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Saturday, January 18, 2020

Restore full citizenship rights for Rohingyas

The Daily Star
January 17, 2020
Unb, Dhaka

Fortify Rights urges Myanmar govt

The government of Myanmar should take steps to urgently restore full citizenship rights for Rohingyas, Fortify Rights said yesterday.

New evidence collected by Fortify Rights, including eyewitness testimonies and internal government documents, confirms that Myanmar authorities are continuing to force and coerce Rohingyas to accept National Verification Cards (NVCs), which effectively identify them as foreigners and strip them of access to full citizenship rights.

“The NVC is widely known as an abusive tool, and the government should scrap it without delay,” said Matthew Smith, chief executive officer of Fortify Rights.

He said the new evidence implicates government officials in ongoing efforts to erase Rohingya identity and deny them full citizenship.

The rights body, which works to ensure human rights for all, documented five recent cases of Myanmar authorities forcing or coercing Rohingyas in Rakhine State to accept the NVC.

It also obtained an internal government document informing state-, district-, and local-level officials that a team of officials would be deployed to issue NVCs to Rohingyas in internment camps in Sittwe Township.

The document, dated December 7, 2019, and signed by the head of the Sittwe Township Department of Immigration and Population, informs the administrator of Thet Kae Pyin that an “immigration mobile team” would be deployed to Thet Kae Pyin internment camp.

The document states that the team would be tasked with issuing NVCs to “Bengali people” -- a term often used by Myanmar officials to refer to Rohingyas, implying that they are from Bangladesh and their ethnic Rohingya identity does not exist. The township official copied state- and district-level officers of the Ministry of Labour, Immigration and Population on the letter.

A 31-year-old Rohingya man in Thet Kae Pyin internment camp told Fortify Rights how state security officers forced him to accept an NVC on December 10, just three days after the document was issued.

The Myanmar government continues to confine over 125,000 Rohingyas to more than 20 internment camps in five townships of Rakhine State.

During violent attacks in 2012, extremists and state security forces forcibly displaced most of the Rohingyas now confined to the camps.

Fortify Rights also obtained a copy of the “National Strategy on Resettlement of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) and Closure of IDP Camps,” adopted by the Union-level Ministry of Social Welfare, Relief and Resettlement on November 20.

The document instructs authorities to facilitate “citizenship verification in camps slated for closure”. In practice, citizenship verification in Rakhine is implemented through the NVC process.

The vast majority of more than one million Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh refuse to return to Myanmar until the government restores their rights and ensures protections.

In September last year, Fortify Rights published a 102-page report -- Tools of Genocide -- revealing how the Myanmar authorities forced and coerced Rohingya to accept NVCs in a systematic campaign to erase Rohingya identity and deny Rohingya citizenship.

The Chinese government previously urged the governments of Myanmar and Bangladesh to fast track the return of Rohingya refugees from Bangladesh to northern Rakhine State, despite objections by Rohingyas, the UN, human rights groups, and others due to protection concerns. 

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