olding this identity card does not testify that the card holder is [sic] Myanmar citizen,” as wellas “[t]his identity card holder is a person who need [sic] to apply for citizenship in accordance with
the Myanmar Citizenship Law.”153
The NVC process is an integral part of protracted attempts to deny Rohingya their identity andcitizenship.154 For example, Yanghee Lee, the former U.N. Special Rapporteur on situation of humanrights in Myanmar, said the NVC was being used as “a way of exterminating their [Rohingya] basic
identity.”155 Before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague, during hearings on whether
Myanmar violated the U.N. Genocide Convention on December 2019, attorney Tafadzwa Pasipanodya
146 Id. at pp. 22-43. Not only did Myanmar implemented orders on controlling births but in April 2022 BangladeshHome Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal told national media that the government would introduce birth control
measures in the refugee camps to stop population growth among the refugees. See, “Birth Control Measures tobe Introduced in Rohingya Camps: Home Minister,” Prothomalo English, April 11, 2022, https://en.prothomalo.com/
bangladesh/government/birth-control-measures-to-be-introduced-in-rohingya-camps-home-minister.
147 Fortify Rights, “Tools of Genocide,” p. 41. See also, U.N. Human Rights Council, Report of the Detailed Findings of the
Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, U.N. Doc. A/HRC/39/CRP.2, September 17, 2018, para.
484. Advisory Commission on Rakhine State, Towards a Peaceful, Fair, and Prosperous Future for the People of Rakhine,
August 2017, http://www.rakhinecommission.org/ app/uploads/2017/08/FinalReport_Eng.pdf, p. 27.
148 Independent Rakhine Initiative, Freedom of Movement in Rakhine State, 2020, pp. 12-13.
149 U.N. Human Rights Council, Report of the Detailed Findings of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on
Myanmar, U.N. Doc. A/HRC/39/CRP.2, September 17, 2018, paras. 482, 484.
150 Fortify Rights, “Tools of Genocide,” p. 42.
151 Republic of the Union of Myanmar, Office of the President, “Formation of the Steering Committee for Issuanceof National Verification Card (NVC) in Rakhine State for Those Who Will Undergo Verification for Citizenship,”
Notification No. 21/2017, February 8, 2017, https://www.moi.gov.mm/moi:eng/?q=announcement/14/11/2018/id-9873.
152 The Republic of the Union of Myanmar President Office, “NV Process is First Step Towards Citizenship,” October 29,
2017, http://www.president-office.gov.mm/en/?q=issues/rakhine-state-affairs/id-7868.
153 Photographs of Rohingya NVCs from Rakhine State Myanmar and Cox’s Bazar District, Bangladesh. See also,
Fortify Rights, “Tools of Genocide,” p. 44.
154 In addition to the Rohingya, according to the FFM in 2018, the Myanmar authorities reportedly issued NVCs to othercommunities in Shan and Karen states. The FFM noted, “[a]s of January 2017, over 16,000 NVCs had been issued in
Shan State and 3,500 in Kayin. In both states, more than a quarter of the population do not have identity documents.”
Human Rights Council, Report of the Detailed Findings of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar,
U.N. Doc. A/HRC/39/CRP.2, September 17, 2018, https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/HRCouncil/FFMMyanmar/A_HRC_39_CRP.2.pdf, p. 117, fn. 1082.
155 Poppy McPherson, “Three Years After Exodus, Myanmar Erases Names of Rohingya Villages, UN Map Makers Follow
Suit,” Reuters, September 11, 2020, https://www.dailysabah.com/world/asia-pacific/myanmar-erases-names-ofrohingya-villages-un-says.

I. Identity Documents and Genocide: Case Studies

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on behalf of The Gambia—the country bringing the case against Myanmar—recognized the roleof the NVC in facilitating the genocide of the Rohingya, saying, “a further step Myanmar is taking
against the Rohingya as a group is the intensified effort to force them to accept ‘national verification
cards’ that explicitly recognize cardholders as non-citizens and brand them as ‘Bengali[s].’”156
The spatialization of control that the different regimes of documentation facilitated made the 2016
and 2017 military’s self-described “clearance operations” targeting Rohingya civilians so devastating.
Estimates place the total number killed at a minimum of 9,000, which is widely considered to be anundercount, as the Myanmar authorities denied access to affected areas, effectively blocking any
casualty recording.157 Gang rapes of women and girls occurred on a massive scale.158 U.N. satellite
imagery identified the full or partial destruction by arson of more than 390 Rohingya villages in
Rakhine State, 40 percent of the total number Rohingya villages in the state.159 The military has since
bulldozed scores of Rohingya villages, leaving displaced Rohingya with no place to return.160
In the weeks and months before the Myanmar military-led attacks in 2016 and 2017, Fortify Rights
documented an uptick in efforts to coerce or force Rohingya to accept NVCs.161 Evidence suggests
a positive correlation between efforts to force Rohingya to accept NVCs and efforts to destroy the
Rohingya as a group. These findings demonstrate that the NVC process has not been a response to
the crisis in Rakhine State, as the NLD government suggested, but rather a fundamental part of the
genocide.162 Adding to Fortify Rights’s research, the U.N. FFM said in 2019:
Statements by government officials demonstrate that the ‘clearance operations’ beginningon 25 August 2017 were a response to Rohingya villagers collectively refusing to accept NVCs
and, that the ‘clearance operations’ were not aimed at crushing the ARSA [Arakan Rohingya
Salvation Army—a militant Rohingya group operational on the Myanmar-Bangladesh border],as the Government claimed.163

Comparative Analysis

Despite important contextual differences, the above three case studies suggest that Rohingya areindeed experiencing a genocide in Myanmar that resembles what the Jews underwent in Nazi
Germany before the official start of the “Final Solution” and is similar to what the Tutsi endured
before the 1994 Rwandan genocide.164
156 Case concerning Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (The Gambia v.
Myanmar), International Court of Justice (ICJ), CR 2019/18, Verbatim Record, December 10, 2019, https://www.icj-cij.
org/public/files/case-related/178/178-20191210-ORA-01-00-BI.pdf, p. 41, para. 18.
157 Médecins Sans Frontières, “No One Was Left”: Death and Violence against the Rohingya in Rakhine State, Myanmar, March 9,
2018, https://www.msf.org/myanmarbangladesh-%E2%80%98no-one-was-left%E2%80%99-death-and-violenceagainst-rohingya p. 5.
158 U.N. Human Rights Council, Sexual and Gender-Based Violence in Myanmar and the Gendered Impact of its Ethnic Conflicts,
U.N. Doc. A/HRC/42/CRP.4, August 22, 2019, para. 38.
159 U.N. Institute for Training and Research, UNOSAT Analysis of Destruction and Other Developments in Rakhine State,
Myanmar, September 7, 2018, https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Documents/HRBodies/HRCouncil/FFMMyanmar/UNOSATReportMyanmar_20180912.pdf, p. 7.
160 Id. at pp. 10, 11. Fortify Rights, Tools of Genocide, p. 61.
161 Fortify Rights, Tools of Genocide, pp. 12, 61, 63; John Quinley, “The Roots of Myanmar’s Rohingya Crisis,” Daily Star,
October 23, 2019, https://www.thedailystar.net/rohingya-crisis/news/the-roots-myanmars-rohingya-crisis-1817305.
162 Fortify Rights, “Tools of Genocide,” p. 43; John Quinley, “The Roots of Myanmar’s Rohingya Crisis,” Daily Star, October23, 2019, https://www.thedailystar.net/rohingya-crisis/news/the-roots-myanmars-rohingya-crisis-1817305.
163 U.N. Human Rights Council, Detailed Findings of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, U.N.
Doc. A/HRC/42/CRP.5, September 16, 2019, para. 90.
164 See, for example, Fortify Rights, “Policies of Persecution”; Fortify Rights, “They Gave Them Long Swords”; Fortify Rights,“Tools of Genocide”; Zarni and Cowley, “The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingya” ; Nicholas Kristoff, “I
Saw a Genocide in Slow Motion,” New York Times, March 2, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/02/opinion/isaw-a-genocide-in-slow-motion.html.

