Rohingya: They tried to erase us

Zaw Win’s grandparents had the same identity card as everyone else in Myanmar, but a generation later his parents were given a separate ID for minority Rohingyas. Today, Zaw Win is classed as an illegal immigrant in the land of his birth.

For more than three decades, Myanmar’s ruling powers have weaponised the country’s identity card system in a wider campaign of persecution, exclusion and surveillance targeting the Muslim ethnic community, human rights groups say.