The end of the road for Bhutan's refugees

5-11 January 2018 #891

Nation

Camps are closing in 2018, and remaining refugees wait to return or move on

Jenna Kunze in JHAPA

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photos: Jenna Kuze

A LONG WAIT: Karma Tshomo and her mother, Wangmo Dorji, showing their refugee IDs in Beldangi II, weeks before their resettlement to Massachusetts, USA.

As the resettlement program ends in 2018, remaining refugees from Bhutan who spent 25 years in eastern Nepal are left with two options: repatriation to the country that exiled them, or assimilation in a country whose constitution denies them citizenship.

“Landless, citizenless, homeless, respectless, everything less,” said Kamala Pradam, a 47-year-old teacher in Beldangi II Camp, who is among the remaining refugees facing an uncertain future.

The Lhotsampa are Nepali-speaking descendants of farmers, many of whom had lived in Bhutan for centuries. Nearly 100,000 were forcibly evicted from southern Bhutan by the King Jigme Singye Wangchuk regime starting in 1991, then transported through India to eastern Nepal where they lived in UN-supervised refugee camps. Some 90,000 have been resettled in third countries in the past decade, and 8,540 remain in the camps.

The Lhotsampa accounted for one-sixth of Bhutan’s population before the evictions. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) ran the camps, and the resettlement was handled by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM).

Some of the remaining 8,540 refugees in the camps.

The UNHCR had three solutions for the refugees: third-country resettlement, repatriation to Bhutan and local assimilation in Nepal.

Since 2007, the third-country resettlement program has sent 90% of the refugees to the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, Norway, the UK and the Netherlands. Of the remaining 8,540 refugees in Beldangi and Sanischare camps, nearly 1,000 are still being processed for resettlement, which UNHCR is wrapping up by December 2018.

The program was especially appealing for younger refugees who wished to seek education and opportunities abroad. Unfortunately, it almost always meant family separation. For Karma Tshomo, it was from her father. He remains in Beldangi II, while she and her mother resettle in Massachusetts State in the US.

“She is only going for me,” Karma says before departing, nodding at her mother across the room. Their plan is to stay long enough only for Karma to attend college, and then later to return “home,” whether that be in Bhutan or Nepal.

Among the remaining refugees, there are those, mostly elderly and those with parents or siblings left behind, who still hope to return to Bhutan. Though UNHCR does not have an exact figure, those opting for repatriation is a small portion of the remaining refugees. Those affiliated with repatriation groups claim the number is around 2,000, but Camp Secretary Tikaram Rasaily, who also supports repatriation, says it is much lower.

“Until and unless this repatriation will happen, I’ll be here,” said DB Subba, a member of Bhutan’s Indigenous Peoples Forum within the camp, which fights for return to their motherland. He says only international pressure on Thimphu will make repatriation possible.

Rukmini Neupane, 83, is one of 1,500 census absentees. She wasn't in the camp when ID cards were issued and without it she cannot travel to the US to join her only son. “I don’t want to go to Bhutan, I want to go with my son," she said. "Maybe I will drink poison and die here, but I don’t want to go back to Bhutan.”

Between 1993 and 2003, the Bhutan and Nepal governments held numerous bilateral talks for repatriation of 108,000 refugees, all of which were futile.

“Unless they can agree to sit in a meeting, what options do we have?” asks Ram Babu Dhakal of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Kathmandu. The Druk regime insisted during the Joint Verification Process that a majority of refugees were Bhutanese, and had emigrated voluntarily.

“We are refugees, we will get discriminated everywhere, until and unless we are not citizens,” says Rebika Adhikari, a 25-year-old single mother from Beldangi II. She works as a teacher outside of the camp in Damak, earning less than her Nepali co-teachers.

Local assimilation into Nepal has happened over the last 25 years. Since they look the same as Nepalis and speak the language, refugees are able to find work outside the camp, though they are at the will of their employers. But to stay on in Nepal, the refugees would need guarantees like citizenship, work permits, ability to open bank accounts or own property.

The majority of the refugees don’t wish to return to Bhutan or remain in Nepal: they had problems with documents and now want to be reunited with their families abroad.

Rebika Adhikari’s family is in the US, and she is virtually alone in the camp because of late paperwork. She says: “I don’t have any reason to go back, and I don’t have any reason to stay here. I want to move forward, not back.”

Devi Charan and Khina Maya Acharya

Devi Cheran Acharya and Khina Maya Acharya have waited three years for a departure date for Canada.

The Acharyas have been packed and ready to go to Canada for three years now.

Devi Charan Acharya, 85, and his wife, Khina Maya, 83, completed the process for third-country resettlement, including preparing travel documents and getting vaccinations. But they are still waiting for their departure date.

The Acharyas’ long wait is an anomaly. The elderly couple have health issues: he is blind and diabetic, requiring insulin injections two times a day, she is hard of hearing. UNHCR says that disabled and vulnerable populations normally receive priority in resettlement, but the Acharyas are still waiting. Of their 11 children, five are resettled in the US, two in Canada and four remain in Bhutan, including one who is in prison for being a dissident.

“If the UN can send us to our son and daughter in Canada, at least they can look after us,” Khina Maya said. The couple initially tried to settle in the US, but were denied without explanation.

UNHCR said it doesn’t comment on individual cases, adding that the final decision remains with the resettlement country.

Ram Pradhan

Ram Pardhan passing time with his wife outside of their hut in Beldangi III.

“From tomorrow, don’t come to work, and leave this country,” Ram Pradhan, 63, was told by his superiors in the Bhutan Army 27 years ago. Despite his official position and years of service, his own colleagues turned against him when the regime started evicting the Lhotsampa in 1991.

