Part IV — Operation Nagamin (Dragon King), 1978

Part IV-C: Rohingya Testimony — Citizens Branded as Illegal Immigrants

At the heart of Operation Nagamin lay a question with enormous consequences: who belonged to Burma? The military government presented the operation as an effort to distinguish lawful citizens from foreigners who had allegedly entered the country illegally. For the Rohingya, however, the operation represented something much more disturbing. People who regarded Burma as their country, whose families had lived in Arakan for generations and who in many cases possessed Burmese-issued documents found their very belonging placed under suspicion.

This contradiction became one of the defining features of the 1978 crisis. Rohingya refugees arriving in Bangladesh did not generally describe themselves as migrants returning to their country of origin. They described themselves as people expelled or frightened from their homes in Burma. Some carried documentary evidence that they believed demonstrated precisely that connection.

Abid Bahar's Eyewitness Account

One of the most important Rohingya-associated testimonies comes from Dr. Abid Bahar. Bahar was teaching at the University of Chittagong when the refugee crisis erupted in 1978. After hearing that approximately 200,000 Rohingya had crossed into southern Bangladesh, he travelled with some of his students to a refugee camp at Ukhia to investigate what had happened.

Bahar later described this visit in testimony before the Canadian Parliament's Subcommittee on International Human Rights. He recalled seeing an enormous refugee settlement and interviewing Rohingya who had recently arrived from Burma. He asked them directly why the Burmese authorities had driven them into Bangladesh.

According to Bahar, the refugees told him that Burmese authorities regarded them as illegal immigrants, but they insisted that they possessed documents showing that they were Burmese citizens. Bahar asked to see those documents. Children and adults went back to their tents and returned carrying National Registration Certificates, or NRCs. He recalled seeing many such documents among the refugees he interviewed.

For Rohingya historical memory, this testimony is extremely significant. It comes from a researcher who says he was physically present among the refugees during the 1978 crisis rather than reconstructing the episode only decades later. His account directly challenges the simplest version of the government's claim that those fleeing Nagamin were merely undocumented foreigners afraid of being identified.

Refugees Show Their Papers

Bahar's observation is not the only account of refugees producing Burmese documentation.

A later country study on Muslims from Rakhine State records that the Burmese authorities characterized Nagamin as a routine check on illegal immigrants and suggested that people without citizenship papers had left the country. Refugees disputed this explanation. The study states that many refugees showed citizenship papers to visiting journalists in an effort to demonstrate that they were citizens of Burma rather than illegal immigrants.

This independent parallel is important. It means that the documentary claim does not rest solely upon later Rohingya political literature. Different observers recorded refugees attempting to prove their connection to Burma through documents issued by the Burmese state itself.

The existence of such documents does not establish that every person among the more than 200,000 refugees held identical legal status. Nor does it resolve every complication in Burma's evolving nationality system. It does, however, seriously undermine any attempt to describe the entire refugee population simply as undocumented foreigners leaving Burma because Nagamin had discovered them.

The Meaning of the NRC

The National Registration Certificate occupies an important place in Rohingya historical memory because it represents an earlier relationship between the community and the Burmese state. After independence, registration documents were issued within a political order in which Muslims from northern Arakan voted, stood for election and participated in public institutions.

The legal and administrative treatment of Rohingya documentation changed progressively under military rule. Human Rights Watch records that the 1974 Emergency Immigration Act required citizens to carry NRCs while Rohingya increasingly faced a different documentary position and were offered Foreign Registration Cards. HRW places this development within the broader deterioration of Rohingya citizenship and civic rights after Ne Win's military takeover.

For Rohingya, this transition represented more than the replacement of one card with another. Classification as a foreigner challenged the political status that members of the community believed they had previously exercised as citizens. Documentation therefore became one of the battlegrounds upon which Rohingya belonging was progressively contested.

From Recognition to Suspicion

Only a relatively short period separated the parliamentary era from Nagamin. During the 1950s and early 1960s, Rohingya and Muslim representatives from northern Arakan participated in Burma's political institutions. Sultan Mahmud had served as a cabinet minister, other representatives had entered parliament, and the Mayu Frontier Administration had been established over the Muslim-majority northern frontier.

By 1978, the relationship had been transformed. Instead of representatives negotiating with the central government about their region, ordinary Rohingya villagers were facing military and immigration personnel demanding evidence that they had the right to remain in the country.

From the Rohingya perspective, this reversal is central to understanding the longer history of persecution. A community does not become foreign simply because a later government begins describing it as foreign. The documentary and political record from the earlier period therefore became crucial evidence against the state's changing narrative.

The Government's Argument

The Burmese government interpreted Nagamin very differently. It maintained that the programme was designed to identify foreigners who had entered the country illegally. When large numbers of Rohingya fled into Bangladesh, the authorities treated their departure as evidence supporting the claim that many were illegal immigrants who feared detection.

This reasoning created a powerful circular argument. Rohingya were scrutinized because they were suspected of being foreigners; when they fled what they described as violence and intimidation during that scrutiny, their flight could then be presented as proof that the original suspicion had been correct.

Refugee testimony challenged this logic. People maintained that they had not fled because Bangladesh was their homeland or because they feared legitimate identification. They said they fled because the operation had become dangerous. Human Rights Watch later recorded allegations of forced eviction, widespread army brutality, rape and murder accompanying the exodus.

