Erasing a People Twice: How Documentation Wars Decide the Future of the Rohingya

They lost their land first. Then they lost their homes, their fields, their neighborhoods, and entire villages that once held the memory of generations. Now, piece by piece, they are losing something even more fundamental — the documents, records, and markers that affirm that a people existed in the first place.

In 2025, the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM) published a detailed account of how Rohingya land and property were destroyed, seized, or transformed following the 2017 clearance operations. The report described how homes were razed, villages leveled, religious sites dismantled, and community structures erased, replacing them with security outposts and other forms of military infrastructure. Satellite imagery, official records, and field testimonies aligned: entire settlements vanished from the ground and from the administrative archives that once recorded who lived on which plot of land.

Reuters’ summary of the same findings said that Myanmar’s army “razed Rohingya villages to build security outposts,” documenting a pattern in which the physical environment and the documentary evidence of Rohingya belonging were removed simultaneously. Similar patterns were already visible in earlier reporting by Associated Press and Reuters in 2018, which noted that Myanmar’s policies had “erased the Rohingya” by destroying household lists, residency records, and property documents long before the mass exodus. According to these investigations, the destruction of documentation was not accidental; it served a political purpose. When a people has no papers, it becomes easier to declare that they have no place.

This long-term attack on documentation forms the first layer of erasure. The second is emerging more quietly, shaped not by military operations but by humanitarian bureaucracies, biometric systems, and the administrative routines of camp management in Bangladesh.

I. Myanmar’s Erasure of Evidence

Myanmar’s identity regime has long revolved around the 1982 Citizenship Law, which divided the population into categories that excluded the Rohingya from recognized ethnic status. Burma Library archival material contains detailed accounts of how decades of discriminatory procedures — including “foreign registration,” special cards, and arbitrary denial of documents — gradually stripped Rohingya of legal existence inside Myanmar.

The IIMM report adds another dimension: the destruction of land records, household documents, and village-level registries during and after the 2017 operations. According to the mechanism, entire communities lost access not only to homes but to every trace of legal recognition. This loss matters because repatriation, restitution, and accountability all depend on documents. Without land records, Myanmar can claim that villages never existed; without residency lists, it can deny that families were ever part of the region; without community registries, it can argue that the Rohingya have no legitimate claim to return.

Reuters’ 2025 account emphasizes that military construction on the land where Rohingya villages stood creates a “new geography” — one in which the original settlements cannot simply be restored. When security outposts replace homes, the past is overwritten by state infrastructure. The physical erasure of a community becomes intertwined with administrative reconstruction.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has repeatedly noted that these patterns of destruction “undermine conditions for safe, voluntary, dignified, and sustainable return.” When identity documents, property deeds, or residency records no longer exist, any conversation about return becomes abstract. The Rohingya become a people without an anchor in the documentary history of the state.

II. The Administrative Identity of Refugees in Bangladesh

If Myanmar erases identity by removing documentation, Bangladesh reshapes it through registration, surveillance, and administrative control. Bangladesh does not classify the Rohingya as refugees but as “Forcibly Displaced Myanmar Nationals.” The World Bank’s 2025 report uses the same terminology, noting that this category lacks the legal rights associated with refugee status. It is a designation that defines presence without belonging.

For years, Bangladesh and humanitarian agencies have conducted extensive biometric registration of Rohingya refugees. The UNHCR registration update page describes how biometric data — including fingerprints and digital photographs — are essential for accessing aid, verifying identity, and updating household information. The logic is administrative efficiency: a digital record ensures that each person receives food, health services, and shelter materials.

But the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre’s 2024 report highlights concerns raised by refugees who saw biometric ID collection as coercive or lacking transparency. Some feared how their data might be used; others questioned whether consent was meaningful within a humanitarian setting where refusing registration might lead to losing access to essential services.