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There is a strong consensus among scholars that “strategies of mass violence are developed in
response to real and perceived threats to the maintenance of political power.”165 The framing of
small, marginalized, and persecuted minority groups as a threat to “the nation” is apparent in all
three cases analyzed in this report.166 The threats attributed to Jews, Tutsi, and Rohingya were notgrounded in any empirical reality, which is why it was so easy for perpetrators to scapegoat and killtheir targets in vast numbers. Jews, ostracized for centuries, never possessed political, economic, or
military power in Europe.167 By contrast, Tutsi did enjoy such power before independence, but theyeffectively lost all of it following the rise of extremist Hutu ethno-nationalism.168 Rohingya havebeen almost entirely dispossessed since the military seized power following the 1962 coup.
Less clear is the extent that armed conflict plays in the onset of genocidal violence.169 For example,
although historians may disagree as to whether the Holocaust helped or hindered the Nazi’s war
effort, there is little doubt that the armed conflict served as a critical catalyst for killing Jews on
a mass scale in the name of protecting Germany from “enemies of the state,” as Jews were often
officially labelled.170 The 1994 genocide of the Tutsi also unfolded in the context of a regionalized
war. During the early 1990s, armed conflict between the Hutu-led government and the RPF headed
by Tutsi elites in exile, caused significant loss of life and conflict-induced displacement.171 Bothoutcomes reinforced Hutu extremist propaganda, which asserted that Tutsi everywhere were traitors
to “the nation.” Perpetrators used this accusation to justify the 1994 genocide when identification
cards played an essential role in identifying Tutsi in more urban areas.172
Moreover, in Rakhine State, Myanmar, the military’s attacks in 2016 and 2017 were ostensibly inresponse to Rohingya militant attacks against police. Historically, the military explained its largescale operations against Rohingya civilians as being necessary to protect “the nation” from internaland external threats to its continued unity, stability, and sovereignty.173 The very few armed Rohingya
groups that have risen since the 1940s–most recently ARSA, previously known as Harakh al Yaqin–
were short-lived, small in size, and lacking significant popular support, adequate material resources
to support a sustained insurgency, or demonstrated capacity for tactical effectiveness.174 Nevertheless,while ARSA posed no genuine security threat to the state, the conflict between ARSA and the Myanmar
military may have amounted to a non-international armed conflict. The Myanmar military has used
the pretext of national security, which is intertwined with widespread islamophobia, to justify armed
conflict and violence against Muslims in general and Rohingya in particular.175

165 Scott Straus, “‘Destroy Them to Save Us’: Theories of Genocide and the Logics of Political Violence,” Terrorism andPolitical Violence, Vol. 24, No. 4, 2012, p. 546.
166 See, Alexander Hinton, ed., Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide, (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2002); Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Fear, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).
167 U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Jews in Pre War Germany,” website, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/
en/article/jews-in-prewar-germany?series=32; U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Jewish Life in Europe Before the
Holocaust, website, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/jewish-life-in-europe-before-the-holocaust.
168 Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, pp. 43, 44.
169 Straus, “Destroy Them to Save Us,” p. 547.
170 See, Yaron Pasher, Holocaust versus Wehrmacht: How Hitler’s “Final Solution” Undermined the German War Efforts,(Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2015). Christopher Fettweis, “War as Catalyst: Moving World War II to theCenter of Holocaust Scholarship,” Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2003, pp. 225-236.
171 Global IDP Database, Profile of Internal Displacement: Rwanda, October 29, 2004, https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.
int/files/resources/450251CAD179D23185256F3C006574A0-nrc-rwa-29oct.pdf, pp. 20, 21.
172 René Lemarchand, “The Rwanda Genocide,” Century of Genocide; Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts, Samuel Totten
and William Parsons, eds., (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 402, 403.
173 Ware and Laoutides, Myanmar’s Rohingya Conflict, p. 17.
174 Ken MacLean, “The Rohingya Crisis and the Practices of Erasure,” Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 21, No. 1, 2018, pp. 4, 5.
175 Ronan Lee, “Extreme Speech in Myanmar: The Role of State Media in the Rohingya Forced Migration Crisis,”International Journal of Communication 13, 2019, pp. 3203-3224.

I. Identity Documents and Genocide: Case Studies

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All three cases, but especially in the case of Rwanda and Myanmar, share the metaphor of “invasion,”
which will continue to bedevil constructive efforts to find a sustainable solution to the protracted
Rohingya crisis. During the post-colonial period, Hutu extremists succeeded in portraying Tutsi as
alien settlers who placed native Hutu under their illegitimate control.176
The narrative uncritically reproduced the prejudices established by the Belgian colonialists.177 The
conflict-induced forced migration and subsequent returns of large numbers of Tutsi at repeated points
after the country’s independence further reinforced popular Hutu perceptions that only the Hutu were
the true “sons and daughters of the soil.”178 Consequently, in the eyes of Hutu extremists and theirsupporters, the 1994 genocide was necessary to “clear [the country] of a threatening alien presence.”179
For these reasons, some experts argue that the genocide was not an ethnic one, but rather an act of“racial cleansing” on the grounds that Hutu perpetrators perceived Tutsi as “colonial settlers.”180
Similarly, the refusal by Myanmar’s government to recognize the Rohingya as an “indigenous race,”
the substantial body of discriminatory laws and policies targeting Rohingya, as well as extensive
hate speech against Rohingya, all serve to frame Rohingya as “illegal Bengali immigrants”
that should be violently forced back to Bangladesh. In particular, popular fear of religious anddemographic “invasion” through large-scale immigration of Muslims from Bangladesh and thealleged high reproductive rate among Rohingya inside Myanmar, reinforce the widely shared belief
that Rohingya are “aliens” who do not deserve state protections, much less citizenship rights.181
For example, public approval for the 2016 and 2017 clearance operations was, anecdotally at least,
extremely widespread as were denials that mass atrocities against Rohingya actually occurred, aclaim attributed to “false stories” published in the international media.182
Finally, and most broadly, as all three cases make clear, identification cards and other forms ofofficial documentation that “force a person to be affiliated with a governmentally-defined groupand expose persons to profiling and human rights abuses based upon their group identity” canplay an instrumental role in the genocidal process.183 Such classifications promote, according to one
typology: deindividualization (societal polarization), dehumanization (institutional polarization),and demonization (eliminationist polarization).184 While the details of each form of polarizationvary by context, as the three case studies show, it is clear that identification documents makeit bureaucratically easier to identify, persecute, and kill targeted populations on a widespread,systematic, and massive scale. Genocide by attrition, which facilitates these outcomes through“indirect methods of destruction,” must consequently be taken seriously as part of the effort tounderstand past genocides and to prevent future ones.185

