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Nepal- Bhutan talks
Nepal to offer a concrete proposal for refugee repatriation: Dr. Mahat

BY A STAFF REPORTER

Kathmandu, Aug.20: The country has a concrete proposal to put forward at the 11th round of Nepal-Bhutan talks on Bhutanese refugee issue beginning today in the Bhutanese capital Thimpu, Finance Minister Dr. Ram Sharan Mahat said minutes before boarding the Druk Air Jet to fly to Bhutan from the Tribhuvan International Airport this afternoon. He was leading the Nepalese delegation for the bilateral talks scheduled to be held from today till August 23 this month.

"We have a concrete proposal to address all the aspects of the refugee issue," Dr. Mahat told reporters at TIA. "The proposal is based on our homework and the experience we have had." He, however, would not elaborate the proposal.

Dr. Mahat is leading the Nepalese delegation for the Nepal-Bhutan Foreign Ministerial level meet in Thimpu since the Foreign Ministry is for now retained by Prime Minster Sher Bahadur Deuba whose portfolio does not allow him to sit with Bhutanese Foreign Minister for the talks.

Nepalese Ambassador to India and Bhutan Dr. Bhekh Bahadur Thapa, senior government bureaucrats and officials (Nepalese) in the Joint Verification Team are accompanying Dr. Mahat for the talks.

Speeding up the ongoing snail-paced verification of the Bhutanese refugees tops the agenda list, he said. "The verification process is painfully slow. Going by the present pace, it would take more than six years to verify all the refugees in the camps."

After their 10th round of talks here last December, Nepal and Bhutan had agreed to verify the refugees camp by camp. The two Himalayan Kingdoms formed a Joint Verification Team – with five members from each side – that began work from March 26 earlier this year. So far, only around 900 families of the 1200 families of the Khudunabari Camp – one of the seven refugee camps in Jhapa and Morang Districts – have been verified, so far.

More than 15,000 Bhutanese refugee families – totaling more than 100,000 heads — to have been languishing in the UNHCR-maintained camps for the last one decade in eastern Nepal.

Verification apart, other issues including categorisation of the refugees and harmonisation of the two countries’ stand on the refugees’ categories would also be discussed, Mahat said. "We still have differences on the categorisation issue and that is where we need to harmonise our stands," he said.

During the first round of ministerial level talks in 1993, Nepal and Bhutan had agreed to categorise the refugees into four groups: Bonafide Bhutanese, Bhutanese who have emigrated, Bhutanese who have committed crime and Non-Bhutanese. The categorisation later proved to be a costly move for Nepal as Bhutan stuck with its rigid stand that it would take back only the first category refugees.

"Regarding the categorisation, our stand is that the refugees should be treated as Bhutanese and non Bhuatnese only," Mahat clarified. "Therefore both the sides need to reach into an agreement."

He further said that the whole idea is to make the repatriation of the refugees as early as possible. "For that we will have to work out in a time-bound manner, so that we could see the refugees return to their home."

The harmonisation of the two nations’ stands on the four categories of the refugees has been a perennial problem ever since they first met to deal with the refugee crisis more than seven years ago. While Bhutan has been saying that its law does not allow it to take back any other refugees except the first category (Bonafide refugees), Nepal maintains that it has no reason to keep back any of the refugees Bhutan created due to its internal problems.

Due to the conflicting stands, the talks were stonewalled after the sixth round of bilateral ministerial-level meeting in 1996. The two nations did not even meet for almost three years. And when they agreed to verify the refugees last year, the issue of categorisation of the refugees and the harmonisation of their respective stands on the categories remained on the back burner.

Knowledgeable observers say Bhutan is asserting on taking back only the first category refugees because it has kept the records of many refugees’ voluntary migratory forms it made them sign forcefully before evicting them from their homelands. The refugees themselves recall how they were made to sign the voluntary migration forms under gunpoint.

They also narrate horrible stories how they were shooed out of their homes after Bhutanese authority began its ethnic cleansing campaign in the late 80’s. The Dragon Kingdom labeled almost all of the Lhotsampas – Nepali-speaking Bhutanese from southern Bhutan – as non-Bhutanese, charging that they did not possess valid documents to prove their Bhutanese citizenship.

The refugees here, however, claim that they all have one or the other documents to prove that they are Bhutanese citizens. Even the Nepalese officials in the Joint Verification Team verifying the refugees say that the Bhutanese in exile (Nepal) have the credentials to prove their Bhutanese citizenhip.

The Bhutanese refugees, who have been living in the UINHCR-maintained camps in Jhapa and Morang Districts, also say that the Bhutanese authorities ousted them under the "one-nation-one-people" ethnic-cleansing grand-design.

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