Mostly, Rohingya refugees are simply too terrified to countenance returning to Rakhine without first obtaining serious guarantees from the Myanmar government: among other things, the restitution of lost land and property, access to public services, formal recognition as “Rohingya” and, perhaps most contentious, full citizenship. The government has refused to grant any of these measures, unless the returnees can prove that they satisfy the draconian requirements of the 1982 Citizenship Law — a cause of their disenfranchisement in the first place. The Rohingya are reviled by the local Rakhine community and, as Muslims, are treated as interlopers by much of the Buddhist ethnic Bamar majority throughout the country.

The experience of the Rohingya who still live in Rakhine State can hardly reassure the refugees. An estimated 660,000 remain, most in villages, but nearly 130,000 of them in squalid camps for internally displaced people. The government has announced plans to close the camps, but has no clear proposal for doing so or for then ensuring Rohingya’s basic freedom of movement. In fact, for years before the recent waves of violence, the Rohingya were prevented from even traveling from one village to another without official permission.

Some Rohingya are now accepting from the government so-called nationality verification cards that label them as “Bengali,” rather than “Rohingya,” in the hope that formal identification will allow them to relocate elsewhere in Myanmar. But this step is anathema to many Rohingya, because “Bengali” has long been used as a label of racist objectification that marks them as outsiders, originally from Bangladesh, and therefore as not belonging in Myanmar.

Myanmar officials brush off such criticism, claiming that it is international nongovernmental organizations that are hindering repatriation efforts (because they profit, financially, from the refugee crisis) and that Bangladesh is reneging on its commitments. Yet the BBC and the Australian Strategic Policy Institute have reported the widespread destruction of former Rohingya villages in Rakhine, challenging the Myanmar government’s claim that it is doing its part to ensure the refugees’ safe and dignified return. Satellite images confirm that an archipelago of confinement camps has been erected in the place of the villages — a gulag in the waiting, in which any Rohingya who did return would likely see their rights and freedoms even more restricted than before.

And then, a new security problem has emerged: an insurgency by the Arakan Army, a guerrilla group of ethnic Rakhine with longstanding grievances about the central government’s neglect of the state’s residents and exploitation of its natural resources. Long based in training camps in northern Myanmar, the Arakan Army has managed to bring several thousand well-trained soldiers to Rakhine and since late 2018 has staged hundreds of attacks against security forces — using sophisticated improvised explosive devices, overrunning police stations and attacking convoys on roads and waterways. According to Arakan Army statements, its operations killed some 1,100 security personnel during the first five months of this year. (The military, known as the Tatmadaw, denies this.)