These concerns unfold in a larger environment of control. Human Rights Watch’s 2022 report describes new restrictions in the camps: demolition of informal shops, severe limits on movement, and increased monitoring. The 2021 report on fire deaths shows how fencing around camps — intended, according to authorities, for “protecting refugees” — had in fact trapped people during a major blaze. These restrictions create a documentation regime in which movement is authorized by passes, identity is verified through biometrics, and livelihoods are constrained by camp-level rules.

The 2019 HRW report on the internet blackout for Rohingya refugees described how the denial of connectivity cut off communication between families, aid workers, and communities, further limiting refugees’ ability to participate in their own narrative or represent their own experiences. A population already stripped of citizenship found itself deprived of digital space as well.

Under this layered system, the Rohingya become legible not through personal histories but through data points. Registration becomes the primary marker of identity; the database replaces the archive.

III. Humanitarian Bureaucracy and the Reduction of Identity to Data

Humanitarian agencies often use technical language to describe populations. Joint Response Plans refer to “beneficiary units,” “caseloads,” and “population figures.” WFP ration guidelines convert each household into a quantifiable “entitlement” — calculated in dollars, calories, or distribution cycles. None of these terms are inaccurate; they reflect logistical needs. But taken together, they shape a mode of recognition in which individuals become entries in a ledger.

For the Rohingya, this bureaucratic framing compounds statelessness. When a person is neither a citizen of Myanmar nor a refugee under international law in Bangladesh, the humanitarian system becomes the primary institution through which identity is mediated. Yet humanitarian identity is inherently temporary. It recognizes needs, not rights. It delivers assistance but cannot confer political belonging.

This tension becomes more pronounced as aid resources shrink. Media reports from Reuters, the Guardian, and AP in 2025 describe steep funding shortfalls leading to cuts in food rations and reductions in basic services. The UNHCR warned that services in the camps were nearing collapse. As resources diminish, the administrative logic of aid becomes more prominent: efficiency, targeting, prioritization. The person behind the beneficiary number becomes harder to see.

Academic studies reinforce this dynamic. Sayeed Al-Zaman’s 2024 analysis of global media sentiment found declining interest in the Rohingya crisis after 2018, which reduced the visibility of their plight. The SAGE 2023 study on visual representations of the Rohingya crisis argued that repetitive imagery leads to “flattening” — where audiences no longer recognize individuals but see only a mass of suffering bodies. MJ Lee’s 2021 study in the Journal of International Humanitarian Action showed how humanitarian responses shift from urgency to maintenance when media attention declines.

Together, these findings suggest that the Rohingya face a form of administrative invisibility. They remain present in data but absent in political imagination. The humanitarian system documents them, but documentation does not restore identity; it records existence without affirming belonging.

IV. Documentation as a Battleground for the Future

The stakes of documentation extend beyond daily life in the camps. Any future attempt at repatriation will hinge on whether Rohingya families can prove that they lived in specific villages, owned property, or had legal rights in Myanmar. The IIMM report states that documentation loss “significantly complicates prospects for restitution and justice.” Without property deeds or household lists, returning families could be declared “new arrivals” or “illegal migrants.”

Bangladesh’s classification of the Rohingya as FDMNs introduces another layer of ambiguity. Without refugee status, they lack the protections associated with international refugee law, including guarantees related to non-refoulement, rights to work, and access to formal education. Their identity exists in a liminal zone — recorded but not recognized.

Humanitarian databases are not designed to provide legal continuity. They serve immediate needs, not long-term rights. If the only surviving record of a family’s existence is a biometric entry in an aid database, it is unclear how this will translate into claims for citizenship or restitution in Myanmar.

The destruction of physical and documentary evidence inside Myanmar, combined with the reduction of refugee identity to biometric records in Bangladesh, creates a double erasure. The first removes historical presence; the second suspends identity in administrative limbo.

V. A Crisis That Narrates Itself Through Missing Records

Much of the Rohingya narrative is now shaped by absence — missing homes, missing villages, missing documents, missing citizenship, missing access to the internet, missing representation in political institutions, and missing visibility in global media.

