Brinham 161 4.1 A Tale of Three Identity Cards There are three state-issued identity documents32 that shaped the events of Mohammed’s life as a Rohingya in Buthidaung of North Rakhine State in Myanmar and map his journey to the refugee camp in Bangladesh, where he has lived since October 2017.33 The first is a hidden and treasured document, the second a nullified and removed document, and the third an enforced document. As international agencies and governments deliberate over solutions to the mass displacement of Rohingya into Bangladesh, Mohammed’s personal history with these three documents also shapes his own visions of his family’s future—of the possibilities and dangers of returning to his home in Buthidaung. He recounts the stories of these documents as a series of increasingly dangerous encounters with the Myanmar State. The first document, hidden and treasured, is endowed with intergenerational belonging despite its lack of legal value and is now also furnished with the personal suffering and sacrifices that Mohammed has made to maintain his group identity and keep this ID card. It is his father’s “three-fold card” or National Registration Card (NRC) that was issued to Rohingya in post-independence Myanmar before military rule. It is the same document that other citizens of Myanmar carried before 1989.34 Mohammed’s father, aware that many Rohingya had had these documents confiscated, destroyed, or removed and never returned, kept it well hidden long after the time when it had ceased to be of any practical use. Before his death in 2005, he instructed Mohammed to keep it safe, as it may one day be useful to prove that he and his family belonged to the country. Mohammed paid heed to this advice and when the security forces came to his village with a list a year later to collect all the old NRCs, he denied all knowledge of the card and refused to disclose its hiding place. As a result, Mohammed was arrested and sentenced to three years in prison. The charges bore little relation to his “offence”—they were immigration charges. In return for payment of a large fee, he was able to have his sentence reduced to seven months. Upon being released, he had still not revealed the location of the ID card. When Mohammed’s village was torched in 2017, he grabbed the ID card from its hiding place, hid it on his body, and fled. With him, the ID card endured the difficult journey to the camps of Bangladesh, where he still has it. He explained that—just in case—he has not even disclosed the location of the card to his wife. He is adamant that, regardless of how they try to persuade him, he will never show this card to Myanmar State officials. The second document, which was nullified and removed, had been laced with false promises of future citizenship recognition from the military government when it was issued to Mohammed in the middle of the 1990s. It was his Temporary Registration Card (TRC), also known as a “white card”. Mohammed described how white cards had been used by the Myanmar State to “trick” both Rohingya and the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), which was working in Rakhine State at the time and was advocating for documentation for Rohingya.35 The Agency had been led to believe—or hope—that citizenship cards would be issued to Rohingya in the future. White cards had been issued to all Rohingya after the mass forced repatriations from Bangladesh in the 1990s instead of the citizenship cards issued to people of other ethnic identities in Myanmar.36 The white card’s meaning and significance in Myanmar’s society transmuted over the decades as the political system changed. Mohammed’s experiences of the apartheid system in North Rakhine State 32 33 34 35 36 Mohammed was interviewed on September 27, 2018 in a refugee camp in the Coxes Bazar area of Bangladesh. All names and references to villages of origin have been changed or omitted to ensure the confidentiality and safety of research participants. There exists a fourth document, the household list, which is also important in Rohingyas’ lives. However, I have chosen to focus on three different ‘identity documents’ for the purposes of clarity and conciseness. NRCs were issued in Myanmar from the 1950s until the end of the 1980s. Although most of the cards contained the words ‘holding this certificate shall not be considered as conclusive proof of citizenship’, the cards were effectively used across the country as national identity cards. Foreigners were required to carry different documents known as the Foreigner Registration Certificates (FRCs). Rohingya were not issued with FRCs but with NRCs. These allowed them to access the same rights as other citizens across the country, including freedom of movement within Myanmar. The UNHCR became operational in North Rakhine State in 1993–1994 following the large-scale repatriations of approximately 200,000 Rohingya from Bangladesh. Although their mandate primarily related to monitoring the returns, advocating with the Myanmar government for the documentation of all Rohingya populations was central to their work. See: Human Rights Watch, ‘Rohingya Muslims: Ending a Cycle of Exodus?’ (1 September 1996) <https://www.hrw.org/legacy/summaries/s.burma969.html> accessed on 04 January 2019. After 1989, under the 1982 Citizenship Law ‘full citizens’—or those considered to be members of one of the 135 listed ethnic nationalities—were issued with Citizenship Scrutiny Cards (CRCs) which were pink in color. It was primarily Rohingya who were issued with white cards during this period, singling them out for a different set of local policies since the 1990s. See: Fortify Rights, ‘Policies of Persecution: Ending Abusive State Policies Against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar’ (February 2014) <https://www.fortifyrights.org/downloads/Policies_of_Persecution_Feb_25_Fortify_Rights.pdf> accessed on 13 May 2019; Amnesty International, ‘“Caged without a Roof”: Apartheid in Myanmar’s Rakhine State’ (Index ASA 16/7484/2017, 21 November 2017) <https://www. amnesty.org/en/documents/asa16/7484/2017/en/> accessed on.