NATIONAL 1 (Spotlight Weekly)]

What Is Cooking?

The visits of UNHCR and the European Parliamentary team to their camps could not inject the expected hopes among the refugees

By A CORRESPONDENT

Bhutanese refugees : What Is Cooking ?

For Bhutanese refugees in the UNHCR-managed camps in Jhapa District in eastern Nepal, the last two weeks bore extra importance. Within a fortnight, the refugees in the camps saw two visits that they thought would be instrumental in solving their problems.

First, it was the nine members of the European Parliamentary delegation that visited the camps. Hardly a week later, they got to see Sadako Ogata, United Nations' High Commissioner for Refugees, walking along their thatched huts. The boss of the refugee commission in the global body even went inside a hut of a refugee and made inquiries whether the refugee-families inside had the right documents to prove their Bhutanese citizenship.

With the two significant visits, the frustrated refugees did have a reason to be hopeful to return to their homes in the Dragon Kingdom. The news that the two important visits are taking place in their camps was itself a pain-relieving antidote for the refugees. Many had even begun to believe that their cause has at last received international attention. And so, they had increasing expectations that they would be repatriated.

Are the refugees equally enthusiastic after the two recent important visits? Perhaps they are not. Especially, after they heard what Thomas Mann, Vice President of the European Parliamentary Delegation that had recently visited the country, had to say. Speaking to Nepali media after visiting the camps, Mann said that Bhutan is in no position to accommodate all the Bhutanese refugees.

"It is impossible for Bhutan to take back all the refugees. Certain number of the refugees will have to settle down in India and Nepal and the remaining ones will have to go back to Bhutan," he told in different interviews. "The issue of assimilation will, of course, be difficult but it has to be done if this impending issue has to be solved."

"We have got to convince the Bhutanese government saying that some of the refugees will stay here and others in India," he further added. "During our visit to the refugees camps, we found some of them willing to go back to Bhutan while others said that they will be unsafe there. Since this later type of people will have no free place to stay, this will become a human rights problem."

In other words, the design is already there to keep the refugee problem from becoming a human rights issue. And that is by assimilating some of the refugees in Nepal while settling others in India and sending the rest to Bhutan.

In yet another disappointing news for the refugees, Mann also said that the European Union is yet to form an opinion whether the refugees are actually Bhutanese citizens. "We will have detailed discussion on the information we have had from the Bhutanese camps," Mann said. "We have plans to present the issue during the legislation session in our Parliament in June."

If there was any good news for the refugees, it was this: The European Union will have a summit with India in Brussels in June. "We will try to include the Bhutanese refugee issue in the summit's agenda and we hope India will accept it."

Though the refugees had high expectations from Ogata's visit, they had no big news to rejoice after she spoke to the Nepali press. All that she told was that both the governments of Nepal and Bhutan should use the database of refugees prepared by the UNHCR.

"This is a complete database on the refugees' record. My office will extend technical expertise and support to facilitate the verification process," said Ogata.

Nepal and Bhutan till recently were engaged in preparing the groundwork for the field verification of the refugees. The two Himalayan Kingdoms had held secretary level meetings in Thimpu and Kathmandu earlier this year to prepare the technical details of the verification process.

The two nations are expected to have the ninth round of ministerial level meet before the actual field verification starts.

The verification has to do with the classification of the refugees into four categories: Bonafide Bhutanese citizens, Bhutanese who have emigrated, Bhutanese who have committed crimes, and Non Bhutanese citizens.

Around 100,000 refugees have been languishing in seven refugee camps in eastern Nepal since 1991 after Bhutan forcefully evicted them out citing a provision in its 1985 Citizenship Act. The Act has made mandatory for each Bhutanese citizen to have the land tax receipt dating before 1958.

No sooner it declared the implementation of the 1985 Citizenship Act, thousands of Lhotsampas (Nepali-speaking Bhutanese residing in southern Bhutan) were forcefully evicted outside the Druk Yul. The Bhutanese government's move was dubbed as ethnic cleansing. What backed the doubt was the Bhutanese official slogan -- one nation, one people.