Refugee Experiences of Identity Documents and Digitisation in India and Myanmar

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 3 Jun 2024

Natalie Brinham and Ali Johar | Forced Migration Review – TRANSCEND Media Service

A Rohingya refugee couple whose camp in Delhi was burned in 2021.
Credit: Ali Johar

Drawing on the authors’ joint activism on the rights of refugees and stateless people in India and Myanmar, this article considers how digital ID systems can be used to exclude minorities.

May 2024 – India’s e-ID system has been hailed for increasing social inclusion and bureaucratic efficiency. Whilst it has brought benefits to many in India, refugee experiences reveal a darker side of digitisation. Combined with increasingly hostile registration and surveillance procedures for noncitizens, refugees suffer economic and social exclusion, harassment and human rights violations.

Myanmar has attempted to digitise its own ID system and has piloted technologies from China, India and elsewhere in the midst of forced displacement and conflict. Myanmar’s latest efforts to implement an e-ID system reportedly include further cooperation with the Indian Government. Myanmar’s military regime already uses identity documents to reinforce systems of surveillance, control and persecution. There is a real risk that if Myanmar were to fully adopt a digital ID system, the rights of minority and opposition groups would be further curtailed.

One refugee’s experience of ID systems in India

For Jafar Alam[2], a Myanmar refugee in India, the Aadhaar card or Indian e-ID card does not only store biometric data, it also represents past hopes, current insecurities, and fears for the future. Born to stateless Rohingya parents in Rakhine State Myanmar in 1995, Jafar was denied Myanmar citizenship. When he and his family fled the anti-Muslim violence in 2012, along with 140,000 others, the only papers that proved his family’s residency in the country were destroyed in an arson attack.

At the time they arrived in Bangladesh, there was no refugee registration available. Support for arrivals was ad-hoc and arrests frequent. The family struggled to make ends meet. In this context, Jafar and his older brother made the difficult decision to take the risky onward journey to India without documents.

Refugee registration was slow in India, but despite his lack of legal status, Jafar was able to find a small shelter to share and found work in the informal economy. After a year he was issued with a UNHCR ID card, which offered him limited protection from arrest and access to some basic services including cheaper healthcare. It also enabled him to register for a SIM card, reconnecting him with the world of knowledge and his scattered ethnic community.

Using his UNHCR card as proof of his status, Jafar was able to apply for a Long Term Visa (LTV), which he received in 2014. In turn, the LTV entitled him to a state-of-the-art e-ID card, or Aadhaar, issued to all residents in 2016. The Aadhaar stores an individual’s biometric and demographic information and provides a unique 12-digit number that links all personal data. The Aadhaar card was hailed as a tool of social inclusion, reducing the need for paperwork, increasing bureaucratic efficiency, and providing better access to welfare and services. For Jafar Alam, things were looking up. One of the first things he used his Aadhaar card for, was to open a bank account. This made it easier to get work and to receive and send money to family members. Best of all, the Aadhaar card allowed him to enrol in school.

How digital IDs in India facilitated the exclusion and persecution of refugees

The context in India swiftly changed when, in August 2017, the Baratiya Janata Parti (BJP) government announced that Rohingya refugees were now considered ‘illegal’ and were to be deported to Myanmar. LTVs and Aadhaars were no longer issued to refugees; it became harder for them to access essential services, and they became more vulnerable to harassment, arrest and detention. Eleven days after the announcement, the military in Myanmar launched the brutal ‘clearance operations’ against Rohingyas, sending almost a million people fleeing into Bangladesh. Rohingyas in India were at risk of refoulement (being forcibly returned) to a situation of genocide.

Biometric and demographic data was not just stored on the Aadhaar system, but also included in a database of ‘illegal immigrants.’ In the same year – 2017 – the police in India conducted a ‘verification and registration’ exercise in Jafar Alam’s refugee camp. He was arrested along with fourteen other refugees. The police claimed he had ‘illegally obtained’ the Aadhaar and charged him. The document that he had once been entitled to had landed him in prison. He served a one-year sentence. Jafar Alam was one of the lucky ones who was able to secure release at the end of his sentence. According to the community-based organisation Rohingya Human Rights Initiative, there are currently at least 776 Myanmar refugees stuck in indefinite detention in India.

