Rohingya MP told by fax that he can’t run in the election as he’s not really a citizen

Myanmar’s chances for a free and fair election in November look worse with each passing week.
 
The latest absurdity is the rejection of Rohingya lawmaker Shwe Maung’s candidacy on the grounds that his parents weren’t citizens at the time of his birth. Which is weird, because the MP was deemed a citizen five years ago; he used to be in the ruling USDP but filed as an independent for this election.
 
The story in the New York Times says he received a fax on Saturday delivering the bad news.
 
And it was, as they say, news to him.
 
“I was approved and considered a full citizen in 2010,” he told the Times. “Now, after five years, how could I not be eligible?”
 
It also would have been news to his parents, for his father was a “career-long” official in the national police force, Shwe Maung said, adding that he planned on filing an appeal. He told the BBC’s Burmese service that he had documentation to support his claims.
 
White cards allowing Muslim Rohingya to vote and granting them other very basic rights were deemed invalid earlier this year. Citizenship tests were enacted instead, but if someone of Shwe Maung’s profile fails even after passing in 2010 (the difficulty of even explaining this gives you an idea of how ludicrous it all is), what chance does the average person on the street have?
 
Numbers on how many Rohingya have been left off the rolls are not available, though the Times report says hundreds of thousands.
 
“This is a grand discrimination against a minority,” Kyaw Min, the father of Rohingya activist Wai Wai Nu, told the paper. “There were only two other places where this happened — in South Africa and Hitler’s Germany.”
 
We’re now presented with a conundrum. Myanmar’s freest election in history could also go down as one of its least free. As the story points out, Rohingya have voted in every election since independence in 1948.
 
Photo of Shwe Maung at dinner reception in July / Aung Naing Soe / Coconuts Yangon