Myanmar junta accused of ‘gradual destruction’ of Rohingya

Myanmar junta accused of ‘gradual destruction’ of Rohingya

Myanmar’s military junta is using identity documents to facilitate the genocide of Rohingya people, says a new report by a human rights group.

The Rohingya genocide mirrored tactics used in the Holocaust and Rwanda killings, Fortify Rights claims in a 63-page report released on June 8.

It has demanded that UN member states deny Myanmar military rulers access to weapons, finances and political legitimacy.

“Evidence from the Holocaust and Rwandan genocides shows striking similarities with the ongoing erasure of the Rohingya identity in Myanmar by the junta,” said Ken MacLean, a co-author of the report and Clark University professor at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

The report, “Genocide by Attrition: The Role of Identity Documents in the Holocaust and the Genocides of Rwanda and Myanmar,” exposes how the junta continues to force Rohingya to obtain national verification cards (NVCs) that effectively strip them of access to full citizenship rights and protections.

It provides new information about the junta’s ongoing targeting of Rohingya and includes case studies from the Holocaust and Rwandan genocides to illustrate how authoritarian regimes instrumentalize identification documents to systematically identify, persecute and kill targeted populations on a widespread and massive scale.

“Accepting an NVC means you identify yourself as a Bengali immigrant. We don’t have any options. We need documents to travel to Sittwe or other cities specifically for medical emergencies or business”

The identification cards contribute to “genocide by attrition” or the gradual destruction of a protected group by reducing their strength through sustained, indirect methods of destruction, the report states.

More than 20 Rohingya genocide survivors were interviewed while the report’s authors accessed leaked junta documents and made a post-coup analysis of junta-backed news outlets to find how the victims were also forced to identify as alien “Bengalis” as part of the effort to exclude them from citizenship and ethnicity within Myanmar.

“Accepting an NVC means you identify yourself as a Bengali immigrant. We don’t have any options. We need documents to travel to Sittwe or other cities specifically for medical emergencies or business,” a 19-year-old Rohingya man from Minbya township told Fortify Rights.

The 1982 law states that only ethnic groups whose families entered the country before 1823 are entitled to Myanmar citizenship. The Rohingya have thus been denied citizenship and have been marginalized in access to education and other government services.

By not recognizing the term “Rohingya,” successive governments and the military have implied that they are illegal immigrants from neighboring Bangladesh despite vast numbers having lived in Myanmar for decades.

An advocacy group has said the report’s findings demonstrate links between the NVC process and acts of genocide and should be a focus of investigations and legal proceedings.

More than 740,000 Rohingya have been forced to flee from Rakhine to Bangladesh due to the Myanmar military’s brutal crackdown in August 2017 that the US recently termed genocide.

Myanmar’s junta has faced mounting pressure from the international community over rights abuses and proceedings against military leaders are underway at the International Court of Justice.