RIGHTS-NEPAL: Bhutanese Refugees Rely Heavily on U.S. Support

By Damakant Jayshi Reprint | | Print |

Damakant Jayshi

KATHMANDU, Jul 11 2003 (IPS) - Bhutanese refugees of Nepali origin are relying ever more heavily on U.S. intervention to resolve the deadlock over of their repatriation to their home country.

A statement of concern and support by the U.S. Ambassador to Nepal, Michael Malinowski, circulated to major newspapers in Kathmandu on Wednesday calling for a re-examination of ”inconsistencies” in the repatriation process, is the latest in a series of interventions that the refugees find welcome.

After all, they are up in arms over what they say are restrictive conditions that the Bhutanese government set with the Nepali government in May, terms that would prevent many of the 100,000 refugees from being able to return to Bhutan.

Washington, which has been backing the refuges’ reintegration through the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), regards as a glaring inconsistency the labeling as non-Bhutanese the parents of young people categorised as eligible to apply for Bhutanese citizenship.

The call of the U.S. Embassy for the involvement of the UNHCR in the Bhutanese refugees’ verification process is significant, since the U.N. body runs the seven refugee camps for them in eastern Nepal.

UNHCR officials in Nepal have been saying that they are ready to play a role if both countries ask for it. While Nepal favours the U.N. agency’s involvement, Bhutan has opposed the U.N. body’s role since the very beginning.

"Let us see if the two countries agree to the UNHCR’s role," R B Basnet, president of Bhutan National Democratic Party (BNDP) told IPS. "If it is involved, we will have lot of faith in the repatriation process and the rehabilitation and the resettlement that will follow."

Now that Washington has pronounced its position, Basnet said: "We are confident that now both Nepal and Bhutan will treat the issue more seriously and with justice."

The Bhutanese refugees have been staying there since the early 1990s, after fleeing the Druk kingdom. Some 25,000 others stay in India.

The Lhotsampa refugees – 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 Bhutan’s Buddhist character.

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 and whose population, excluding the refugees, was put at more than 650,000 by the government in 1999.

During the dying days of Clinton presidency in 2000, the U.S. government sent a high-powered team to Nepal to provide impetus to attempts to address the problem of refugees between the two Himalayan kingdoms, separated by Indian and Chinese territory.

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton had urged the two governments to take steps towards resolving the problem. Soon afterwards, the two countries formed the Joint Verification Team (JVT) that was tasked with the verification and categorisation of the Bhutanese refugees. They started with the Khudunabari camp in eastern Nepal.

Three years down the road, the U.S. government has again made public its dismay over the work of the JVT. The refugees are upbeat again, saying they feel that this would put much-needed pressure on the governments to solve a problem that has been festering since 1993.

The latest instance of U.S. support comes at a time when the refugees staying in camps in eastern Nepal have been crying foul over "suspicious activities" by the Bhutan government, including the "restrictive conditions" it put for their return to their country.

These conditions were circulated to the refugees of the Khudunabari camp after the JVT report was made public on Jun. 18.

The U.S. statement addressed the refugees’ concern that very few of the appeals by the refugees against the categorisation would be entertained. "The appeals are submitted to the same adjudication body that made the original determination – a body not likely to reverse its own decisions,” the embassy statement added.

An "unofficial" list of conditions mandates that the mainly Nepali-speaking refugees need to know the Dzongkha language and Bhutan’s history and culture, although refugees who were born in the camps in this country hardly know them.

Likewise, it requires that they stay away from political activity while their applications for citizenship are being processed.

The refugees have also been asked to produce new documents and to lodge their appeals within two weeks of the publication of the report – a move many refugees say is aimed at preventing the appeals for the sheer shortness of the time.

When approached by IPS, Bhutan’s officiating Foreign Secretary S T Rabgye, who is in Kathmandu to attend a meeting of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), pointedly declined comment. "I am aware of the news reports about the U.S. ambassador’s statement but I do not want to make any comments,” he said.

U.S. support is timely given that 94 percent of the more than 12,000 refugees from the Khudunabari camp have appealed against the JVT findings.

Only 2.4 percent of 12,183 individuals from 8,595 families qualify as bona fide Bhutanese forcibly evicted or what is known as Category 1 refugees, according to the verification team. It classified 70.2 percent in the second category of willing emigrants, 24.2 percent as non-Bhutanese and 2.85 percent in the fourth category as Bhutanese with criminal records.

The findings left the refugees aghast, and for the first time they accused the Nepalese government of a "sellout".

Nepal has since dubbed the ”unofficial” circular containing the conditions as being against the "spirit" of the bilateral agreement it reached with Bhutan in May.

The refugees want the grant of citizenship made in the camps itself and have asked for the creation of a "conducive" atmosphere for their "dignified" return.

But Nepal’s Foreign Secretary Madhu Raman Acharya said the refugees had to be realistic. If the refugees wanted the situation in Bhutan to improve before their return, "then they will have to wait for decades”, he said.

Referring to the refugees’ demand for the amendment of Bhutan’s 1985 citizenship law, Acharya said the refugees need to make the choice – to go now or stay in the camps for an indefinite time.

Many hope that things could change after the U.S. statement this week. "We remember how things moved ahead after the U.S. nudge in 2000,” Ratan Gazmere, chief coordinator of the banned Association of Human Rights Activists-Bhutan, told IPS.