I. Identity Documents and Genocide: Case Studies 48 on behalf of The Gambia—the country bringing the case against Myanmar—recognized the role of 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 an undercount, 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’ beginning on 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 are indeed 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, October 23, 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.