Unlike other ethnic groups, the state does not frame the Rohingya issue as one of needing to subjugate a rebellious ethnic minority. It does not matter whether one is a good Rohingya or a bad Rohingya or involved in armed resistance or not. It is the mere fact of being a Rohingya that the state takes issue with. Elsewhere I have given a detailed account of this. Moreover, this is the reason the state makes blurry distinctions between insurgents and civilians and why so many non-combatant Rohingya are killed with every military action. The enemy is never just the Mujahidin, RSO or the ARSA but always Rohingya people themselves. That anyone could be surprised at this in light of the 50-year military campaign that has sought to either drive Rohingya out of the country or kill them, is astounding. As  Min Aung Hlaing himself has put it, the Rohingya ‘problem’ is a ‘long standing’ and  ‘unfinished job’. The Tatmadaw has never seriously tried to conceal the fact that the Rohingya need to be violently excluded – it won’t even allow for the term ‘Rohingya’ to be uttered in the country. There is nothing more violent than preventing a people from denoting their own existence.  With each wave of deadly state violence, journalists and analysts seem caught unaware – shocked and surprised, falling over one another to offer explanations – was it because of the ARSA? Was it communal violence? Was it the failures of the Kofi Annan commission? Was it that Rakhine felt excluded? Maybe the NGOs weren’t conflict sensitive enough? The vulnerability of the Rohingya comes from the fact that in the eyes of the state, their identity has become separate from their bodies. The state has extinguished the legal ethnic identity of the Rohingya effectively, eliminating it from the political community. Yet the Rohingya as a people – as a collection of bodies –  remain in Myanmar’s territory. It is this existence in the indeterminate zone of having a physical presence within the territory but without a corresponding political and legal presence that makes Rohingya so vulnerable to death. As philosophers like Agamben^[7] have been at pains to point out, it is this condition of being able to be killed without sanction that facilitates mass murder. For Rohingya in Myanmar, death could come at any time and from any angle with little or no legal retribution for the perpetrators. It is the deliberate production of vulnerability – the progressive stripping back of political rights of Rohingya, so they are merely bodies in the eyes of the state, that allows such systematic and unthinkable violence to be repeatedly cast upon them.  And this is no doubt why people in Northern Rakhine have so desperately insisted on state recognition of the Rohingya ethnic category – a move that some liberal analysts have sought to undermine. If the Rohingya have become merely bodies in the eyes of the state, it is the presence and even rise in the number of these bodies that the state takes issue with. Fertility and the concern that these bodies will multiply and even contaminate the Buddhist political community has been at the forefront of state and ultra-nationalist concerns. This is why the state is so heavily invested in measures to control birth, mobility and demographics in Rakhine state. This is why a ludicrous proposition in the lower house to protect racial purity was inspired by events in Rakhine. This is also why the state has for a long time invested in ‘model villages’ in northern Rakhine to counter ‘demographic pressure of the Rohingya’^[8] and why the state systematically deprives the Rohingya of the most basic elements to sustain life. The state has taken a multi-pronged approach to excluding, or at least reducing the expansion of these bodies which ranges from benign neglect, starvation, economic restrictions, mobility restrictions, ad hoc violence, rape and systematic exclusion. Here the state oscillates between begrudgingly tolerating the presence of these bodies on its territory, and engaging in sudden bouts of violence to clear them out. At times, it tolerates NGOs and the international development industry keeping these people alive, but never tolerates any action or program that would treat them as political subjects deserving of rights. Mob attacks on NGOs in Maungdaw and Sittwe sent a clear message; Rohingya who have been attacked by police and soldiers do not have a right to medical treatment. The state’s insistence that it has the right to take Rohingya life is absolute. It is crucial to point out here that this does not represent a movement away from democracy or modernity. As Achille Mbembe states, ‘the sovereign right to kill and the mechanisms of biopower are inscribed in the way all modern states function indeed, they can be seen as constitutive elements of state power in modernity’.