citizenship legislation nearly impossible for Rohingya to follow, and by stripping
them of their legal status as a group (Parashar & Alam, 2018). This form of
separation remains not only legally binding but deeply culturally relevant to this
day—it is of note that the anti-Muslim propaganda campaigns ran by the
Myanmar military, discussed in the previous section, also contained historical
falsification, with attempts to fraudulently show Rohingya 'intruding' into the
country during the era of British colonialism (Yangon, 2018), thus reinforcing the
idea that they are, in some way, not 'true' citizens of Myanmar. Ideas of
'belonging' as a line of separation also appears within Rwanda, in which the
division between Hutu and Tutsi was not only massively boosted politically under
Belgian colonisation, but reforged via a false history—the Tutsi, in this telling,
were a 'superior' group who descended from the North and took over,
conquering the supposedly more native and longer-existing Hutu people
(Gerhart, 1999:29). The Belgian administration, after forging this history, opted
to forcefully register every person in Rwanda as either Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa, fixing
the newly reinforced ethnic boundaries in place. This notion of the Tutsi as a
prior invading force stayed relevant, and, I would argue, was massively
reinforced by the political situation in Rwanda during the early 1990s, and the
incursions from the RPF (Thompson, 2007:42). Tutsis, in an ironic continuation
of the narrative originally designed by the Belgians to bolster Tutsi power (and
thus their own), were targeted as an 'invasive force' threatening the 'native' Hutu
during the 1994 genocide (Sharma, 2020:222).
The similarity I find most striking between these cases is the use of
citizenship norms and related legal processes, a legacy (directly or indirectly) of
colonial rule, to prime a people for genocidal acts. However, the differences
within this process are just as crucial to analyse as the similarities; within Nazi
Germany, it's possible to see an extremely explicit and government-driven
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