Burma as migrant workers under the British aegis and had left. This claim drew legitimacy from the early role that the armed forces assumed under the guidance of Aung San, creating the appearance that the Tatmadaw was the only suitable protector of Burma and Buddhism. The situation in Arakan further deteriorated in 1982 when the Burma Citizenship Law was passed, again tightening the definition of a citizen and the requirements for citizenship. According to this law, any ethnicity other than those explicitly named in the legislation were deemed to be foreigners. In order to substantiate this claim without sparking a mass civil unrest, three levels of citizenship were constructed (citizen, associate citizen, and naturalized citizen) and arbitrary requirements for each classification. Ethnic groups other than the Bamar were assigned to one of the three categories based on their residence prior to 1823—the year Britain began its nearly century-long campaign to colonize Burma (Ibrahim, 2016). A requirement for naturalization—the only form of citizenship Rohingya would have been eligible for due to the explicit denial of their natural-born citizenship in the 1974 constitution—was documented evidence proving residence before 1948, the year Burma gained independence. The problem for nearly all Rohingya who tried to do this was that following ratification of the Socialist Constitution, their identification cards indicating that they had been living in Burma before the required deadline, were confiscated and replaced with the Foreign Identification Cards, meaning documentation for the Rohingya no longer existed. This effectively denied them citizenship of any form and left them especially vulnerable to abuse and violence. 12