176 Magnarella, “Explaining Rwanda’s 1994 Genocide,” Human Rights & Human Welfare, p. 28.
177 Id. at 25.
178 Ibid.
179 Ibid.
180 Ibid. For extended discussion, see, Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers.
181 Nyi Nyi Kyaw, “Islamophobia in Buddhist Myanmar: The 969 Movement and Anti-Muslim Violence,” Islam and theState in Myanmar: Muslim-Buddhist Relations and the Politics of Belonging, ed. Melissa Crouch, (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2016), pp. 194, 195.
182 Congressional Research Service, “Burma’s Brutal Campaign Against Rohingya,” 2017, p. 3.
183 Prevent Genocide International, “Group Classification on National ID Cards as a Factor in Genocide and Ethnic
Cleansing,” p. 1.
184 Id. at pp. 4-5.
185 Sheri P. Rosenburg, “Genocide Is a Process, Not an Event,” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal,
Vol. 7, No. 1, 2012, p. 18.

Genocide by Attrition

II.	 Post-Coup Human Rights
Violations Related to
National Verification
Cards in Myanmar“The [NVC application] form has not changed after the coup. It involves[answering questions on] race and religion.”- Rohingya man, civil society member, August 2021186“They wrote ‘Bengali’ [at the immigration office]. . . Our name is Rohingya, butthey wrote ‘Bengali.’”- Rohingya man, Rakhine State, Myanmar, July 2021187
On September 2021, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on human rights situation
in Myanmar, Tom Andrews, highlighted the continued forced and coercive
implementation of the NVC process by the Myanmar junta following the
February 1, 2021 coup d’état and the role of NVCs in the erasure of Rohingya.
In an annex to his report to the U.N. General Assembly, Tom Andrews stated:
The junta continues to force or coerce Rohingya to accept the Identity
Card for Nationality Verification (ICNV)/National Verification Card (NVC).
The ICNV/NVC still does not serve as a predictable or accessible pathway
to citizenship, nor has it increased access to rights, including freedomof movement, in a consistent and predictable manner. The NVC processcontinues to require Rohingya to self-identify as foreigners and, as such,remains an administrative tool to erase Rohingya ethnic-identity.188
Validating these points, on November 19, 2021, junta-backed media reported
the junta’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs saying:
Myanmar does not recognize the term “Rohingya.” The real aim of using
this term is to claim wider ethnicity and territorial status. Such usage has
never existed in legal and historical records of the country and thus, thepeople of Myanmar cannot accept it.189
186 Fortify Rights interview with A.C., U.S., August 10, 2021. This Rohingya man fled Myanmar after
the February 2021 attempted coup and sought asylum in the United States.
187 Fortify Rights interview with Z.I., Rakhine State, Myanmar, July 19, 2021.
188 Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, Thomas
H. Andrews, “Annex 1 – Additional Human Rights Concerns Observed by the Special
Rapporteur,” U.N. Doc. A/76//Slot3181, September 1, 2021, https://www.ohchr.org/
Documents/Countries/MM/GA76report-annex-SR-Myanmar.pdf, para. 18.
189 The statement by the military junta Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Naypyitaw went
on to say: “It is disturbing to see that the unlawful and terrorist groups, NUG and
Kyaw Moe Tun recognize the term ‘Rohingya’ and call for repealing the 1982 Myanmar
Citizenship Law in direct contradiction to the national interests, historical facts andII. Post-Coup Human Rights Violations Related to National Verification Cards in Myanmar

52

Rohingya interviewed by Fortify Rights believe the junta is continuing a longstanding campaign
to erase the ethnic identity of Rohingya and destroy them as a people group, using the NVC asa tool to implement this campaign. This chapter exposes how the Myanmar military junta is
continuing to use NVCs to deny Rohingya the right to basic rights in the context of an ongoing
genocide in Rakhine State, Myanmar.

Restrictions on Nationality and Denial of Identity

Rohingya in Myanmar who applied for the NVC since February 1, 2021, told Fortify Rights thatthe junta is continuing the authorities’ earlier practices of refusing to allow them to identify as“Rohingya” in the application process, and instead requiring them to register as “Bengali” oranother foreign identity.190
A Rohingya woman in Rakhine State’s Buthidaung Township told Fortify Rights how the junta
labelled her a “Bengali” when she applied for a NVC in July 2021 in order to travel and pass security
checkpoints in Rakhine State. She told Fortify Rights:
I went to Buthidaung immigration office to make the NVC . . . [The officers] wrote “Bengali.”In the column, they wrote “Bengali” and the religion “Islam.” I can read a little bit of Burmese.
[The military] want to make us Desh Sara [stateless]. I feel bad they wrote I was Bengali. I
am a Rohingya, and we have a family list that is Rohingya, and we have Rohingya parents.191
Another Rohingya man, 30, in Buthidaung Township, who applied for an NVC after the coup around Marchor April 2021, told Fortify Rights: “[Junta officers] asked my religion. They asked my ethnicity . . . They
wrote ‘Bengali’ [at the immigration office] . . . Our name is Rohingya, but they wrote Bengali.”192
A 26-year-old Rohingya woman in Maungdaw Township told Fortify Rights how she lost all her
family identification documents during the 2016 military-led attacks against Rohingya in RakhineState.193 She said: “During the 2016 massacre, the Myanmar military killed my husband, and ourhouse was burned. We lost all of our belongings, including our documents such as ID cards andhousehold registration papers.”194
She went on to say: “As I lost all of my identity documents, I wasn’t able to move from one place
to another place. I can’t go out so I decided to take the NVC, and I got it on October 8, 2021.”195 A
photograph of the woman’s NVC is on file with Fortify Rights.196
To travel to the immigration office to apply for the NVC, the woman described paying 2,000 Myanmar
Kyat (approximately US$1) to obtain a recommendation letter from the village administration office
and another 5,000 Myanmar Kyat (approximately US$2.70) to the district administration office. At
the immigration office, she paid 10,000 Myanmar Kyat (approximately US$5.50) to immigration
officials to facilitate the application process.197 Describing the application process itself, she said:
will of the people.” Myanmar Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “Myanmar Sees No Reason for UN’s Resolution Other
Than a Politically Motivated Agenda,” November 19, 2021, https://www.meseoul.org/index.php?option=com_
content&view=category&layout=blog&id=71&Itemid=341&limitstart=5.
190 Fortify Rights interviews with Z.B., A.Z., A.A., and B.B., Rakhine State, Myanmar, February 10, 2021, July 20, 2021,
and April 4, 2022. Furthermore, an aid worker in Myanmar familiar with the situation told Fortify Rights thejunta continues to use the term “Bengali,” saying “It’s actually one of the barriers towards obtaining documents.
Rohingya don’t want their documents to say ‘Bengali.’” See, Fortify Rights communication with B.C., in undisclosed
location, April 6, 2022.
191 Fortify Rights interview with Z.H., Rakhine State, Myanmar, July 13, 2021.
192 Fortify Rights interview with Z.I., Rakhine State, Myanmar, July 19, 2021.
193 Fortify Rights interview with B.B., Rakhine State, Myanmar, April 4, 2022.
194 Ibid.
195 Ibid.
196 Photograph of the NVC on file with Fortify Rights, October 8, 2021.
197 Fortify Rights interview with B.B., Rakhine State, Myanmar, April 4, 2022. Furthermore, a Rohingya person in
Rakhine told Al Jazeera about the restrictions on travel, saying: “If we have to go to Sittwe for our health problems,Genocide by Attrition53

