Temporal Bordering

The case of the Rohingya is perhaps the most violent case in the world of a government weaponizing paperwork and citizenship in order to manufacture its own as foreigners subject to expulsion. The government of Myanmar laid the groundwork for the violent expulsion of the Rohingya through a series of legal and administrative temporal moves which made them stateless. First, it removed the Rohingya from a list of recognized ethnic groups in a 1982 Citizenship Law. Then, in 1989, it replaced their old national identity documents with temporary registration cards which did not recognize them as citizens (along with other Muslims and Hindus in North Rakhine State). Third, in 2015 Myanmar withdrew the white temporary registration cards (along with voting rights) and issued a receipt in exchange. Fourth, Myanmar proceeded to roll out National Verification Cards (NVC) in 2016, an interim card which required applicants to first register as a foreigner, when Myanmar was the only country they knew, and did not allow people to self-identify with their own ethnic or mixed ethnic identity (de Chickera et al. 2021).

The violence accompanying these processes was not only bureaucratic, but also physical. When the military was deployed to enforce the reclassification of Rohingya as foreigners, they razed villages, killed tens of thousands, raped and pillaged along the way, committing genocide and crimes against humanity. There are also reports of gender-based drivers of forced migration, gender-based violence in transit and in Bangladesh, and pregnant women who flee Myanmar to give birth in Bangladesh. Temporal bordering by the government of Myanmar has made the Rohingya stateless by revoking citizenship and temporally bounding their status until they could no longer prove their identity or nationality.

The temporal maneuvers work forward in time through the denial of birth registration for Rohingya born both in Myanmar and Bangladesh. While babies born to some Rohingya refugees are registered with assistance of UNHCR, the birth certificates are of little consequence, as they are not eligible for citizenship anywhere. Whether the move is a backward-looking reinterpretation of history, or a forward maneuver truncating a child’s future, the result is the same: intergenerational statelessness.