Citizenship Papers and the Meaning of Flight

The presence of documented refugees changes how the flight must be interpreted. If at least substantial numbers of people crossing into Bangladesh possessed Burmese-issued documentation, the exodus cannot simply be treated as the departure of people who knew they had entered Burma illegally.

This does not mean that there had been no migration across the Bangladesh–Burma frontier. Cross-border movement existed, just as it had existed historically between Bengal and Arakan. The relevant question is whether such movement justified treating the Rohingya population collectively as foreign.

The evidence does not support that conclusion. The Rohingya population included people whose families had deep roots in Arakan, people who had exercised political rights in Burma and people possessing official Burmese documentation. Nagamin increasingly subjected this diverse population to collective suspicion based upon the state's changing understanding of ethnicity, citizenship and the frontier.

When Documents Become Vulnerable

Rohingya testimony also raises another important issue: what happened to documentation during citizenship scrutiny.

Later Rohingya accounts describe NRCs being confiscated, rejected or otherwise lost during successive verification campaigns. The consequences could be profound. Once a person's documents disappeared, later authorities could demand documentary proof that the individual was no longer able to produce.

This created the possibility of a destructive cycle. A person's citizenship was questioned; documentation was removed or rejected during scrutiny; and the later absence of documentation could then be used as further evidence that the person had never possessed a legitimate claim to citizenship.

The precise scale of document confiscation during Nagamin requires further archival investigation, and Rohipedia should not present every later community account as independently established. But the broader documentary deterioration of Rohingya legal status under military rule is well documented.

A Community Forced to Prove Its Own History

For the Rohingya, the citizenship scrutiny of 1978 was therefore about more than individual identity cards. It forced an entire community to defend its historical existence.

The question posed implicitly by Nagamin was not merely: “Do you possess this document?” It was increasingly: “Are you really from this country?” That question carried enormous historical weight because the Rohingya had already experienced the destruction of communities in 1942, increasing concentration in northern Arakan, loss of political representation after 1962 and the dismantling of institutions through which their identity had previously received recognition.

By the late 1970s, the burden had shifted dramatically. Instead of the state recognizing the community through political participation, Rohingya individuals increasingly had to demonstrate to the state that they were not foreigners.

The Testimony of Ordinary Refugees

Bahar's account is valuable for another reason. The people he described were not principally national politicians or professional historians constructing an argument about Rohingya identity. They were refugees living in camps immediately after the crisis.

When asked why they had been expelled, according to Bahar, they responded by producing their documents.

That reaction reveals how the refugees themselves understood the accusation against them. They recognized that their legal belonging was being challenged and believed that the state-issued papers in their possession answered that challenge.

The documentary evidence therefore became part of refugee testimony itself.

Independent Evidence of Mass Persecution

International documentation increasingly supports the conclusion that the 1978 crisis involved much more than routine immigration enforcement. UNHCR's historical account describes Nagamin as officially intended to scrutinize the status of people in border areas and act against alleged illegal foreigners, but states that its effect was to target the Rohingya, followed by widespread arrests and expulsions.

Human Rights Watch similarly records that the operation, although national in scope, degenerated in Arakan into abusive attacks involving the army and local Rakhines. By May 1978, more than 200,000 Rohingya had fled to Bangladesh.

A later UN human-rights assessment places Nagamin within a recurring pattern of mass violence against Rohingya that included killings, arrests, torture, rape, forced labour and other abuses producing successive waves of displacement.

These findings do not independently verify every individual refugee account. They do, however, provide substantial support for the broader Rohingya claim that the 1978 exodus resulted from persecution and fear rather than simply from lawful identification of undocumented immigrants.

From Citizenship to Exclusion

Nagamin therefore represents a critical stage in the transformation of Rohingya citizenship.

The process did not yet amount to the comprehensive legal framework introduced by the 1982 Citizenship Law, which will be examined later in this series. But by 1978 the political direction was already visible. Rohingya belonging was increasingly treated as something requiring exceptional scrutiny, while the community's earlier participation in Burma's national institutions carried diminishing weight.

For Rohingya historical memory, this is why the NRCs shown in the refugee camps possess significance far beyond pieces of paper. They symbolize an earlier state recognition that was being progressively withdrawn.

The state had once issued documents.

The state now questioned the people holding them.

And within a few more years, Burma would adopt a new citizenship regime under which the legal exclusion of the Rohingya would become far deeper.

Why This Matters to the Genocide History

Within the Rohingya interpretation of a slow genocidal process, the transformation of citizenship is fundamental. Physical destruction is not the only way in which a community can be progressively weakened. Removing political representation, denying identity, undermining documentation and redefining a population as foreign can leave that population increasingly vulnerable to later violence and expulsion.

Nagamin demonstrated this vulnerability on a massive scale. The Rohingya had been politically weakened after 1962; their belonging was subjected to increasingly restrictive scrutiny; and in 1978 state coercion contributed to the flight of more than 200,000 people.

The testimony of refugees carrying Burmese papers is therefore central to this history. It challenges the narrative that Rohingya exclusion merely corrected illegal immigration. Instead, it points toward a more disturbing historical process: people who had previously possessed recognition within Burma were increasingly being deprived of the ability to prove that they belonged there.

The next article follows these refugees across the Naf River and examines the enormous humanitarian crisis created in Bangladesh—the scale of the exodus, conditions in the camps and the international response to the first great Rohingya refugee emergency of the Ne Win era.

Continue reading → Part IV-D: The 1978 Exodus — More Than 200,000 Rohingya Flee to Bangladesh