For ethnicity, they only allowed “Bengali.” . . . [The officials at immigration] insisted that I
write “Bengali,” so I wrote “Bengali.” They know I am a Rohingya, but they said we just know
Bengali, no Rohingya . . . I was very disappointed and sad as I could not list my identity.198
A 19-year-old Rohingya man from Minbya Township in Rakhine State similarly described being
required to identify as “Bengali” when he obtained an NVC on March 25, 2022.199 He said: “[Theauthorities] filled out according to details that were on my family registration list. On the family
registration list our ethnicity was mentioned as ‘Bengali’ so they mentioned me as ‘Bengali.’”200
The man explained why the authorities require Rohingya to identify as “Bengali,” saying:
The reason Myanmar authorities are pressuring us to accept the NVC is because they want tomake us illegal immigrants and Bengali people as a strategy to exclude us from citizenshipand ethnicity [in Myanmar] . . . Accepting NVC, means you identify yourself as “Bengali
immigrants.” We [Rohingya] don’t have any options. We need documents to travel to other
cities, like Sittwe or other cities specifically for medical emergencies or business.201
Immigration authorities in Rakhine State also made it clear to the man that citizenship was not an
option for Rohingya. He said:
I requested to the immigration officer [name withheld], “Can I apply for a citizenship cardinstead of an NVC? I want to apply for a citizenship card like the Rakhine community does.”He said, “No” . . . The official at the immigration office said, “You don’t have the same rights
as the Rakhine and cannot get citizenship at this moment.”202
The junta also continues to use tactics, which were also used under State Counsellor Aung San Suu
Kyi’s administration, to pressure Rohingya into accepting the NVC.203 For example, a 57-year-old
Rohingya man from northern Rakhine State told Fortify Rights how immigration officials came tohis village in July 2021. 204 He said:[The officers] told us to take the NVC, explaining that, “No one can stay here without taking
the NVC. This is not your country. You have to accept this, and then you need to apply
for citizenship.” Like that, they pressured us so much. It was officers from immigration
department themselves who came to the village.205
A Rohingya man from Maungdaw Township, who spent nearly five years in detention, told
Fortify Rights how the junta forced him to accept the NVC to obtain his release in April 2021,
saying: “[Junta prison and immigration officers] forced us to take it [the NVC]. Otherwise, theywould not free us . . . They required many signatures from us on different papers. They mention us
as ‘Bengali’ in the NVC [application form].”206
there will be many restrictions and it will take a lot of time. First, we have to go to the Buthidaung immigration
office and then we have to go to the district immigration office in Maungdaw. If the district office refuses us, we
can’t go.” See, Kyaw Hsan Hlaing, “Myanmar’s Military Coup Prolongs Misery for Rohingya in Rakhine,” Al Jazeera,
January 6, 2022, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/1/6/rohingya-myanmar-restrictions-on-freedom-of-movement.
198 Fortify Rights interview with B.B., Rakhine State, Myanmar, April 4, 2022.
199 Fortify Rights interview with B.D., Rakhine State, Myanmar, April 5, 2022.
200 Ibid.
201 Ibid.
202 Ibid.
203 An aid worker in Myanmar told Fortify Rights in March 2022: “There seems to be no major differences in the
NVC process pre-or-post-coup. Perhaps one difference might be that NVC applicants are now required to travel tothe immigration office in town, which is costly.” Fortify Rights communication with B.Z., undisclosed location,
Myanmar, March 14, 2022.
204 Fortify Rights interview with A.G., Rakhine State, Myanmar, September 24, 2021.
205 Ibid.
206 Fortify Rights interview with Z.F., Rakhine State, Myanmar, May 29, 2021.

