Genocide by Attrition I. Identity Documents and Genocide: Case Studies This chapter highlights three case studies on the use of identity documents in three separate genocides: the Holocaust of the Jewish people in the 1930s and 1940s, the Rwandan genocide of the Tutsi people in 1994, and the ongoing genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar.10 Disturbing similarities exist across these three cases regarding the role official identity documents play in the efficient and effective marginalization, dehumanization, and, ultimately, the rapid extermination of populations targeted for genocide. While history indicates that genocidal policies are not necessarily predicated on problematic official identification documentation, such documentation can contribute to the creation of monolithic, essentialized identity categories for the facilitation of atrocity crimes when exploited by governments or regimes in highly polarized societies to subdivide a country’s population. Identification documents can symbolically and bureaucratically reinforce an “us” versus “them” ideological framing of real and imagined group differences in intentionally divisive terms. Such binary framing combined with discourse that relies on fear and hate to portray the targeted group as sub-human or nonhuman may be used to justify official and unofficial forms of discrimination, persecution, and/or violence. Government solutions to the perceived threats that the “other” allegedly poses often take the form of apartheid-like conditions, wholesale domination, and/or physical extermination. Identification documentation can also contribute to “genocide by attrition”— the gradual destruction of a protected group by reducing their strength through sustained, indirect methods of destruction.11 In such contexts, the long-term systematic denial of human rights results in “a slow process of annihilation rather than the immediate unleashing of violent death.”12 For example, identification documentation helps facilitate restrictions on basic rights, such as the right to freedom of movement, which, in turn, can limit access to livelihoods, education, health services, and so on. Such tactics may contribute or amount to the genocidal act of “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”13 10 The discussion of each case is strategic and, thus, highly limited in scope. 11 Sheri Rosenberg, “Genocide is a Process, Not an Event,” Genocide Studies and Prevention, Vol. 7, No. 1, 2021, p. 19. 12 Ibid. 13 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Genocide Convention), adopted December 9, 1948, G.A. Res. 260 A (III), U.N. Doc. E/447, 1951, Art. II(c). Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (Rome Statute), adopted July 17, 1998, U.N. Doc. A/CONF.183/9, 2002, Art. 6(c).