“The army chased me from my village,” he said, remembering that his wife and small children ran all the way to the Indian border.

Today, Pradhan lives with his second wife in Beldangi III, all of his five children have been resettled in Nebraska State, US, but he has no interest in joining them there. He ultimately wants to return to Bhutan, otherwise he is happy to stay on in Nepal.

“We suffered in Bhutan and the government didn’t see our pain,” he says, “but no one saw our suffering. Not government, not people, not any officials.”

Read also:

Lhotshampa, Rohingya, Kanak Mani Dixit

Refugees-in-waiting, Gopal Gartaula

The 100,000th refugee, Gopal Gartaula

California's Little Bhutan, Ayesha Shakya

Huddled masses yearning to rejoin families, Gopal Gartaula

Lhotshampa, Rohingya-Kanak Mani Dixit

27 Oct - 2 Nov 2017 #881

On the Way Up

Burma’s pernicious populism and a preoccupied world abandon the Rohingya

The Rohingya tragedy should resonate much more in Nepal than elsewhere in South Asia, because its genesis is nearly identical to the tragedy of Bhutan’s Lhotshampa.

The main difference is one of scale, as Bhutan too carried out state-sponsored de-population of its Lhotshampa Nepali-speakers. More than 100,000 were booted out under the son-of-the-soil ‘Drig Lam Namzha’ banner, to live as refugees for nearly two decades in Nepal before they were fortunate enough with third-country resettlement in the West.

Like the Rohingya the Lhotshampa, too, were regarded as Bhutanese citizens until the harsh state decided to generate statelessness, with a scorched earth policy that spread fear among the targeted community. The fleeing Lhotshampa entered India, which for its own considerations facilitated the transfer of the refugees to Nepal where they were put up in camps by the UNHCR.

Gopal Gartaula

The bulk of the Lhotshampa were invited to the largely uninhabited southern hills of Druk Yul by the Bhutan nobility, the settlers providing revenue to state coffers. But as the economic and strategic value of the southern hills became apparent in the modern era, and as fear of cultural inundation built up alongside the 1985 Citizenship Act and 1988 census, the Druk government activated its depopulation machine as directed by the then king, Jigme Singye Wangchuk.

In 1992, I was on the ground watching the desperate Lhotshampa arrive by the banks of Mai Khola in Jhapa from their homes in Samchi, Chirang, Gelegphug and other parts. The scale of eviction of Rohingyas is exponentially more horrendous as the fleeing mass of humanity was filmed on land and sea and by airborne drones. The tragedy is ongoing, and the number of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh is hitting the one million mark even as this is being written, which includes those here since 1992.

The Rohingyas’ historical home has been the Rakhine region on Burma’s west coast, and they were regarded as citizens when the country became independent in 1948, and thereafter as well. Things began to go sour following the military takeover of 1962, and the 1974 Constitution and Citizenship Act of 1982 ended up wresting citizenship from the Rohingya.

The tragedy escalated to unbearable proportions because the Rohingya are friendless within Burma. The non-Muslim Rakhine people, the countrywide Buddhist clergy, the other nationalities of Burma, the military, bureaucracy, political class or civil society, all seem to be agreed they are ‘Bengali’ foreigners.

Anti-Rohingya populism within Burma is so vicious that the stand-alone leader and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu-Kyi seems incapable of resisting. Or it may be that her mindset is at one with the chauvinists, which has her ignoring calls for reversal from Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama, Malala Yousafzai, the UN Secretary General, as well as the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the last terming the Rohingya tragedy a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”.

Sonia Awale

Suu-Kyi, evidently in isolated existence at the capital Naypyidaw, cannot even bring herself to mouth the term ‘Rohingya’. On the day she delivered her Nobel address in Oslo back in 2012, her response to the rape, arson, lynchings and mass displacement of the Rohingya was (as I wrote then in “Lady Liberty and the Ethnic Cauldron in Himal Southasian) ‘to equivocate rather than speak directly to the human tragedy’. She took refuge in the absence of proper citizenship legislation, a ‘faint-hearted response of a politician (who was) insensitive to their enforced statelessness, human rights, and the right to life and livelihood’.

The rounds of violence and the exodus to Bangladesh began in 1978. There was another bout of depopulation in 2012, and the latest and ongoing tragedy began on 25 August, following reported attacks by Rohingya militants which killed 12 Burmese border police. In exactly two months, 604,000 Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh after their houses were torched by the military, the inhabitants violated and killed. Within Burma, there are said to be another 150,000 kept in internment camps, with international humanitarian agencies denied access and support.

The Rohingya people are looking into an abyss of statelessness, within Burma as well as in the Bangladesh refugee camps. The international reaction is muted. While the Dalai Lama has spoken on the basis of humanitarian principle, Buddhistic societies by and large are silent, be they Mahayan or Theravad adherents. The West is in geopolitical confusion ever since the advent of Donald Trump in the international arena, even as crimes against humanity are committed by the Burmese security forces. If one were to look to India as the largest regional democracy, we have the shocking absence of empathy that has state functionaries talk brazenly of ‘refoulment’ (forcible return of refugees to where they are apt to face persecution).

The Lhotshampa, faced with Thimphu’s rejection of repatriation, were lucky that the international geopolitical configuration made third country re-settlement available. No such luck for the ten times more numerous Rohingya. One of their ‘faults’ – being born Muslim.

Read also:

Bhutan’s Lhotshampa, Kanak Mani Dixit

The South Asian cauldron, Dominique Moisi

Burma to Kathmandu, Navin Jha

Too little, too much freedom, Kunda Dixit