When Jafar Alam was released his life had changed. The Aadhaar card had been frozen. He could no longer continue his education. Mobile phone network providers now required an Aadhaar for SIM registration. Aadhaar had become a mandatory document to receive remittance, so he and his fellow refugees could no longer receive financial support from family or friends. His UNHCR card offered less and less protection from arrest in an increasingly hostile environment. Seen under the law as merely proof of residence, Aadhaar cards had unofficially become a single access point for almost all services including education, financial services, driving licences, SIM cards, passports, subsidies and utilities including gas, water and electricity. In 2018, the Indian Supreme Court ruled that private entities could not compel their customers to provide Aadhaar cards to access services. However, this is not the way it works in reality. As refugees in India know, the same digital identity management system that first promised social inclusion, has now resulted in the further marginalisation of refugees and other disenfranchised groups.

Now Jafar Alam constantly fears being arrested again, or worse, being deported back to Myanmar. Following the military coup in Myanmar in 2021, his hometown has been engulfed by fighting between the Myanmar military and the Arakan Army (a predominantly Buddhist Rakhine group fighting for self-determination). Since 2017, the Indian government has deported an unknown number of Rohingya refugees to Myanmar, 18 of which have been documented and followed by Rohingya Human Rights Initiative. Some were detained in Myanmar on arrival, some separated from family, some fled again.

The current ID system in Myanmar and surveillance by the military regime

The Indian Government issued Jafar Alam a registration form in Burmese titled ‘Verification of Illegals from Myanmar.’ It asked for information about his relatives in Myanmar, which he worries may lead to them being targeted. Data from the 18 deported Rohingyas was shared with the Myanmar authorities, according to the Rohingya Human Rights Initiative. Deportees were issued with Myanmar’s National Verification Card (NVC) on return. This card registers Rohingyas as non-citizens in Myanmar who need to have their nationality verified. The ID system in Myanmar has long held in place systems of surveillance, persecution and segregation.

Since the military coup of 2021 in Myanmar, civil conflict has spread throughout the country. Registration and ID systems have been further weaponised by the military against the opposition and minorities from the conflict zones. Used in tandem with check points and other surveillance infrastructure, movement restrictions have been put in place that make securing an income or fleeing to safety more difficult. The current ID system’s inefficiencies have their benefits for members of the opposition. Many are still able to circumvent military surveillance to operate within the country or flee to safety. The military, acutely aware of their weakness in this area, has been piloting the use of biometrics on the displaced, the stateless and the opposition.

Myanmar’s attempts to digitise registration data and effectively utilise biometrics requires foreign investment and technical support. Plans to secure foreign support have been stalled by both the genocidal violence of 2017 and civil conflict following the military coup of 2021. The latter led to sanctions, the pulling out of foreign investors and a diversion of development funding away from state actors. As the support of international lenders and tech companies has waned, the regime has increasingly turned to India, China and Israel. For Jafar Alam, and other refugees who have experienced how digital ID systems can increase the capacity of governments to exclude and make survival in the margins so much harder, concerns about how Myanmar’s authorities may misuse identification technologies run very deep.

The potential for misuse of digital ID technologies in Myanmar

Digitising and upgrading ID systems is often viewed as an essential prerequisite for large economic and human development projects, for example the World Bank Group’s ID4D programme. They are also seen as essential in preventing statelessness. Digitised systems supposedly immunise societies against the problems associated with paper-based and non-centralised systems such as loss and destruction of documents. However, digital systems can also exacerbate the power differentials between individuals and state authorities. Where state authorities become perpetrators, these technologies can become effective weapons against dissidents and minorities. For Jafar Alam’s family whose paper documents were destroyed, even digital records will not protect them against administrative violence as long as the systems remain under the control of Myanmar’s militarised state.

