In July 2015, I was invited to the residence of U Aung Thaung, a senior and influential leader of Myanmar’s Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), in Naypyidaw. We discussed the approaching general elections and parliamentary nominations for the constituencies in northern Rakhine state.
What happened during that meeting has remained outside the public record for more than 11 years. I want to disclose it now because the political question at its center – the recognition of Rohingya identity and rights – remains unresolved. It is also relevant to how ASEAN engages with Myanmar’s military leadership today.
I was elected to Myanmar’s house of parliament, the Pyithu Hluttaw, from Buthitaung township of Rakhine state in November 2010 as a USDP candidate. In the summer of 2015 I was preparing to secure my office for another term. But, during our private conversation, U Aung Thaung proposed a condition that went far beyond ordinary electoral politics.
As I recall it, he told me that he, the USDP leadership, President U Thein Sein, and then Commander-in-Chief Min Aung Hlaing did not accept “Rohingya” as an ethnic identity. He urged me to stop advocating for that identity and to persuade my constituents to identify themselves as “Bengali” instead. He presented this change as a pathway toward obtaining citizenship documentation and restoring political participation. He also advised me to give a media interview stating that “there is no Rohingya but Bengali,” without mentioning our private meeting and his name.
My parliamentary nomination, he indicated, depended on my willingness to support that position.
I refused.
I could not ask my constituents to surrender their identity in exchange for the possibility of receiving documents, voting rights, or another parliamentary term. Political representation should protect the rights of a community, not become an instrument for bargaining those rights away.
U Aung Thaung encouraged me to consult my constituents and reconsider. I subsequently informed community leaders and constituents about the conversation. They supported my position and we were all on the same page. I did not disclose the meeting to the media at that time because of the political consequences of making such an account public while living in Myanmar.
During my visit, I saw large portraits of President Thein Sein, Min Aung Hlaing, and nationalist Buddhist monk U Wirathu in an office at the residence. An assistant told me that the office also served U Wirathu whenever he comes to Naypyidaw. These are my recollections of what I saw and I was told 11 years ago.
The statements about Thein Sein and Min Aung Hlaing were made to me by U Aung Thaung. I cannot claim that I heard either man personally authorize the proposal. But U Aung Thaung confirmed the proposal with Union Immigration Minister U Khin Yi, today’s USDP chairman and speaker of Pyithu Hluttaw, over the phone in front of me.
The central proposition was unmistakable: I was being asked to abandon public advocacy for the identity of the people I represented as a condition of continuing my political career.
On August 4, 2015, I resigned from the USDP. Two days later, I applied to contest the upcoming Pyithu Hluttaw election as an independent candidate for Buthitaung.
On August 22, the Maungdaw District Election Subcommission rejected my candidacy. Its decision concluded that my parents had not been Myanmar citizens at the time of my birth in 1965. I appealed, together with concrete documents, to the Rakhine State Election Subcommission, which upheld the rejection on September 1, 2015. The Union Election Commission subsequently affirmed the decision, communicating its ruling in a letter dated September 6, 2015.
This outcome presented a profound contradiction in my political life.
The same Union Election Commission had formally recognized me as an elected member of parliament following the November 7, 2010 election. Its recognition certificate, dated January 10, 2011, identified me as the elected representative of Buthitaung and recorded my citizenship card.
Five years later, election authorities found me ineligible to stand for the same parliamentary seat because they now considered the evidence of my parents’ citizenship insufficient.
The State Election Subcommission acknowledged that my father possessed a national registration card, which serves as a primary document for full citizenship, and that my maternal grandparents also held national registration cards. Nevertheless, it concluded that those records did not adequately establish the citizenship qualifications required under the election laws.
I maintained that I had submitted the same family citizenship documentation in both electoral processes. The surviving recognition certificate and 2105 rulings represent contrasting official outcomes, although a complete comparison of the underlying applications would require examination of the original 2010 candidate file.
I believe the circumstances of my exclusion cannot be separated from the political pressure I experienced over my Rohingya identity. But the official election decisions do not themselves establish that my refusal of U Aung Thaung Thaung’s proposal caused my disqualification.
In November 2015, I publicly described the disenfranchisement of Rohingya voters and candidates in an opinion article for the New York Times. What I did not reveal then was the private conversation that had proceeded my departure from the USDP. I am revealing it now not simply to revisit my personal experience, but because it illuminates a continuing political problem.
For decades, Rohingya identity has been contested by successive Myanmar authorities, often through the characterization of the community as “Bengali” migrants. Questions of citizenship, documentation, and political participation have been intertwined with that dispute. The consequences extended beyond elections.
The mass atrocities committed against Rohingya in 2017 drove hundreds of thousands of Rohingya people into Bangladesh and intensified international demands for accountability. The Myanmar military coup in February 2021 subsequently plunged the country into wider political and humanitarian crisis.
Today, the Rohingya question cannot be treated as an isolated refugee-management problem. It is connected to Myanmar’s broader failure to establish an inclusive political order in which citizenship and fundamental rights are protected without discrimination.
This why ASEAN’s diplomatic engagement with Min Aung Hlaing deserves close scrutiny.
Regional governments have legitimate reasons to maintain channels of communication concerning humanitarian access, armed conflicts, migration, and regional security. Diplomatic contact is not necessarily equivalent to recognition or endorsement. But engagement must be judged by what it achieves for people affected by Myanmar’s crisis.
For Rohingya, discussions of repatriation are incomplete unless they address the conditions that forced people to flee and the rights they must be able to exercise upon return. A refugee cannot be expected to regard return as durable when questions of identity, citizenship, personal security, and political belonging remain unresolved.
ASEAN should therefore make these issues substantive elements of its discussions with Myanmar’s authorities. They include equal citizenship rights, recognition of the right to self-identification, meaningful political participation, protection against further atrocities, accountability for grave violations, and conditions for voluntary, safe, dignified, and sustainable return. The wider realities of Myanmar’s conflict must be taken into account. The aspirations of people resisting military rule, the safety of civilians across the country, and political future of ethnic communities cannot be separated from efforts to resolve the Rohingya crisis.
My experience in 2015 taught me how readily the question of identity could become a condition imposed upon political participation. The documents from my parliamentary career show that official recognition in one election offered no assurance of eligibility in the next.
Eleven years later, I remain convinced that Rohingya rights cannot depend on whether individuals agree to relinquish the name by which they identify themselves.
ASEAN cannot settle Myanmar’s political future on its own. But it can insist that engagement address the rights and security of the people whose lives are at stake.
A sustainable future for Myanmar requires more than meetings among political leaders. It requires a political order in which no community must choose between its identity and its rights.
