Part 15. The 2014 Census and the Exclusion of Rohingya Identity
Introduction
Myanmar’s 2014 Population and Housing Census was presented as an opportunity to build a reliable foundation for national development. Conducted with assistance from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), it was intended to count people regardless of citizenship and allow respondents to state their own ethnicity. For Rohingya, that undertaking carried particular importance: inclusion under their own name would record their presence within the country without requiring them to surrender their identity. Yet immediately before enumeration began, the government withdrew the promised freedom to identify as Rohingya. UNFPA publicly acknowledged that this decision breached the agreed procedures and international census standards.
From a Rohingya perspective, the central issue was the government’s decision to make participation conditional on accepting an imposed identity. Rohingya organizations had demanded an inclusive census well before enumeration. A joint statement dated 5 May 2012, signed by ARNO, BROUK and organizations representing Rohingya communities in several countries, warned that the proposed exercise could exclude their people. After the census began, ARNO challenged portrayals of Rohingya as unwilling participants, maintaining that the community welcomed enumeration but opposed being recorded as “Bengali.” Its statement distinguished a willingness to be counted from submission to a designation used by the authorities to deny Rohingya belonging in Arakan.
This Part examines how an internationally supported population count became an instrument of exclusion: the assurances given during preparations, the political pressure preceding their reversal, the conduct of enumeration, and Rohingya efforts to defend their name. Its central concern is the relationship between counting people and acknowledging their existence in the public record. Research by Amanda R. Cheong, drawing on interviews with Rohingya activists and documentary evidence, identifies the census exclusion as a form of “bureaucratic omission” a process through which withholding official recognition can weaken a community’s capacity to substantiate collective claims. Read alongside contemporary Rohingya statements, this approach helps explain why the struggle over the census concerned both immediate participation and the historical record that the exercise would leave behind.