Bhutanese refugees : Breaking the stalemate

By Dr D N Dhakal

Of 84,000 Bhutanese individuals who arrived 11 years ago for asylum in Nepal, those in Khudunabari camp will soon face the Joint Verification Team (JVT), whose job is to place the refugees into different categories based on the information it received during the verification process. After completion of this process the two sides are expected to meet in a quiet environment to vet on a case by case basis the records of all 1,963 families from Khudunabari camp, and refer any differences of opinion to the Joint Ministerial Committee JMC), scheduled to meet in February 2002.

What exactly Nepal wants out of this categorization process is unclear at the moment. Nevertheless, at the secretarial level meeting, which took place in Kathmandu from 5 to 8 November, Nepal is reported to have demanded that ‘Bhutan allow its citizens, irrespective of the categories to which they belong, to return with honour and dignity’. This clearly is a right position in view of fairness and justice. At the outset of the bilateral talks in 1993, Nepal had agreed to the proposed four categories only to bring Bhutan around to field verification since the latter had denied time and again the presence of any Bhutanese nationals in the UNHCR organized camps in Nepal.

Then, the participating JMC members from the Cabinet of Girija Prasad Koirala had defended their position banking on the argument that Nepal’s acceding to the categorization does not make it responsible towards those Bhutanese refugees who would fall in any of the three categories: Bhutanese forcibly evicted, Bhutanese who emigrated and Bhutanese with criminal records. Their view was: whether a refugee signed the form, committed criminal acts, or left Bhutan for fear of persecution, they are all Bhutanese citizens. If Bhutanese laws prohibit its citizens to return to Bhutan Nepalese laws have no provisions for granting citizenship rights to asylum seekers. At the start Bhutan might have believed that it could create a statelessness problem for the refugees who would fall in ‘Bhutanese who immigrated’ category and eventually activate an international lobby to mount pressure on Nepal to make it accept this category of refugees based on ethnicity or similarity of language, culture and tradition. Bhutan reportedly set aside IC 400 crores since it started negotiations; if acceptable, this money is expected to flow into Nepal for the rehabilitation of those Bhutanese who could not return to Bhutan under the JMC framework. Ram Sharan Mahat, who is the lead person in the Deuba Cabinet in foreign affairs, has reported a similar offer from the international community.

Nepal is one of the poorest countries in the world. Of its 23.2 million people more than 90 percent depend upon subsistence farming. Its mountain region, which comprises 33 percent of the land area, has less than 2 percent suitable for cultivation; its hill region, which comprises more than 60 percent of land area, has 10 percent suitable for agriculture; and its Tarai region, which comprises 17 percent of the total area, supports close to 50 percent of the total population. Nepal’s per capita GNP is the lowest among the SAARC countries, and the land to population ratio is considered uncomfortable. Nepal has a limited natural resource base; its forest cover has receded to close to one-third of the land area, threatening a spiral degradation in environmental quality. Besides, Nepal has served as a sink to absorb the reverse flow of Nepali population after it cleared the Tarai from the menace of malaria. The population that left the hill region after the Sugauli Treaty in 1815 AD in search of prosperity, or as mercenaries in the British Indian Army, had been in retreat particularly from Burma and Northeast India. When space was available, Nepal rehabilitated thousands of Burmese Nepali refugees in the 60s and 70s, providing them land and official assistance. Nepal’s position, however, has changed since the early 1980s.

In the absence of this option, Nepal has little leverage to resolve the refugee issue under the JMC framework given Bhutan's inflexible position on categorization. Nepal is not in a position to provide space for local assimilation given the controversy over the citizenship issue and the need to address the problems of Sukumbasi and Kamaiyas. Also, any proposal for local assimilation of the Lhotsampa refugees can easily serve as an important rallying factor for Maoist activism, which claims to have established its tenets on the premise of correcting the Kingdom’s sagging international image and liberating the Nepalese citizen from the grip of acute poverty. After all, the refugees in the camps have lived for generations in Bhutan; their contributions to its socio-economic development were second to none, and there is adequate space to accommodate every genuine Bhutanese given Bhutan’s present population base, natural resources and land availability.

