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Kathmandu Friday May 18, 2001 Jestha 05, 2058.
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Design next step
Mr Mandal’s "Bhutanese refugee verification
exercise" (TKP, 23 May, 2001) was informative as it attempted to up date the progress
of the ongoing verification of the Bhutanese refugees. The refugees seem to be frustraed
largely due to slow pace of the verification exercise. If the present rate of progress is
anything to go by, the Joint Verification Team would take more than six years to end this
mammoth task. Understandably, if the arrangement remains unchanged, it will be too much to
try human patience to wait for such a lengthy period. But it would be wrong to project the
verification process as a problem. Undoubtedly, it is a move towards breaking the impasse.
At this stage, I do not think, the refugee leaders and other concerned parties need to
overreact to the present situation. Given social and technical problems, the screening of
one to ten families a day can be noted as a remarkable progress, at least from a layman's
point of view. The most important question that should bother the concerned people is
where to go now. According to news reports, JVT has already interviewed over 1000
individuals. The responsible party should, therefore, engage themselves in churning out
the next step. If we are waiting for a single JVT to complete the assignment and then
thinking to move forward, apparently we are being rather unfairly to the refugees. In my
understanding, verification and repatriation processes should move together.
Shekhar Chauhan
Haratari, Gorkha |
