Positive Sign
IT TOOK over a decade for the Bhutanese
refugees languishing at different refugee camps in Jhapa and Morang districts in eastern
Nepal to see light at the end of the tunnel. The joint team of Nepalese and Bhutanese
officials is now in Jhapa to prepare groundwork for the verification of the Bhutanese
refugees in one of the seven UNHCR-maintained refugee camps. The team’s arrival in
Jhapa must have made the refugees feel that this may be the beginning of the end of their
long wait to return to their homeland with dignity. In fact, it took a full 10 years for
Nepal and Bhutan to take the first positive step towards resolving the refugee problem.
For this altogether 10 bilateral talks starting from 1993 to 2000 were held between the
two Himalayan Kingdoms. In fact, the provision of categorisation of the refugees into four
groups and to verify them was agreed upon in the third round of talks in 1993, but it took
another 7 round of talks for both the sides to agree on the modality of verification and
the actual process to start. The first nine bilateral talks held between Nepal and Bhutan
had failed mainly due to the dispute over the refugees’ categorisation. The latter
was never ready to call all the Bhutanese living in Nepal’s refugee camps in the
eastern Nepal as genuine refugees while Nepal stood firm that all the Bhutanese living in
the refugee camps were the refugees. Finally after seven years of intense bilateral
negotiations and also due to the international pressure Bhutan agreed to verify all the
refugees with their families intact as per the stand of Nepal.
Though the present joint team will verify the
refugees of only one of the seven camps, this verification process has come as an
encouraging sign in resolving the decade-long refugee problem. Of course, Nepal, which
itself is a cash-crunch country facing a problem of rampant poverty suffered much due to
the presence of over 100,000 Bhutanese refugees in the country. Equally sufferers are the
local people, especially the wage-earners of Jhapa and Morang not to mention the trauma
the Bhutanese refugees have undergone for a decade in the foreign land with an uncertain
future. However, the cooperation of the international organisations like UNHCR in managing
the refugee camps eased Nepal’s burden to a large extent. As such it is the duty of
all to cooperate the joint team in verifying the refugees so that the verification process
will be completed soon to the satisfaction of the refugees, Nepal, Bhutan and which in
turn help all the refugees to return their homes as soon as possible.
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