Too Little
GOING by the reports from Thimpu, Bhutan has
continued to hold fast to its policy of dragging the refugee issue as best as it can.
Nepalese officials taking part in the 11th ministerial round of talks on the Bhutanese
refugee issue found across the table a Bhutanese side that refused to entertain
Nepal’s proposal to verify all the Bhutanese refugees in a time-bound manner. Knowing
Bhutan’s legendary way of dealing with this problem that it itself created as part of
its ethnic cleansing policy in the late eighties, its unyielding position does not come as
a surprise. Nonetheless, this must be an upsetting piece of news to the Bhutanese refugees
languishing in different camps in eastern Nepal for over a decade. Given the frustratingly
slow-paced verification process, Nepal was expected to try to convince Bhutan to a
time-bound process of verification and eventual repatriation. Bhutan, in the event, showed
that it cares little about taking steps that would facilitate a speedier resolution of the
refugee crisis. Sources in the Nepalese delegation told this newspaper Wednesday that it
had only agreed to the idea of increasing the pace, to only a very limited degree, of
ongoing verification in one of the refugee camps. The two sides signed a minute in which
they agreed to split the present Joint Verification Team into two to increase the
verification process at the Khudunabari camp, one of the seven UNHCR-maintained camps in
Jhapa and Morang districts.
This "concession" is just too little. Given the
fact that only 900 families were able to be verified over four months out of the 15,000
families in the camps, the latest agreement to have two, instead of one, JVTs is an
insufficient move that indicates the Dragon Kingdom’s extreme reluctance to genuinely
go for a speedier verification process. The two sides also agreed to categorise the
refugees of the Khudunabari camp, where the verification work is focused at present, once
they are verified. But suspicions about Bhutan’s sincerity in the whole process were
reinforced when Bhutanese Foreign Minister Jigme Thinley refused to clarify, in a
telephonic interview with our reporter, what category of the refugees it will be taking
back. Thimpu’s past insistence that it will take back only "bonafide
Bhutanese" flies in the face of Nepal’s correct contention that it should take
back all the refugees except those in the non-Bhutanese category. All in all, the 11th
round of ministerial-level talks appear to have got stuck, once again, in Thimpu’s
standard rebuff of any move that brings an end to the agony of the over 100,000 southern
Bhutanese it kicked out just because they happened to be of Nepalese origin. By doing so,
it has once again demonstrated its notorious callousness.
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