Under the given circumstances, Nepal has no option but to involve the UNHCR in negotiations with Bhutan. Until now the UNHCR has confined its role to managing relief operations, leaving international lobbying and tough talking to HMG Nepal and the refugees themselves. Except for the visit of Madame Ogata to Thimphu and Kathmandu, this organisation, which has the mandate of the UN General Assembly not only to provide protection but also to actively seek a lasting solution to the refugee problem, is yet to make a decisive move to involve the international community towards persuading Thimphu to create a congenial atmosphere for the return of all genuine Bhutanese refugees irrespective of the circumstances in which they left their country. Today, with President George W Bush stating in public that ‘no distinction be made between a terrorist, who shelters terrorists, or who provides support to terrorists’, and the position the international community has on terrorism, the statements of the refugees to the JVT could become handy to make the Royal Government answerable for its treatment towards Nepali Bhutanese, in the interest of fairness and justice. The NATO initiative in Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzgovenia, which essentially was an international coalition to fight against state terrorism for protection of the ethnic and religious rights of a minority, is a shining example of how intolerant states are compelled to accommodate the rights of all minorities.

Therefore, this time at the JMC meeting, Nepal should convey to Bhutan the message that its responsibility ends with helping the JVT identify who is, and who is not, a Bhutanese in the camps.
After all Nepal is beset with more severe domestic problems. The UNHCR, the Royal Government of Bhutan and the refugees themselves should share the burden of finding a lasting solution to the ten year old refugee problem, which will indeed be a paradigm shift in the search for lasting solution.

From the rural heart

By Smriti Jaiswal

Come hither, come hither civilized town man. Come hither before you write of us. Come hither before you dream of us, before you envy us. Live hither civilized town man, drink in our sylvan beauty, share with us our sense of duty, be one with our simple community before you sing of us. Stare at our trees that remain forever, at our lakes that shine forever, at our women who work forever, at our men who sweat forever. Come hither to understand the meaning of forever - the unchanging, the undeveloping, the non-metamorphosizing. The trees change only to cheap firewood, the lakes to scum, the women to coughing tuberculosis, the men to white eyed imbeciles dripping saliva.

Come hither to know our simple joy that consist of waking and sleeping with cows, of several families in one leaking house, of cooking on mud stoves, of eating out of empty utensils - the same meal thrice a day.

Come hither to see young withering beauty. Young withering beauty of them who never knew the charms of their face. Nobody knows the charm of their face at this place. Nobody
cares - except those who come from distant places to sell us to distant places.

Come hither to experience unrelenting endurance. To understand the lack of desire - that which you call our sainthood. Come, watch our stagnancy. Come here before you conspire about our ability - watch our helpless inability.

Come hither civilized town man before you condemn your own progress. Come and see the distress of having no progress at all. Green stretch of
land. Unbroken. Green stretch of land without roads, without service, without poles - just the green of crops that bring us no money. No brick houses, no small industries, no comfort - just an endless stretch.

Come taste our life with us.

It tastes like something rotting. It tastes like sin. It tastes like an inescapable coffin.

Yesterday we were hit by flu. It stuck to us like a glue without solvent. The flu dissolved us, we relented, we died - without a fight - while far away, in another world you wrote beautiful pastoral poems. The famine came, we swallowed raw fish. There was nothing with which to buy fuel. We ate ripe rotten apples picked from a debris of ripe rotten apples. We swallowed our dreams, tears, blood and sweat.

Come hither interested town man, watch us swallow vomit like a dog and survive.

Watch us if you can.

Be proud if you can.

Sing and envy if you can.

And remember you’ve created us.

And kept us this way.

Democracy beyond emergency

By Pratyoush Onta

We should have never reached this emergency juncture in the life of our nation but it is too late to be saying that. The dominant view being expressed by the Prime Minister and his coterie of ministers is that after the attack on the military barracks in Dang, the Maobadis left no alternatives for the government but to declare a state of emergency. This is certainly correct if you are willing to forget how just a month ago, there was no consensus in the ruling party regarding how to deal with the Maobadis.