II. Post-Coup Human Rights Violations Related to National Verification Cards in Myanmar

54

Another Rohingya in Rakhine State told Fortify Rights: “We don’t want to make ourselves ‘Bengali’by accepting the NVC . . . How could we agree to lose our original identity knowingly?”207
Despite the coup and ongoing genocide against Rohingya, a small number of displaced Rohingya
have informally returned to Myanmar’s Rakhine State since the coup.208 Fortify Rights obtained
a filled-in “Form for Reception” issued by the junta-run Ministry of Social Welfare Relief andResettlement—a verification form for Rohingya refugees returning from Bangladesh—which
includes a section for “race” and “religion.” In this completed form for Rohingya refugees returning
to Myanmar, the applicant’s “race” is listed as “Bengali.”209“Project Flowerbed”: Nationwide Citizenship Verification
In and beyond Rakhine State, the junta has attempted to initiate a nationwide citizenshipverification campaign called Pan Khin, or Project Flowerbed in English. On May 7, 2021,
Myint Kyaing, who heads the Ministry of Labour, Immigration, and Population for the
military junta, announced that Project Flowerbed would provide identity cards to allrecognized “ethnic nationals” who lack identity documentation.210 The junta reportedly
initiated the project to address “terrible fraud in the voter list,” which the military
claimed to be the reason the NLD won a landslide victory in the 2020 elections.211
207 Fortify Rights interview with A.G., Rakhine State, Myanmar, September 24, 2021.
208 Despite the pervasive persecution of Rohingya in Myanmar, a strong desire among displaced Rohingya to returnto their homeland in Myanmar remains. For example, a 2018 survey conducted by a team of Rohingya refugee
researchers with support by Fortify Rights found that a majority (94.7 percent) of Rohingya surveyed in Bangladesh
reported a desire to return to Myanmar, identifying a number pre-conditions that must be in place before returns
would be possible, including: “citizenship” (92.5 percent), “compensation for loss” (85.9 percent), “protection (e.g.,
U.N. Security Force)” (75.4 percent), “freedoms (travel, attend school, etc.).” Fortify Rights, “The Torture in My Mind”:
The Right to Mental Health for Rohingya Survivors of Genocide in Myanmar and Bangladesh, December 10, 2020, https://www.fortifyrights.org/downloads/The%20Torture%20in%20My%20Mind%20-%20Fortify%20Rights%20-%20
December-10-2020.pdf. In May 2021, the junta-run media The Global New Light of Myanmar reported the return of 790
displaced Rohingya. “Repatriation Process of Displaced Persons from Rakhine State to Bangladesh Is Underway,”
The Global New Light of Myanmar, May 23, 2021, https://www.gnlm.com.mm/repatriation-process-of-displacedpersons-from-rakhine-state-to-bangladesh-is-underway/.
209 State Administrative Council, Ministry of Social Welfare Relief and Resettlement “Form for Reception,” on file with
Fortify Rights, May 8, 2021. Refugees in Cox’s Bazar also said the conditions are not right to return to Myanmar. For examplea Rohingya man told Fortify Rights in April 2022:
We will not go back to Burma [Myanmar] if we have to acknowledge ourselves as Bengali and receive a NVC. The
conditions that Master Mohib Ullah [the late Mohib Ullah was assassinated in September 2021] has proposed in the
country and abroad, if we can go with our rights according to those conditions he has proposed, we will go. Rights
mean our house, our land, security of our lives and property, and living a life like the other citizens of that country.
Fortify Rights interview with B.E., Cox’s Bazar District, Bangladesh, April 14, 2022.
210 The campaign is expected to issue cards to approximately four million people across the country. “Myanmar Nationals
Can Grab the Rights of Citizens: Pankhin Project,” The Global New Light of Myanmar, May 8, 2021, https://www.gnlm.com.
mm/myanmar-nationals-can-grab-the-rights-of-citizens-pankhin-project/. “Consider How to Develop the Country,”
The Global New Light of Myanmar, August 24, 2021, https://cdn.myanmarseo.com/file/client-cdn/2021/08/24_August_21_
gnlm.pdf. Fortify Rights research focuses on the Pan Khin in Rakhine State although junta-run media indicates that the
project is ongoing in Yangon Region likely to try to track dissidents. The Global New Light of Myanmar states:
Issuance of citizenship scrutiny cards must be done to the people residing in Yangon Region to have smooth
travelling . . . Yangon Region Chief Minister U Hla Soe reported on happening of terror attacks in the
Region . . . Region ministers and officials also reported on rule of law, security measures and declining of violent
attacks, crime reduction, and implementation of Pan Khinn project to issue CSCs to the people.
See, “Administrative Officials Need to Take Severe Action Under the Law Without Bias Against Those Who Harm
Security Measures: Senior General,” The Global New Light of Myanmar, October 11, 2021, https://cdn.myanmarseo.com/
file/client-cdn/2021/10/11-10-20211.pdf.
211 “Entire People, All Administrative Bodies Need to Join,” The Global New Light of Myanmar, December 21, 2021, https://
cdn.myanmarseo.com/file/client-cdn/2021/12/14_Dec_21_gnlm-1.pdf. Furthermore, an aid worker with knowledgeof the project told Fortify Rights, “The Phan Khin project is a mobile exercise conducted by Ministry of Immigration
and Population to facilitate the issuance of documents–birth certificates, household lists, and citizenship cards.”
Fortify Rights communication with B.C., April 6, 2022.

Genocide by Attrition

The junta-controlled Ministry of Foreign Affairs publicly confirmed on July 14, 2021 that“the citizenship verification process will be carried out in accordance with 1982 Citizenship
Law.”212 Senior General Min Aung Hlaing further ordered that “citizenship scrutiny cards mustbe issued to all citizens born of Myanmar citizen parents. Relevant scrutiny cards must be
released to those who are deserved [sic] for having citizenship and associate citizens under the1982 Myanmar Citizenship Law.”213

55

Under the Project Flowerbed directive, the township-level authorities are designated to scrutinize
the accuracy of the household lists “in accordance” with the 1982 Citizenship Law, which limits
full citizenship rights to specific ethnic groups, and issue “eligible cards.”214 Given that Rohingya
are excluded from full citizenship rights under the 1982 Citizenship Law and its regulatory regime,
the vast majority of Rohingya are not eligible for citizenship and can only take NVCs.215
As part of this effort, the Township Planning Administration of Maungdaw in northern
Rakhine State issued an internal junta directive to its ward and village administrators on
May 11, 2021.216 The directive, signed by Aung Ye, the chair of the Township Administrative
Committee, instructs authorities to gather “name lists of the migrants”—which could mean
Rohingya and others may be discriminatorily denied citizenship rights in Myanmar as part of
the Project Flowerbed.217 It is unclear if Rohingya in Rakhine State are being issued anything
more than NVCs during the Project Flowerbed.218
The rapid spread of COVID-19 cases in Myanmar, which skyrocketed in early July 2021,
threatened to slow Project Flowerbed.219 In response, amid escalating COVID-related deaths,
the junta called for an “acceleration of the Pan Khin [Flowerbed] project, which aims to issue
identity and citizenship cards to the whole population, together with the drive to have allhouseholds legally registered.”220 The junta also reportedly expanded the project in July 2021 to“displaced persons in the respective regions and states.”221

212 Myanmar Office of the Commander-in-Chief of Defence Services, “Myanmar Rejects the Draft Resolution Tabled by OIC,”
July 14, 2021, https://cincds.gov.mm/node/13530?d=1.

213 “The Government Will Provide Necessary Assistance for Generating Electricity through Solar Panels, Says Senior General,” The
Global New Light of Myanmar, December 15, 2021, https://cdn.myanmarseo.com/file/client-cdn/2021/12/15_Dec_21_gnlm.pdf.

214 Township Administrative Committee of Maungdaw, “Guidance Related to the Flower Bed Project,” May 11, 2021, on
file with Fortify Rights, unofficial translation. Burma Citizenship Law. See also, Fortify Rights, “Tools of Genocide.”
215 For example, during a meeting on June 10, 2021, the Immigration and Citizenship Verification Working Committee confirmedthat the NVC process would be implemented in Rakhine State. “Immigration and Citizenship Verification Working Committee
Holds Meeting (1/2021),” The Global New Light of Myanmar, June 11, 2021, https://www.gnlm.com.mm/immigration-andcitizenship-verification-working-committee-holds-meeting-1-2021/.

216 Directive to the Township Planning Administration of Maungdaw, May 11, 2021, official translation on file with Fortify Rights.
217 “Migrants” is a reference to Rohingya and others, which former governments, dating back to the early 1960s, have refused torecognize, using the term “Bengali” or other terms instead to emphasize their alleged “foreignness.” Directive to the Township
Planning Administration of Maungdaw, May 11, 2021, official translation on file with Fortify Rights.

218 Township Administrative Committee of Maungdaw, “Guidance Related to the Flower Bed Project,” May 11, 2021, on file with
Fortify Rights, unofficial translation. Under the 1949 Residents of Burma Registration Act, Myanmar residents are required toregister members of their household and maintain “household lists.” Rakhine State immigration officials and members of the
Border Guard Police in northern Rakhine State conduct annual household surveys and photograph Rohingya households with
their household lists since the 1990s. Rohingya are also required to promptly report any change to their family situation—
including births, deaths, relocations, and marriages—to their respective Township Administration Office. The Residents of Burma
Registration Act, 1949. See also, Norwegian Refugee Council, The Seagull: Human Rights, Peace and Development, the Statelessness
Network Asia Pacific, and the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, “A Gender Analysis of the Right to a Nationality in
Myanmar,” March 2018, https://www.nrc.no/resources/reports/a-gender-analysis-of-the-right-to-a-nationality-in-myanmar/,p. 42; Fortify Rights, “Tools of Genocide,” p. 57.

