33 Further complicating the situation, the Myanmar Army and the Arakan Army—a non-state armed group comprised largely of ethnic Rakhine Buddhists—have been engaged in armed conflict in Rakhine State since 2015, displacing an estimated 60,000 predominantly Buddhist, ethnic Rakhine civilians in seven townships since January 2019.12 The Myanmar Army have killed Rakhine civilians, used forced labor in armed conflict, and arbitrarily arrested and detained Rakhine civilians— violations that rise to the level of war crimes.13 On June 21, 2019, the government ordered the shutdown of internet services in nine townships—eight in Rakhine State and one in Chin State— severely impeding humanitarian aid, business, media access, and human rights monitoring.14 The most recent attacks against the Rohingya have been perpetrated by the Myanmar military but also involved the civilian leadership of Nobel-laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, who came into power in 2016 after her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), won the 2015 national elections in a landslide. Following the elections, Aung San Suu Kyi took up the role of State Counsellor, a position created to enable her to become the de facto head of state and circumvent provisions in the 2008 military-drafted constitution that barred her from the presidency.15 Like the former administration of President Thein Sein and military-led regimes before that, the NLD-led government’s process to address Rohingya citizenship is based on the 1982 Citizenship Law, which does not meet international standards and predicates access to citizenship on ethnicity.16 The law stipulates that only members of certain “national ethnic groups”— not including Rohingya—who settled within Myanmar before the British conquest in 1824 are eligible for full citizenship.17 The government has not attempted to hide its plan to erase the Rohingya identity. On May 13, 2016, approximately five months before the instigation of mass atrocities in Rakhine State, Myanmar’s military Commander-in-Chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing stated that there were no Rohingya in Myanmar, referring to Rohingya instead as “Bengalis,” adding that “the term Rohingya does Religious Intolerance, Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide,” May 21, 2019, https://www.csw.org.uk/2019/05/21/ report/4339/article.htm (accessed August 23, 2019); Victoria Milko, “Red Robes, White Roses: Religious Discrimination in Myanmar,” New Naratif, August 7, 2019, https://newnaratif.com/journalism/red-robes-white-roses-religiousdiscrimination-in-myanmar/ (accessed August 23, 2019). 12 See, “Refugees, UNHCR Raise Concerns Over Rushed Rohingya Repatriation Bid,” Frontier Myanmar, August 20, 2019, https://frontiermyanmar.net/en/refugees-unhcr-raise-concerns-over-rushed-rohingya-repatriation-bid (accessed August 23, 2019); Fortify Rights, “Myanmar: Protect Civilians Trapped in Armed Conflict;” Amnesty International, “No one can protect us”: War crimes and abuses in Myanmar’s Rakhine State, May, 2019, https://www.amnesty.org/ download/Documents/ASA1604172019ENGLISH.PDF (accessed August 23, 2019). 13 Fortify Rights, “Myanmar: Protect Civilians Trapped in Armed Conflict”; Fortify Rights, “Myanmar: Investigate Forced Labor of Rakhine Buddhists in Western Myanmar,” March 15, 2016, https://www.fortifyrights.org/ publication-20160315.html; Amnesty International, “No one can protect us.” 14 Fortify Rights, “Myanmar: Lift Internet-Blackout in Rakhine and Chin States,” July 22, 2019, https://www. fortifyrights.org/publication-20190722.html (accessed August 23, 2019); Human Rights Watch, “Myanmar: Internet Shutdown Risks Lives,” June 28, 2019, https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/06/28/myanmar-internet-shutdown-riskslives (accessed August 25, 2019). 15 Euan McKirdy, “New Government Role Created for Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi,” CNN, April 7, 2016, http://edition. cnn.com/2016/04/06/asia/aung-san-suu-kyi-state-counsellor-role-created/index.html (accessed August 23, 2019). 16 Yale Law School and Fortify Rights, Persecution of the Rohingya Muslims, pp. 6-8. 17 Burma Citizenship Law Art. 3; United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Citizenship and Statelessness Myanmar: An Analysis of International Standards and the Myanmar Citizenship Legal Framework, April 2018, on file with Fortify Rights; Human Rights Watch, “All You Can Do Is Pray”; Fortify Rights, Policies of Persecution: Ending Abusive State Policies Against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, February 24, 2014, https://www.fortifyrights.org/downloads/Policies_ of_Persecution_Feb_25_Fortify_Rights.pdf (accessed August 23, 2019); Verena Hölzl, “Identity and Belonging in a Card: How Tattered Rohingya IDs Trace a Trail Toward Statelessness,” The New Humanitarian, March 1, 2018, https://www.irinnews.org/feature/2018/03/01/identity-and-belonging-card-how-tattered-rohingya-ids-tracetrail-toward (accessed August 23, 2019); Azeem Ibrahim, “Myanmar Wants to Track Rohingya, Not Help Them,” Foreign Policy, August 1, 2019, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/08/01/myanmar-wants-to-track-rohingya-not-helpthem/ (accessed August 23, 2019).