A Rohingya woman from Myanmar holds a SweTinSit photo. Seven of the people pictured were killed in military “clearance operations’’ in northern Rakhine state in August 2017. Photo courtesy of Shafiur Rahman. Taslima was dreading the day. It was SweTinSit, an annual population census conducted by Myanmar government officials in northern Rakhine state. Military, police and customs officials would be sweeping through, collecting data on Rohingya families – monitoring the birth of children, photographing family members and listing their names. This was in 2016, when tensions in Rakhine were escalating. For many Rohingya people, like Taslima and others in her village of Tula Toli, the SweTinSit (or “Map Record Check,” in Burmese) was a mandatory and intense audit, and always unpredictable. If one is absent during a SweTinSit, their relatives can be subject to extortion, imprisonment, arbitrary taxation, or worse. The year before, a relative of Taslima's was raped by a military officer. In the SweTinSit of 2016, Taslima's brother-in-law had gone to work outside the village, to repay a debt. Fearing that he would be arrested for his brother's absence, Taslima's husband disappeared for the three days it took for the census to be completed in Tula Toli. Taslima paid a fine of 300,000 kyats (US $208) for her brother-in-law and a further fine of 200,000 kyats (US $138) for her husband. Officers warned her that if her husband did not return while the census was still underway, there would be further consequences. In the early hours of the very next day, Taslima says that four men, including the village chairman Aung Ko Sein, entered her hut and raped her in front of her two young children. I met and interviewed Taslima in 2018, after she, along with hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims like herself, had fled from Rakhine state to Bangladesh. At this time, the lists and the photographs produced during SweTinSit amounted to the only forms of official Myanmar government documentation that many of them had. Authorities do not grant citizenship to Rohingya people born in Myanmar territory. In government documentation systems and rhetoric, Rohingya are referred to as “Bengalis,” erroneously suggesting that they are migrants from Bangladesh. In Bangladesh, photos and lists from SweTinSit have become portable memories of loved ones, thousands of whom perished in the so-called “Clearance operations.” These documents also are potentially the most compelling claim to citizenship that Rohingya refugees possess, given that many of these records stretch back decades. Once they had arrived in Bangladesh, at the Balukhali camp, Taslima learned that her household family members would need to register with camp authorities in order to receive food tokens. To register, Taslima and her family members were told to submit their information, fingerprints, and an iris scan, all of which would be collected and logged in biometric “Smart Cards.” Speaking with others in the camp, Taslima and her husband heard different views on the Smart Cards. But concerns grew stronger, and the opposition to Smart Cards germinated and spread. Many refugees refused to believe that the card was just a practical necessity for aid management and delivery, that it had no social or political meaning. On Twitter, the head of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Filippo Grandi called the Smart Card a “personal document which is also a tangible sign of dignity and hope.” But many Rohingya disagreed. At the heart of their suspicion lay the fact that the cards did not include the word “Rohingya,” although the database for the Smart Cards does include this information. The card itself describes Rohingya cardholders as “Forcibly Displaced Myanmar Nationals.” One might imagine that to be called a “Myanmar National” would be favourable for many Rohingya, who for decades have struggled against the Myanmar government’s refusal to grant them citizenship. Nay San Lwin, a prominent Rohingya activist and coordinator of the diaspora group Free Rohingya Coalition, told me: It is not standard practice [to include one's ethnicity on an ID card]. But the people in the camps felt very strongly about their ethnic name given their experience of being labelled “Bengali” in Myanmar. They wanted to secure their Rohingya identity on a card finally. They thought it would amount to some international recognition of Rohingya ethnic identity. And for many, the decision not to include the term “Rohingya” indicated deeper collaboration between the Bangladeshi and Myanmar governments. For many, an even more worrisome aspect of the process was that the database registration form included the option to share one’s information with Myanmar authorities.