Reuters’ reports on Myanmar’s growing food crisis and deepening instability show that conditions remain unsafe for return. The New Humanitarian’s 2025 report on detentions and forced labor by the Arakan Army underscores that Rohingya civilians continue to face threats from multiple sides. The OHCHR’s human rights updates from 2025 reiterate that discriminatory structures remain intact.

In Bangladesh, the HRW report on spiraling violence inside camps highlights insecurity within a system designed to house, not integrate. The BHRRC account of biometric registration concerns illustrates how humanitarian aid intersects with ethical and practical challenges in digital identity systems.

Each of these documents offers fragments of a broader truth: the Rohingya remain a people denied the ability to define themselves within any legal or national framework. Their identity is documented everywhere but anchored nowhere.

VI. Losing the Story, Losing the Future

Identity is not only a legal category; it is the foundation of political belonging. When documentation disappears — whether burned in Myanmar or reduced to digits in Bangladesh — a people’s ability to claim rights, history, and future becomes precarious.

The humanitarian system, despite its essential role in sustaining life, cannot compensate for the loss of citizenship. It can record, but it cannot restore. It can measure, but it cannot enfranchise.

The erosion of media attention further intensifies this condition. As global coverage declines, the space in which Rohingya voices are heard narrows. Al-Zaman’s study notes how sentiment shifted from urgency to neutrality; SAGE’s study shows how images lost their capacity to shock; Lee’s analysis explains how humanitarian responses diminish when attention fades. When a crisis loses its witnesses, it drifts into the margins of international concern.

The Rohingya are living through the consequences of a world that has grown accustomed to their suffering. Documentation wars — the destruction of records, the creation of new bureaucratic identities, the limitations imposed by registration systems — determine how they are seen or not seen.

A community once erased from the state is now at risk of being misrepresented, reclassified, or administratively overwritten. Their future depends not only on securing rights but on reclaiming a story that has been taken from them through fire, through archives emptied, through biometric screens that register presence but not personhood.

Conclusion

The Rohingya are being erased twice: once by the state that destroyed their villages and records, and again by a humanitarian and administrative system that redefines them as data. The first erasure makes return uncertain. The second traps them in a space where identity is recorded but never recognized.

Every document destroyed in Rakhine, every biometric file created in Cox’s Bazar, every classification that reduces a person to a “beneficiary unit,” shapes the boundaries of Rohingya identity. These boundaries are not drawn by the community; they are drawn around them.

A future built on missing records will always be precarious. For the Rohingya, the struggle for justice is inseparable from the struggle to reclaim documentation that proves they existed as citizens, as families, as communities. Until that recognition is restored, they remain suspended between archives lost and databases that cannot return what was taken.

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References

1. Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM), 2025 Report on Land and Property Destruction.
2. Reuters, “Myanmar army razed Rohingya villages to build security outposts” (29 Sep 2025).
3. AP/Reuters Investigative Series, “Erasing the Rohingya,” 2018.
4. OHCHR Human Rights Updates on Myanmar, 2017–2025.
5. Burma Library archive: documentation of discrimination under 1982 Citizenship Law.
6. Human Rights Watch (2019), “Internet blackout on Rohingya refugees.”
7. Human Rights Watch (2022), “New restrictions on Rohingya camps.”
8. Human Rights Watch (2021), “Refugee camp fencing cost lives in blaze.”
9. Business and Human Rights Resource Centre (2024), “Rohingya biometric IDs and coercion concerns.”
10. UNHCR Bangladesh Registration Update Page.
11. World Bank Report (P180296, 2025), classification of Rohingya as FDMN.
12. Reuters (2025), Myanmar instability and food crisis updates.
13. The New Humanitarian (Aug 2025), AA detentions and forced labor report.
14. Human Rights Watch (2023), “Spiraling violence against Rohingya refugees.”
15. Sayeed Al-Zaman (2024), Journalism & Media, global sentiment analysis.
16. Visual Communication, SAGE (2023), visual framing of Rohingya crisis.
17. MJ Lee (2021), Journal of International Humanitarian Action, media influence on humanitarian response.