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Kathmandu,Friday January 28, 2000 Magh 14th, 2056.
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Unfair
report
This is in response to an article
in The Kathmandu Post on January 24 regarding the Bhutanese refugee
girls being involved in prostitution. This is a disgrace to the entire
Bhutanese community. The girls do not need to involve themselves in
flesh trade for any reason whatsoever. I hope that this report will
discourage the Bhutanese ladies from further engaging themselves in
ungainly activities.
One
thing that I take exception to your reporting is the partiality. Only
Rupa’s name featured. Who was the driver that was exploiting
Rupa’s weakness? Did he have a respectable family that his name had
to be hidden? Or was he rich? Or is it only the refugees that have to
be targeted and defiled in public? Now, Rupa will have a place neither
in her family nor in the Bhutanese community. She will have to
be hardened into what she was caught doing as the paper says. If Rupa
was a girl from Nepal, she would have ended up in the hands of Maiti-Nepal
and not in the newspaper column.
There
have been many articles in The Kathmandu Post that have helped the
Bhutanese movement. At the same time, there have been writings that
may impair the self-image of the refugees. The nightly teams of local
Nepali citizens who smuggle wood from the forest nearby the refugee
camps never make it to the newspaper. When the Bhutanese refugees go
to the forest to get firewood when there is no kerosene supply, there
is a great furore over it. Why is it so? Isn’t it reflective of your
lack of sensitivity and partiality? Despite these facts, the Bhutanese
refugees are grateful to Nepal and great-minded Nepali citizens for
the hospitality they have accorded to them and their cause.
Hari
P Acharya
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