Bhutanese refugees
Verification process to begin from Monday

BY NAVIN SINGH KHADKA

Kathmandu, Mar. 20: Come March 26 (Monday), a joint team of Nepalese and Bhutanese officials will begin the verification of a little above 12,000 Bhutanese refugees from Khudunabari Camp -- one of the seven camps accommodating the Nepali-speaking Bhutanese living in exile in eastern Jhapa and Morang Districts for the last ten years.

The Joint Verification Team (JVT) of Nepal and Bhutan finalised the date and the selection of the refugee camp for the verification today, according to Gopendra Bahadur Pandey, Spokesman at Home Ministry. "The verification process will begin from Monday."

Buses will transport the Bhutanese refugees from the Khudunabari Camp near Birtamod in Jhapa District to the JVT office at Damak in the same district where Nepalese and Bhutanese officials will together verify them. The 10th round of ministerial level talks between Nepal and Bhutan last December had decided to form a JVT (with five members from each side) to begin the verification of the refugees from, to begin with, one of their seven camps.

"The verification procedure will be in line with the Terms of Reference agreed between Nepal and Bhutan during the 10th round of talks," said Usha Nepal, Joint Secretary at Home Ministry, who heads the Nepalese side in the JVT.

The JVT will ask the head of refugees’ families to fill-up a form on the basis of which the Bhutanese citizens in exile will be interviewed. The refugees’ family-members above 25 years of age will have to fill up a separate form – technically called "attached proforma."

The verification process in what has been dubbed as the first test-case-camp, has no fixed time frame, officials involved said. "It depends how fast the refugees will fill the forms and how quickly can they be interviewed."

As per the result, the JVT will remain tight-lipped until they are done with all the refugees in the Khudanabari Camp. "We will disclose the results only after all the refugees in the camp are verified," said Nepal.

It took more than a week for the Nepalese and Bhutanese officials to reach into an agreement on the date and the selection of the camp for the verification. The Bhutanese team, led by Dr. Sonam Tenzing, Director at Bhutanese Home Ministry, had arrived in Jhapa on March 11 earlier this month.

Officials said most of the last 10 days the Bhutanese team had to spend on settling down in Jhapa, looking for accommodation and other necessities.

Until the JVT’s today’s decision, the around 100,000 Bhutanese refugees were left guessing which of their camp will mark the genesis of the verification process.

Khudunabari Camp is the fourth biggest one among the seven refugee camps. Which means this is the camp with the average number of refugees compared to the first three biggest and the three smallest ones. Located some 40 kilometers away from Damak, the camp ranks fifth among the seven camps in case of their distance from the JVT office.

This is the latest camp of all the seven refugee-camps the United Nations High Commission for Refugees has been managing all over the years. According to Bhutanese refugees’ leaders here, refugees who were earlier lodged at Beldangi Extension camp – one of the three camps in Beldangi, near Damak – were later shifted to the Khudunabari Camp.

"Some of the refugees in the camp are among those who were forced to sign the voluntary migration forms by the Bhutanese government," said Rakesh Chhetri, Director of Centre for Protection of Minorities and Against Racism and Discrimination in Bhutan (CEMARD), who himself is a Bhutanese refugee.

The refugees narrate spine-chilling incidents how they were made to sign the voluntary migration forms before they were "booted" out of their homelands in southern Bhutan. "The people were coerced to sign the so called "voluntary migration forms," a document written in Dzonkha – a form of Tibetan script – which most people from the south could not decipher," reads a report "Victims of forced eviction" prepared by Association of Human Rights Activists (AHURA), Bhutan. "The document stated that the signatories were voluntarily denouncing their Bhutanese citizenship to migrate elsewhere."

Unable to stand what they claim the ethnic-cleansing move of the Dragon Kingdom, the Lhotsampas (southern Bhutanese population) fled their homes and landed up in the eastern districts of the country. The trouble began when the Druk Yul amended its Citizenship Act 1985 requiring anyone claiming to be a Bhutanese to have the land tax receipt of 1958.

Bhutan’s 1988 census labeled those found without the document as non-nationals and, say the refugees, forcefully evicted them.

The first batch of 60 Bhutanese refugees, according to Foreign Ministry, entered Nepal on December 12, 1990.

In the following two years, the heads swarmed reaching around 100,000 in the seven camps. Meantime, Nepal began to cry foul on the refugee crisis and got Bhutan to sit across the table for the first time in 1993 – when the two Himalayan Kingdoms agreed to categorize the refugees into four categories – Bonafide Bhutanese who have been forcibly evicted, Bhutanese who have emigrated, Non Bhutanese, and Bhutanese who have committed crimes.

The difference on the two country’s positions on the four categories of refugees turned out to be a rift in the lute keeping the refugee crisis hostage for around seven years.

Increasing international pressure in recent times softened Bhutan’s posture that paved way for the verification. The two nations agreed to identify the refugees, for now, in one of the seven camps, without any third party involvement. The refugees had demanded for one, though.

Where & How many

(Data source: RCU, Chandragadi, Jhapa, Nepal)

Other Stories

• Int'l meet on Lumbini April 5-9
• House stalled again with oppn walkout