Promoters of digital identification systems have sometimes used India’s Aadhaar system as an example of good practice. IDs issued on the basis of residency rather than citizenship theoretically circumvent issues relating to the exclusion of non-citizens. Yet, the experiences of refugees and stateless people in India shows that digital ID systems based on residency can also effectively endorse and exacerbate endemic structures of discrimination and exclusion by ‘locking in’ an irregular legal status and ‘locking out’ marginalised groups from socio-economic spheres and welfare systems.

Digital ID systems, when utilised together with other border-control technologies, have links to forced migration – both causing and prolonging displacement. The ‘four cuts strategy’ which has been deployed by the Myanmar military since the 1960s against opposition and minorities, aims to cut off food, funds, information and recruits. The paper-based ID system was used to kerb freedom of movement and segregate Rohingyas. This became a method to cut off access to food, income, funds and humanitarian aid; and to block international access and the flow of information about atrocities.

Digitised ID systems that provide a single access point for utilities and services could hold in place surveillance regimes that prevent opponents of the military regime from operating underground or even from fleeing the country; they could be deployed to facilitate the stripping of nationality and rights. As the Rohingya people have experienced, if you are denied a legal identity, you can more easily be stripped of your right of return. This can lead to protracted displacement and a lack of access to durable solutions. Without a legal ID, and increasingly enclosed by a system of digital borders, moving in search of security can become more expensive and more risky.

Rohingya communities have resisted coercive and oppressive state identification practices that recategorise them as foreigners, utilising civil disobedience practices during the 2014 census and the roll out of National Verification Cards (NVCs). While western governments and international organisations including the UN and World Bank Group have limited their engagement with Myanmar on these issues, statist and corporate interests continue to drive the transfer of oppressive technologies into the military’s hands.

Conclusion

The digitisation of ID systems presents a mixture of protections and risks for both refugees and those at risk of statelessness and forced displacement. Biometrics and digital registration for refugees can improve the efficiency of services and aid delivery. Technologies can potentially improve access to refugee protections via a trusted system that can help authorities and service providers to easily identify the protection needs of individuals. However, refugees also need to trust that their data is safe and that e-IDs lead to protections, not risks. In a climate that is increasingly hostile to refugees, digitisation further locks refugees out of economic and social spheres, and locks in their irregular status leading to more vulnerabilities and risks.

In the wrong hands, digitisation of registries and ID systems can consolidate the power of states to disenfranchise minorities and produce statelessness. But, in the right hands, the digitisation of national ID systems and registries can serve to bolster social protections on multiple levels for marginalised groups, not least for those at risk of statelessness including returning IDPs and refugees.

Paper documents are easily lost or destroyed and non-digitised systems can be inefficient and prone to inaccuracies leading to greater challenges for those with precarious legal status in proving their identity, place of origin, family relationships, right to nationality and residency, and land ownership. Less than 20% of Myanmar’s territory is under effective administrative control of the military regime. The rest is increasingly governed by non-state administrations run by ethnic and political opposition. These groups control cross-border movement of goods and people, customs, taxation, land use and more. ID technologies could potentially be put to use or repurposed by forward thinking non-state administrations to provide proof of residency, birth place, citizenship, land rights and future-proof access to welfare schemes and rights.

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Natalie Brinham is an Economic and Social Research Council ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Bristol and a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment. She has worked for many years in NGOs in the UK and Southeast Asia on forced migration, trafficking and statelessness in both front-line service provision roles and research and advocacy roles. This included four years working as a research and advocacy consultant on a multi-country project on the human rights of stateless Rohingya. Under the pseudonym Alice Cowley, she co-authored a three-year study on the Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingya with Maung Zarni. She holds an MA from UCL Institute of Education and a BA (Honors) from the School of Oriental and African Studies. natalie.brinham@gmail.com

Ali Johar is a Refugee Fellow, Refugees International – alijohar20@gmail.com

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