Even as Deuba’s men sat down to negotiate a deal with representatives of the Maobadis (because, as the press then put it, they were a potent political force in the country), the NC party president and his coterie were making different noises. If you stretch your memory even further back, you might recall Girija P Koirala’s moves to derail the work of the committee headed by Deuba (the one commissioned by Krishna P Bhattarai) on the subject of the Maoist insurgency. One might also recall here the many shifting positions taken by UML and other oppositional parties regarding the insurgency over the last six years. Readers are being reminded of all this simply because the dominant reason doing the rounds regarding the source of the present emergency situation forces us to forget the deep duplicitous character of our leadership that let the Maoist sore fester for so long.

That said, the rest of this essay makes two points. First, it demands clarification from the government regarding the limits of public speech under conditions of emergency. Second, it emphasizes that long-term solutions to the country’s problems can only be found through the deepening of democratic institutions and not through the barrel of the gun.

Deuba and his spokesman J P Gupta have reiterated that the suspension of fundamental rights is targeted only against the Maoists and no other sector of Nepali society. If that is so, then those with no ties to the Maoists and in fact those who have publicly denounced the Maoists have nothing to fear. But then what are the limits of free speech under conditions of emergency (mind you this is a totally new experience for Nepali society under the Constitution of Nepal, 1990)? Do those who have maintained a previously established oppositional stance vis-a-vis the Maoists and the government have the right to oppose even the imposition of the state of emergency? In other words, when legal recourse regarding the protection of this right has been suspended, what kinds of precision statements from the executive would be a useful guide regarding the limits of free speech under conditions of emergency?

This is not simply an academic concern. I bring this point because fundamentalists such as the Nepal Sivasena group have already distributed pamphlets earlier this week in which they have threatened those who oppose the emergency. In a handout distributed in the streets of Kathmandu, they write: "When the state of emergency comes up for endorsement in Parliament in three months, the leaders of all the parties that do not support the government will be dealt with harshly by a joint group of Sivasainiks and Nepali janataharu…. Those who oppose this valiant effort of the government are anti-nationalist supporters of terrorism and Nepal Sivasena demands that they should be imprisoned immediately for life." In the next paragraph of the same pamphlet, Sivasainiks are exhorted to physically eliminate those who oppose the state of emergency. Deuba and Gupta should make clear if this kind of publicly available hate speech and open exhortation to violence by a fundamentalist group that derives its existence from another fundamentalist group south of the border is acceptable public speech at this point. They might also explain how exhortation to violence by the Nepal Sivasena is different from that advocated by the Maoists. Such a clarification might even help to reduce the silly levels of self-censorship imposed by our media houses.

The second point of this essay is related to the life of democracy in this country beyond the state of emergency. If all the analyses (that need not be repeated here) regarding the sources for the rise of the Maoist insurgency are even half correct, then these sources will still be with us even if the Maoists are demobilized. In other words, demands for the greater establishment of social justice for all kinds of otherwise disenfranchised Nepalis will not disappear even if the Maoists were to disappear. To feel as though their demands are being heard without them having to resort to arms (as was the case with the Maoists), representatives of various social movements demanding for greater justice in Nepali society must feel that the government is taking their demands seriously and is acting upon them. For this to happen in any meaningful way, democratic means of dealing with such demands must become a norm in our polity. Civil discourses and negotiations and not afno manchhe dictatorship should be the norm. This would require the setting up of possibly new democratic institutions where necessary and the democratization of already existing institutions that are otherwise seen to be part of the problem at the moment.

This imperative should not only be remembered by the office holders of the present government and the NC party, but also by all oppositional parties. It is a point that all our international friends need to keep in mind when rushing to offer various kinds of help to the Deuba government. Any short-term help that inhibits the long-term democratization of Nepali society will be counter-productive.