RIGHTS: Real Test of Nepal-Bhutan Accord on Refugees Comes Later

By Damakant Jayshi Reprint | | Print |

Damakant Jayshi

KATHMANDU, May 24 2003 (IPS) - Now that Bhutan and Nepal have agreed on the number of the Bhutanese refugees who can return to their homeland after more than a decade of waiting, the curtain should be coming down on one of the most complex and often forgotten refugee crises in the world.

But leaders of the refugee community and rights activists here flayed the agreement reached this week, saying it does not address their core concerns or signify a comprehensive solution to the refugee crisis.

Under the repatriation agreement worked announced Wednesday, the first of the refugees could head home by September this year, Nepalese sources said.

But many refugees remain unconvinced that it is time to go back to Bhutan – and analysts say the actual return of people is the real test of the success of the governments’ accord. Refugee leaders reiterated their call for the involvement of either the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), India or the European Union in the repatriation process.

Kathmandu-based R B Basnet, president of the banned Bhutan National Democratic Party and Rakesh Chhetri, another exiled leader and chief of the Centre for Protection of Minorities and Against Racism and Discrimination in Bhutan (CEMARD), called upon Bhutan and Nepal to involve a third party in the repatriation process.

Without this, they warned, hardly any refugee would venture back to Bhutan.

They said that the Druk government has already resettled other groups – Ngalops from the north-western and Sharchops from the eastern and the western regions – in the homes and lands of the Lhotsampas. "Who will guarantee that we will get our homes and properties back?"

More than 100,000 Bhutanese refugees have been staying in seven UNHCR-run camps in eastern Nepal and some 25,000 are in India.

These Lhotsampas – the mainly Nepali-speaking Hindu people in southern Bhutan- left their homes in the late 1980s and early 1990s when the Druk government was accused of launching a cultural and religious unification drive to preserve the Buddhist character of the nation.

Others left due to Thimphu’s decision to expel all those who could not provide proof of having lived for more than 30 years in Bhutan, whose population, excluding the refugees, was put at more than 650,000 by the government in 1999. Bhutan and Nepal have been trying to reach a solution since 1993.

"It is like something is better than nothing after years of wrangling between the two governments,” Professor Lok Raj Baral, executive chairman of Nepal Centre for Contemporary Studies who has done research on Bhutanese refugee crisis, said of this week’s pact.

But Baral said, ”Two things have to be borne in mind: it has to be bilaterally agreeable, which seems to be the case now. But more importantly, whether there is a conducive atmosphere for the refugees to return."

Without this, he said, "How can the refugees go there?". After all, it is the internal situation back then that had forced these Bhutanese nationals out in the first place, he added.

"At the end of the day, it amounts to nothing simply because it does not take into account the concerns of the refugees. Only when the actual movement of the refugees back to Bhutan begins can we term any agreement positive,” said Yadab Kant Silwal, member of Eminent Persons Group of UNHCR on refugee situation in South Asia.

A day before the Bhutanese delegation arrived here on May 19, Nepal Foreign Minister Narendra Bikram Shah said that those refugees who did not want to go back to Bhutan might apply for asylum in the West and the remaining might be granted Nepalese citizenship. "After all, they are ethnic Nepalese,” he said.

Under the agreement, among the issues yet to be hammered out is the place where the repatriated Lhotsampas will stay while their claims to citizenship are being processed.

The tediousness of the process is highlighted by the fact that it took nine months for the categorisation of refugees in the Khudunabari camp in eastern Nepal, one of the seven refugee camps, to be completed last year.

The report of the bilateral Joint Verification Team (JVT) on this was formally adopted only at this week’s 14th meeting of the foreign ministers of the Hindu kingdom of Nepal and of the Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan, where the agreement on repatriation was reached.

News reports say that according to the JVT, which carried out categorisation in the Bhutanese capital Thimphu in February to April this year, the refugees comprise the following groups: about three percent in Category 1 or nationals forcibly evicted, about 75 percent in Category 2 or Bhutanese who willingly emigrated, around 20 percent Category 3 or non Bhutanese, and the last category comprising three percent or Bhutanese with criminal records.

Under Bhutan’s citizenship laws, this means that only six percent – those from Category I and Category 4 – qualify as bona fide nationals. Half of them, however, will have to stand trial and get either acquittal or conviction before their fate is finally decided.

The JVT findings are likely to be challenged, Basnet said in an interview.

Bhutan’s Foreign Minister Jigme Y Thinley said that those in the first category do not require fresh citizenship, but those in the second will have to reapply for it once they go into Bhutan. While their applications are being screened, they will have to stay in "transition camps" in Bhutan, one Nepali official said later, although Nepal’s Shah said he did not get this impression.

In any case, Basnet said, "How can they expect us to move from one camp to another? And that too without the supervision of the UNHCR, which has been running the camps so well in eastern Nepal?"

Refugees are also protesting the fact that Bhutanese facing criminal charges need first to be put in police custody and can head home only after they are acquitted. Chhetri said: "First, the criminal charges are fabricated and were levelled because many of us participated in the movement for democracy and freedom back then. Second, we do not have faith in the kangaroo courts of Bhutan."

Details of the repatriation process will be thrashed out in the next foreign ministers’ meeting in August. While Nepal wants simultaneous verification of refugees in the six remaining camps, Bhutan has suggested taking them one by one, said Nepalese sources.