1 Introduction IDs for Rohingya: ‘pathways to citizenship’ or ‘instruments of genocide’? Introduction In August 2017, the Myanmar military launched a ‘clearance operation’ against the Rohingya in Northern Rakhine.1 This campaign of terror involved mass killings, mass rape, and the destruction of whole villages (UNHRC Sept 2019). More than three-quarters of a million Rohingya fled across the border into Bangladesh, joining the a quarter of a million registered and unregistered Rohingya refugees who had fled previous waves of violence since the 1990s (Crisp 2018). International media was filled with images of lines of Rohingya stretching into the distance walking into Bangladesh in the monsoon rains, balancing on narrow paths across flooded lands, carrying the injured and the elderly in improvised bamboo slings, smoke from their burning villages billowing behind them. The suffering of the Rohingya, a predominantly Muslim minority, in Buddhist-majority Myanmar captured worldwide attention. For those of us, Rohingya activists and allies, who had been campaigning since the previous wave of mass violence in 2012 and 2013 to have the crimes against them recognised as genocide, there was an utterly devastating inevitability about events (Zarni and Cowley 2014; Green, McManus et al. 2015). ‘Genocide’ is defined in international law in Article 2 of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (hereafter Genocide Convention) as: Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing of members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. After the events of 2017, the abuses against the Rohingya in Myanmar were extensively documented by international human rights bodies. The reports of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar or IIFFM DOI: 10.4324/9781003494539-1 This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY 4.0 license.