^[9] Necropolitics or the production of death by the state, does not represent an aberration of democracy, it is a result of democracy. As the line between the inside political community and those who are outside it becomes increasingly rigid, it is no surprise that with the transition to democracy, violent exclusion of the latter group occurs. That the UN has been complicit in this arrangement where they have ultimately accepted the state’s sovereign right to kill the Rohingya at any moment, should in hindsight be seen as unforgivable. In the 21^st century, any state – and especially the Burmese state – faces great logistical, political and economic challenges in producing the same kind of systematic genocidal violence as say the Nazi state did in the 1930s. The Burmese state has simply never functioned along the same organisational lines of the Third Reich with its enormous and highly efficient bureaucracy. Even compared to say the Rwandan state, or Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, there are important differences with the current Burmese state that make genocide logistically challenging. The fragmented Burmese state is simultaneously fighting numerous insurgencies and has been deeply unpopular since independence. Furthermore, economically and politically, it is entering a phase where international acceptance and foreign investment are crucial. Yet these are not strong enough reasons to reject that genocide is occurring. At the domestic level, there have been important logistical steps towards genocide. For Michael Mann, one of the preconditions of murderous ethnic cleansing (which includes genocide) is that “ordinary people are brought by normal social structures into committing murderous ethnic cleansing, and their motives are mundane”.^[10] The most remarkable thing about the politics of Rakhine state and anti-Muslim sentiment more generally is that the state has been able to very effectively channel localised discontent against the Burmese elite into rabid anti-Rohingya violence. The relationship between the Rakhine and the state has very rapidly evolved in this regard. From the state looking on as the Rakhine engaged in pogroms of deadly violence in 2012, the state now blatantly arms Rakhine and uses them in its program of systematic arson. In fact, the big lesson of the 2012 violence was that the state lost control of these violent populist movements as they spread like cancer across the country.  Here is another one of Mann’s preconditions for murderous ethnic cleansing – that it typically occurs organically: ‘[M]urderous cleansing is rarely the initial intent of perpetrators” yet where “cleansing typically emerges as a kind of Plan C, developed only after the first two responses to a perceived ethnic threat fail. Plan A typically envisages a carefully planned solution in terms of either compromise or straightforward repression. Plan B is a more radically repressive adaptation to the failure of Plan A, more hastily conceived amid rising violence and some political destabilization.^[11] At a discursive level, various elements have rapidly come together to premeditate murderous ethnic cleansing. The Rohingya have slowly transitioned from a marginalised ethnic group that was nonetheless tolerated by the state –  which at times the state even used for electoral advantage – to enemies of the state. This has been facilitated by two uniquely Burmese concerns; the spread of Islam and its supposed deleterious impacts on the Burmese Buddhist political community and the uncontrollable flow of ethnic Bengali’s into Burmese territory. What is crucial from the perspective of genocidal ethnic cleansing is that these concerns are quite literally embodied by the Rohingya. If fertility, intermarriage and migration are the mechanisms of spreading the disease, the disease itself is Islam – or more specifically the variant of Islam held by “illegal Bengali immigrants”. It is here that Burmese genocide – like all modern genocide – takes on an undeniably biopolitical logic. That is that the disease can only be stopped by the physical expulsion or destruction of Rohingya bodies in which it dwells. Even sexual violence takes on a deeply disturbing biopolitical logic. More than just an excess of the machoism used to stoke state inflicted violence, systematic rape and mutilation is likely a strategy to replace Rohingya children with Burmese or prevent further children. On several occasions, Burmese military officials, when faced with the allegation of systematic rape have responded that no Burmese soldier would desire a Rohingya woman. The timidity with which liberal analysts have approached the question of genocide is astounding. Relying upon an overly legalistic interpretation, many have not only failed to appreciate the biopolitical and political significance of genocide but even sought to undermine the use of the term by the Rohingya community. Raphael Lemkin’s original concept was specifically concerned with the Holocaust and thus the legal definition is limited to very specific circumstances comparable to the Holocaust (yet there is still a strong legal argument that what is happening in Myanmar now matches this limited legal definition). Maung Zarni amongst others has done much to popularise the concept of a ‘slow burning genocide’ which is tailored to the unique situation in Myanmar. Yet most liberal analysts have either ignored or looked on in disdain at both this concept as well as the use of the term by the Rohingya community.