Rohingyas see gradual erosion of citizenship

Reuters :
Zaw Win’s grandparents had the same identity card as everyone else in Myanmar, but a generation later his parents were given a separate ID for minority Rohingyas. Today, Zaw Win is classed as an illegal immigrant in the land of his birth.
For more than three decades, Myanmar’s ruling powers have weaponised the country’s identity card system in a wider campaign of persecution, exclusion and surveillance targeting the Muslim ethnic community, human rights groups say.
Zaw Win, 37, a rights activist who fled Myanmar in 2014 in fear for his safety, traces the withdrawal of his citizenship back through his family members’ diminishing identity status.
“My grandparents had full citizenship – they had the same type of ID card that Daw Suu Kyi had,” Zaw Win said, referring to Aung San Suu Kyi, the deposed political leader who was jailed after a military coup early last year.
“My parents had a green card that only the Rohingya had, and I got a piece of paper that categorised me as Muslim and my race as Bengali, an illegal immigrant. So over the years, they stripped us of our citizenship and tried to erase us,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
When Zaw Win left Myanmar eight years ago, he had a temporary registration card issued to Rohingyas, but a year later that form of ID was also cancelled by the government.
From then on, Rohingyas were ordered to get National Verification Cards (NVCs) that identified them as non-citizens. Around the same time, officials also began collecting their biometric data such as fingerprints.
Over the next two years, human rights groups reported coercion and force by government officials and security forces issuing NVCs, alongside increasing bouts of violence including rape and mass killings that drove more than 700,000 Rohingya to flee Myanmar in August 2017 and seek refuge in Bangladesh.