219 See, for example, Fortify Rights interview with A.C., undisclosed location, August 10, 2021. By early July 2021, only three percent
of Myanmar’s population was vaccinated, and COVID-19 was responsible for significant deaths. See, Naw Theresa, “Myanmar
Plunges into Deadly Third Covid-19 Wave,” The Diplomat, July 19, 2021, https://thediplomat.com/2021/07/myanmar-plungesinto-deadly-third-covid-19-wave/.

220 “The Fifth Month of the State Administration Council Government,” The Global New Light of Myanmar, July 22, 2021, https://cdn.
myanmarseo.com/file/client-cdn/2021/07/22_July_21_gnlm.pdf. See also, “Pan Khin Project Important for Socio-Economic
Lives of Citizens: I & P Union Minister,” The Global New Light of Myanmar, August 15, 2021, https://cdn.myanmarseo.com/file/client-cdn/2021/08/15_August_21_gnlm.pdf.

221 “The Sixth Month of the State Administration Council,” The Global New Light of Myanmar, September 1, 2021, https://cdn.
myanmarseo.com/file/client-cdn/2021/08/1_Sept_21_gnlm.pdf.

II. Post-Coup Human Rights Violations Related to National Verification Cards in Myanmar

56

NVCs and Restrictions on Rights to Freedom of Movementand Livelihoods

Similar to the situation in Rakhine State before the coup, the junta is requiring Rohingya obtain
NVCs and a “Form-4”—a temporary travel permit for “foreigners”—to travel temporarily between
townships or, in rare cases, outside of Rakhine State.222
In May 2021, a Rohingya man in Maungdaw Township told Fortify Rights: “Security forces are veryalert and strict right now. I cannot travel with my White Card receipt. Rakhine people are not stopped
and checked like us [at checkpoints]. We, Rohingya, are not recognized as citizens but others are.”223
Another Rohingya man in Maungdaw Township told Fortify Rights how the coup affected travel for
Rohingya in northern Rakhine State, saying:[A]fter this military coup, [the junta] have started enforcing the travel restrictions more.
People are not easily able to travel. NVC holders can travel. People have to survive. They are
put into circumstances that make people vulnerable to take the NVC . . . If we see the trend,
we can see the movement restrictions are more than under the NLD.224
A 17-year-old Rohingya girl from Buthidaung Township told Fortify Rights she spent more than 20days in detention in an unknown location in central Rakhine State for travel-and immigration-related
offenses, along with 12 others traveling between Buthidaung and Bago in mid-2021. The junta charged
the group for attempting to travel to Malaysia with the support of a broker. Upon her release, junta
officials stopped her again while she was traveling from central Rakhine State back to her home
township. She said: “I was forced to take the NVC [by the junta] when I was between Bago and Sittwe[townships] . . . I was not happy to accept the NVC. If I didn’t accept the NVC, they might have beat us.”225
The girl described her experience in detention saying:
I don’t remember the date. We were arrested in May or June [2021] . . . There were also men andwomen together [in detention] . . . The police beat the men in police custody . . . I saw myself. It
happened in front of us. The police beat them with their stick and with their fist. The police beatthem on their face, side, and they kicked them. They pushed them with the back end of the gun.226
Women’s Peace Network—a Rohingya-led human rights organization—reported in March 2022
that since February 2021 the Myanmar junta has arrested and detained at least 850 Rohingya
people, including women and children, for traveling without permission.227

222 The Form-4 application process normally includes a police clearance form and Village Departure Certificate. See,
Independent Rakhine Initiative, Freedom of Movement in Rakhine State, March 2020, https://www.rohingyapost.com/
freedom-of-movement-in-rakhine-state-report-by-independent-rakhine-initiative/ p. 13. See also, Fortify Rights,“U.N. Security Council: Take Urgent Action Against Myanmar Military Junta,” December 7, 2021, https://www.
fortifyrights.org/mya-inv-2021-12-06/. See for example, Fortify Rights interviews with Z.C., A.I., A.B., Rakhine State,
Myanmar, May 25, August 9, and March 25, 2021, and April 4, 2022.
223 Fortify Rights interview with Z.C., Rakhine State, Myanmar, May 25, 2021.
224 Fortify Rights interview with A.I., Rakhine State, Myanmar, March 13, 2022.
225 Fortify Rights interview with A.B., Rakhine State, Myanmar, August 9, 2021. Fortify Rights also received consent
from one of the girl’s guardians in the home at the time of the interview.
226 Ibid.
227 Women’s Peace Network, “Rohingya Update: Arbitrary Arrest and Detention of Rohingya Since the Attempted
Coup,” March 2, 2022, https://mcusercontent.com/6819ae24e30bd9a9db0322d69/files/2a79f5e9-4d82-bf0a-7c7e702bc869a5c2/Briefer_on_Arbitrary_Arrest_Detention.pdf.

Genocide by Attrition57

In addition to requiring NVCs, the junta has also reinstituted earlier discriminatory policies requiring
Rohingya to obtain a “Form-4.” An administrative order reviewed by Fortify Rights and issued by thejunta-run General Administration Department of Buthidaung Township in Rakhine State on November
25, 2021 states, “Bengali people can only travel after obtaining legal permission (Form-4)” and thatbreaching the order will result in “strong action being taken as per the existing law.” The order further
states that the restrictions are necessary to protect “township security and the rule of law.”228
In a separate internal letter, also obtained by Fortify Rights, from the military junta’s Ministryof Immigration and Population in Rakhine State’s Ponnagyun Township in Sittwe District dated
November 10, 2021, Chief Officer Win Myint informed the Rakhine State Director of the Ministry of
Immigration and Population located in Sittwe Township of the arrest and conviction of 45 “Bengali”
for “travelling illegally.” According to the letter, the Ponnagyun Township Court convicted andsentenced individuals in the group on October 21 and, on November 2, the authorities released
children, who were part of the group. At the time of writing, five adults remain detained.229
A Rohingya man, 25, from southern Buthidaung Township confirmed the continued necessity of a Form4 in order to travel, telling Fortify Rights in December 2021: “I had to take a Form-4 [from ButhidaungTownship] to go to Maungdaw Township . . . I went to Maungdaw north to work on harvesting a rice
field . . . [The junta forces] checked our Form-4 at three checkpoints while going to Maungdaw.”230
Another Rohingya man, 19, from Minbya Township confirmed that NVC-holders must still have a
Form-4 to travel. He said: “Currently, I am holding an NVC as they are not giving us the national
scrutiny card. Without having an ID card, it’s not possible to travel. When we travel with the NVC,
we still need to apply for a Form-4.”231
Rohingya also described the challenges that the travel restrictions pose for their daily lives. For
example, a 30-year-old Rohingya business owner from Buthidaung Township told Fortify Rights that
he had to obtain an NVC to continue his business. He said: “I sell vegetables in Maungdaw . . . Before
this, I did not have an NVC, so I could not do my vegetable business.”232
Another Rohingya man from Buthidaung Township, who obtained an NVC in May 2021, similarly
shared how he had to obtain an NVC to continue his livelihood. He said:
It has been two and half months since I took the NVC. I took the NVC after the military coup. I
had to take the NVC from the Buthidaung immigration office. I took the NVC because we don’t
have any business here [in Buthidaung], and I have to drive a car on the road. We can’t travel
to Maungdaw and Buthidaung. That’s why I had to accept the NVC.233
He went on to describe his earlier experience being extorted at military checkpoints for not carrying
an NVC. He said: “They took money from me three times at the four-mile check post. The last time
was one month after the military coup . . . It was a multi-department checkpoint, and they tookmoney from me, saying I didn’t have any documents.”234

