As the Myanmar/Burma government has begun to ease on the violence against the Muslim Rohingya — as the mass majority of them have fled into Bangladesh — the spotlight has begun to shift. The government has more recently started to target the mostly Christian Kachin in the northern parts of the country, and violence has erupted there, displacing thousands of civilians once again.

There are two narratives in regards to the repatriation of the Rohingya people into Rakhine State and the rebuilding of the war-torn part of the nation. The narrative of the government and the narrative of the outsiders and local people — outsiders including various private aid organizations and NGOs, the U.N., and other countries.

Approximately 700,000 Rohingya people fled from the crisis, and are now crammed into refugee camps just over the western border in Bangladesh (added to the previously existing population from past conflicts, that amounts to around 900,000 total refugees). Some estimates say that now 90% of the Myanmar Rohingya population have been driven from their homes into Bangladesh, not to mention the heavy casualties they sustained on their way out. The U.N. described the violence toward them as “textbook ethnic cleansing,” which were initially spurred by several attacks by Rohingya militants on Myanmar police and military checkpoints (a product of the longstanding conflict between the government and the ethnic minorities around the country). The government retaliated with a brutal campaign primarily directed at Rohingya civilians.

After a substantial amount of international criticism, the Myanmar government has constantly been promising repatriation efforts in order to return the Rohingya to the place they’ve called home for generations (including holding seats in parliament). However, these “efforts” have produced little fruit. Despite the lack of documentation many refugees may have (many of them had to run with what they had on their backs at the time), there are also certain legal issues that might prevent huge swaths of Rohingya from being repatriated, even if they were born there, their parents were born there, and even their grandparents were born in Myanmar.

Human Rights Watch puts it this way:

The stipulations of the Burma Citizenship Law governing the right to one of the three types of Burmese citizenship effectively deny to the Rohingya the possibility of acquiring a nationality. Despite being able to trace Rohingya history to the eighth century, Burmese law does not recognize the ethnic minority as one of the national races.”

Under this logic, Myanmar could express a humanitarian willingness to repatriate the Rohingya, appeasing the international community, and yet exclude most Rohingya from actually re-entering the country. To this effect, the U.N. has also pointed out the facade of Myanmar authorities — claiming to make efforts to repatriate the Rohingya, and yet providing little-to-no fruit in those endeavors.

Read about these laws that exclude many Rohingya here.