Jasmine Burnley The condition of the Rohingya today however, is one of chronic statelessness.21 This change in circumstances pivots on a number of factors: firstly, the gradual privileging of official national ethnicities or ‘taingyintha’ – in which the Rohingya are not included – as the primary currency of belonging, to the national community;22 secondly, the treatment of citizenship in the 1982 Citizenship Law which redefined citizenship and in so doing, de facto revoked the citizenship of those who were neither covered by the official list of national ethnicities nor able to prove their existing citizenship; 23 and thirdly, the ways in which successive Myanmar Governments have pursued administrative measures – before and after the 1982 Law was promulgated – that deprived the Rohingya of the documentation necessary for accessing rights associated with citizenship or for obtaining a form of citizenship under the provisions of the 1982 Law.24 Taken together, these amount to a process of citizenship revocation which has progressively transformed many Rohingya and members of other minority groups25 not included in the official recognised list of ethnic nationalities, into stateless persons. The following sections examine these factors. Firstly, as above, belonging to Myanmar’s body of citizens, is premised upon membership of an approved ethnic nationality.26 Although both the 1947 Constitution and the 1948 Union Citizenship Act refer to ‘indigenous races’,27 it was not until the 1960s, that the use of ‘national races’ or ‘taingyintha’ became part of the official lexicon of the authorities and evolved to be an important tool of statebuilding,28 which emphasised the Government’s intention to bring social and economic returns to those recognised as members of the national races, and ‘meshed with a larger programme for political 21 Advisory Commission on Rakhine State (2017), Towards a peaceful, fair and prosperous future for the people of Rakhine. Final Report of the Advisory Commission on Rakhine State; UNHCR (2018), Independent evaluation of UNHCR’s emergency response to the Rohingya refugees influx in Bangladesh August 2017– September 2018: Evaluation Report 22 Cheesman, N. (2017), ‘How in Myanmar “National Races” Came to Surpass Citizenship and Exclude Rohingya’, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 47(3): 461. 23 ISI (2019). Country Position Paper. Statelessness in Myanmar. 24 Nyi Nyi Kyaw (2017), ‘Unpacking the Presumed Statelessness of Rohingyas’, Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, 15(3): 269-286; Advisory Commission on Rakhine State (2017), Towards a peaceful, fair and prosperous future for the people of Rakhine. Final Report of the Advisory Commission on Rakhine State; UNHCR (2018), Independent evaluation of UNHCR’s emergency response to the Rohingya refugees influx in Bangladesh August 2017– September 2018: Evaluation Report 25 Whilst other groups in Myanmar are affected by the discrimination enshrined in the Law, in particular Chinese and Indian communities, less is known about their experiences (ISI 2019). A report by the High Level Committee on Indian Diaspora however, stated that of Myanmar’s sizeable Indian community, 400,000 are stateless (Mukhopadhyay, J. (2010), ‘Indian Diaspora in South East Asia: Predicaments and Prospects’, The Indian Journal of Political Science, 71(3)). For further analysis on the Chinese community’s experience of citizenship and negotiation with the authorities see Ho, E. L and L. J. Chua (2015), ‘Law and ‘race’ in the citizenship spaces of Myanmar: spatial strategies and the political subjectivity of the Burmese Chinese’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 39(5): 896-916). It is however, understood that the Rohingya are the country’s main stateless population (ISI, 2019). 26 Cheesman, N. (2015), Opposing the Rule of Law. Cambridge University Press; International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) (2019), Citizenship and Human Rights in Myanmar: Why Law Reform is Urgent and Possible. A Legal Briefing; Nyi Nyi Kyaw (2017), ‘Unpacking the Presumed Statelessness of Rohingyas’, Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, 15(3): 269286; Ware, A. & C. Laoutides, (2018), Myanmar's Rohingya Conflict. Oxford Scholarship Online. 27 Arraiza J. M. & O.Vonk (2017), Report on Citizenship Law: Myanmar. Country Report 2017/14. Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies. European University Institute. 28 This extensive nationalisation project launched by General Ne Win included actions which resulted in an exodus of hundreds of thousand Indians from Burma (Chakravarti 1971; Holmes 1967; Silverstein 1966 cited in Nyi Nyi Kyaw (2017), ‘Unpacking the Presumed Statelessness of Rohingyas’, Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies, 15(3): 273) and also had profound consequences for Myanmar residents descended from Chinese migrants (Cheesman, N. (2017) ‘How in Myanmar “National Races” Came to Surpass Citizenship and Exclude Rohingya’, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 47(3): 461–483). 20 Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies Working Papers