228 The Buthidaung Township General Administration Department appended the November 25 order to an internal
letter sent to multiple Myanmar military, police, and border-guard commanders as well as township administrativeand justice officials. Order on file with Fortify Rights, November 25, 2021. See also, Fortify Rights, “U.N. Security
Council: Take Urgent Action Against Myanmar Military Junta.”
229 Ibid.
230 Fortify Rights interview with A.H., Rakhine State, Myanmar, December 1, 2021.
231 Fortify Rights interview with B.D. Rakhine State, Myanmar, April 5, 2022.
232 Fortify Rights interview with Z.I., Rakhine State, Myanmar, July 19, 2021.
233 Fortify Rights interview with A.A., Rakhine State, Myanmar, July 20, 2021.
234 Ibid.

II. Post-Coup Human Rights Violations Related to National Verification Cards in Myanmar

58

NVC Requirements for Rohingya Humanitarian
Aid Workers
In 2019, Fortify Rights documented how five humanitarian organizations operating in
northern Rakhine State contributed to facilitating the NLD-government’s discriminatory
policies and practices against Rohingya by requiring Rohingya staff to obtain NVCs as
a condition of employment.235 This situation remains largely unchanged post-coup.236
For example, a 27-year-old Rohingya man from Buthidaung Township, who applied fora job in February 2021 to join an international humanitarian organization operating in
Rakhine State, said the organization required a copy of the NVC to be “attached alongwith other documents” in his application.237 He described the process of applying for the
NVC, which required a recommendation letter from his village administrator, a letterfrom the police station, and an up-to-date family list.238 He said:
We must mark “Bengali” in the [application] forms. We call ourselves“Rohingya” . . . The word “Bengali” is already written on the form, and we justneed to mark it. “Bengali” is also mentioned in the recommendation letter of the[Rakhine] village administrator and from the police station . . . When I tried tomention “Rohingya” at the [ethnic-Rakhine] village administrator’s office, they
told me there is no Rohingya here, but you are “Bengali.” . . . . The applicants [forthe international organization] who don’t have an NVC are not even shortlistedwith the assumption that they won’t be able to work without an NVC. To apply fora post [with an international organization], the NVC is also attached along withthe other documents.”239
Speaking about the impacts of obtaining the NVC, the man said:[The junta] are making us foreigners by forcefully making us accept the card, since
they have power in their hands, even though we are natives of this country . . . I
am already a citizen here and have all the qualifications to be a citizen. They forced
me to be a foreigner.240
A Rohingya in Maungdaw Township who had knowledge of humanitarian operations in
Rakhine State told Fortify Rights travel restrictions are imposed even on Rohingya aid
workers and that “organizations are not in a position to hire Rohingya without NVCs.”241

235 In 2019, Fortify Rights documented how five international organizations operational in Rakhine State, in policy orpractice, required Rohingya staff to hold NVCs. This requirement was largely due to Myanmar authorities’ pervasive
restrictions on freedom of movement, and other freedoms, against Rohingya without NVCs and the challenges those
restrictions would pose for staff in conducting their duties. Fortify Rights, “Tools of Genocide,” pp. 63-65.
236 Fortify Rights interview with A.Z. and A.I., Rakhine State, Myanmar, July 20, 2021 and March 13, 2022.
237 Fortify Rights interview with A.Z., Rakhine State, Myanmar, July 20, 2021.
238 Ibid.
239 Ibid.
240 Ibid.
241 Fortify Rights interview with A.I., Rakhine State, Myanmar, March 13, 2022.

Genocide by Attrition

III.	The International Legal
Framework

Raphael Lemkin, who developed the concept of genocide and was the driving
force behind the adoption of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention andPunishment of the Crime of Genocide, envisioned a more comprehensive
definition of the “crime of all crimes” than how it is defined in the Convention.
In 1944, he wrote, “The objectives of such a [genocidal] plan would be thedisintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language,
national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups,
and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and eventhe lives of the individuals belonging to such groups . . .”242 Most of these
indicators of genocide as a process of attrition were not included in the final
text of the Convention, which required significant diplomatic compromise topass.243 Nonetheless, Article 2 of the 1948 Convention, employing more genericlanguage, listed five qualifying acts, three of which are directly relevant to theidea of “genocide by attrition,” especially as it relates to the Rohingya case.244
Decades of union- and state-level laws, policies, and practices enabled militaryand civilian government officials to identify, control, and persecute Rohingya
in ways that violated elements of Article 2 of the Genocide Convention. These
enumerated crimes include:(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c)Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bringabout its physical destruction in whole or in part; [and] (d) Imposing
measures intended to prevent births within the group.245
Fortify Rights, like many other human rights organizations and various U.N.
bodies, have comprehensively documented all three violations, which havecontinued over generations.246
242 Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Washington: Carnegie Endowment forInternational Peace, 1944), p. ix.
243 Kurt Jonassohn with Karin Solveig Bjornson, Genocide and Gross Human Rights Violations in
Comparative Perspective, (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers 1998).
244 Genocide Convention, Art. II.
245 Ibid.
246 For example, Fortify Rights found “reasonable grounds” to believe that the Myanmar
military, police, and civilian perpetrators committed the crime of genocide against Rohingya
civilians in Rakhine State through at least three criminal acts of genocide: killings, serious
bodily and mental harm, and the infliction of conditions of life calculated to bring about
the physical destruction of the group. Fortify Rights, “They Gave Them Long Swords,” pp.

III. The International Legal Framework

60

On September 6, 2018, the International Criminal Court (ICC) Pre-Trial Chamber I ruled that the ICC
may exercise jurisdiction over the alleged deportation of Rohingya from Myanmar to Bangladesh,marking the first time the Court has exercised jurisdiction over crimes involving Myanmar.247
Later, the Government of The Gambia brought a case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ)
alleging Myanmar committed the crime of genocide against Rohingya.248
The violations documented in this report demonstrate that the crimes and violations associatedwith the NVC process amount to genocidal acts and should be considered as such in ongoinginvestigations and legal proceedings.

59–72; Fortify Rights and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “They Tried to Kill Us All.” The FFM similarly found“sufficient information to warrant the investigation and prosecution of senior officials in the [military] chain ofcommand” for the crime of genocide against Rohingya in Rakhine State. OHCHR, “Myanmar: Tatmadaw LeadersMust be Investigated for Genocide, Crimes Against Humanity, War Crimes–UN Report,” August 27, 2018, https://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/Pages/NewsDetail/aspx?NewsID=23475&LangID=E.
247 Decision on the “Prosecution’s Request for a Ruling on Jurisdiction under Article 19(3) of the Statute, International
Criminal Court, ICC-RoC46(3)-01/18-37, Decision (Pre-Trial Chamber I), September 6, 2018, para. 61.
248 International Court of Justice, “The Republic of the Gambia Institutes Proceedings against the Republic of the Unionof Myanmar and Asks the Court to Indicate Provisional Measures,” November 11, 2019, https://www.icj-cij.org/
public/files/case-related/178/178-20191111-PRE-01-00-EN.pdf.

Genocide by Attrition

Recommendations

61

To the Myanmar Junta

 RESTORE relevant authority to those rightfully elected by the people of Myanmar.
 ABOLISH immediately the National Verification Card process, cease identifying Rohingya as“Bengali,” and end all restrictions on freedom of movement for Rohingya people.

 ORDER junta operatives, including the Myanmar Police Force, immigration officials,
junta armed forces, and others, to immediately cease requiring Rohingya to hold National
Verification Cards to engage in protected activities.
 ANNOUNCE publicly that Rohingya are not required to accept or hold National Verification Cards.

To the National Unity Government of Myanmar

 ABOLISH immediately the National Verification Card process and restore equal access tofull citizenship rights for Rohingya through a speedy administrative process developed inmeaningful consultation with the Rohingya community in Myanmar, Bangladesh, and thewider diaspora.

 ACCEPT all forms of documentation, including National Verification Cards, National
Registration Cards, White Cards, household lists, and other previous government and U.N.issued identity documents, as well as alternative forms of evidence, such as testimonial
evidence, to support applications for Myanmar citizenship.
 REPEAL all laws, policies, and orders that require the possession of a National Verification
Card to engage in activities protected by international human rights law, specifically, in
exercising the rights to liberty, freedom of movement, and livelihoods.
- Work with stakeholders in Myanmar and outside the country to draft a framework ofaction to restore citizenship rights for Rohingya and other ethnic minorities.
- Consult Rohingya and other ethnic groups in drafting a new citizenship law that replaces
the 1982 Citizenship Law in Myanmar.
 ANNOUNCE publicly that Rohingya are not required to accept or hold National Verification Cards.
 APPOINT a ministerial-level ethnic-Rohingya representative to the National Unity Government
to assist in implementing and expanding policies concerning the Rohingya people, including
efforts to achieve justice and accountability for the genocide and other atrocity crimes.
 COOPERATE fully with international justice mechanisms regarding past human rights
violations and atrocities against Rohingya, including denying citizenship rights andrestrictions on freedom of movement.
 ENCOURAGE “insider witnesses” within the National Unity Government or deserters from the
Myanmar military and police to share with international justice mechanisms any actionable
information, knowledge, or past personal experience in the imposition of restrictions or thecommission of crimes against Rohingya.

Recommendations

62

To the United Nations and International Organizations in
Myanmar and Bangladesh

 ESTABLISH a common position and a coordinated, rights-respecting response to the National
Verification Card process that protects the rights of Rohingya and other communities andenables Rohingya to opt out of the National Verification Card process, if they choose, without
fear of reprisals or loss of opportunities.

 OPERATIONALIZE the Human Rights Up Front Action Plan, especially regarding work in
Rakhine State and the delivery of humanitarian aid to displaced communities throughout
Myanmar, to promote and protect human rights and avoid complicity in human rights
violations.
 SUPPORT current and future international efforts to hold perpetrators of atrocity crimes
accountable, including genocide and crimes against humanity. Support the mandate and workof the Independent International Mechanism for Myanmar to collect, consolidate, preserve,
and analyze evidence for future criminal proceedings.
 EMPLOY legal specialists to identify mass atrocity crimes, recommend emergency responses,
and educate the humanitarian community about prevention.

To United Nations Member States RECOGNIZE the National Unity Government as the legitimate government of Myanmar.
Support the National Unity Government’s existing credentials at the United Nations and otherinternational organizations.

 ENSURE international justice for past and ongoing atrocity crimes in Myanmar and press
the United Nations Security Council to refer Myanmar to the International Criminal Court
or, alternatively, to establish an ad hoc international criminal tribunal to investigate andprosecute genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.
 ACKNOWLEDGE publicly, through formal determinations, the Rohingya genocide and otheratrocity crimes perpetrated in Myanmar, including war crimes and crimes against humanity.
 ESTABLISH a domestic inter-agency department for the prevention and ending of mass
atrocity crimes worldwide and coordinate with such departments.

Genocide by Attrition

Acknowledgements

Fortify Rights dedicates this report to Mohib Ullah, the founder of Arakan
Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights (ARSPH). He was a steadfast
human rights defender and beloved partner of Fortify Rights and wasassassinated in a refugee camp in Bangladesh in September 2021.
Ken MacLean is a Senior Advisor to Fortify Rights and is the lead researcher
and primary author of this report. Fortify Rights Human Rights Specialist Zaw
Win and Senior Human Rights Specialist John Quinley III co-authored and led
the research on post-coup violations affecting Rohingya in Myanmar. The
writing, research, and editing support team included Fortify Rights Executive
Director Amy Smith, Chief Executive Officer Matthew Smith, Regional Director
Ismail Wolff, and Investigations Associate Pavani Nagaraja Bhat.
Fortify Rights Visual Design Associate Chutapat Suwansatiean and Senior
Visual Design Specialist Iuri Kato created the layout and design of the report.
Jack Picone, Saiful Huq Omi (with assistance from Shantanu Majumder), Patrick
Brown, and Greg Constantine provided photographs for this report.
Fortify Rights also extends a special thanks to Rohingya survivors and eyewitnesses
as well as human rights defenders who contributed to the research and generously
shared their time, energy, and experiences with Fortify Rights. Special thanks
also to the generous supporters of Fortify Rights who make our work possible.

Perpetrators of genocides have long
used identification documents todiscriminate, dehumanize, and thencarry out mass violence against
protected groups. This was the caseduring the Holocaust of the Jewish
population and the Rwandan
genocide of the Tutsi population, and
it is the case of the ongoing genocideof the Rohingya population in
Myanmar.

This report, Genocide by Attrition: The
Role of Identity Documents in the
Holocaust and the Genocides of Rwanda
and Myanmar, provides comparative casestudies of these three genocides and theuse of identification documents to carryout the international crime of genocide. It
provides new information on the
Myanmar military junta’s ongoingtargeting of Rohingya people in
Rakhine State, and it makes
detailed recommendations toaddress impunity by the Myanmar
junta, hold perpetrators
accountable, and end theongoing genocide of theRohingya people.