A Life in Limbo: Bhutanese Refugees

Chet Nath Timsina dips his shaving brush in a metal bowl of water and carefully shaves around the bruises on his face. Light from the open back door spills into the bamboo hut, illuminating his plastered right leg. His 60-year-old mother, Mon Maya Timsina, watches in the shadows.

This is not how Chet Nath, 34, imagined he would spend his summer. Back in May, he and hundreds of other Bhutanese who have been living in refugee camps in eastern Nepal for as long as 17 years, tried to walk the 70 miles from Nepal through India to Bhutan. Indian police blocked them and ended up killing two people and injuring dozens. Chet Nath, a teacher and self-taught journalist, was one of those injured. Though he usually lives in the small Nepalese town of Birtamod, just east of a cluster of refugee camps, he moved himself, his wife Uma Devi, and his son Kushal into his parents’ camp hut so that his parents could care for him while his wife works during the day.

Chet Nath’s actions and injury reflect the intensity of an issue that has polarized the 106,000 Bhutanese refugees of ethnic Nepali descent: whether they should hold on to hopes of repatriation to Bhutan or accept resettlement offers from third countries, including the United States and Canada. The United States says it will take at least 60,000 people starting this year. The first groups of resettled refugees have already left Nepal.

Holding on means continued limbo. Bhutan refuses to repatriate what it calls voluntary migrants to Nepal; Bhutan’s March 24 election of its first democratic government is unlikely to change this view. However, most media reports and firsthand accounts say the Bhutanese government forced the ethnic Nepalis into leaving Bhutan because of their growing numbers and influence on society.

Refugees say that accepting resettlement means giving up on the hope that Bhutan will be held responsible for its actions and the chance they will ever return to their home country. But staying in Nepal is no option either: the Nepalese government won’t allow the Bhutanese to integrate into the country.

For several months in late 2007, the situation in the refugee camps was so tense that the United Nations and other aid groups would not discuss the resettlement issue in the camps. Refugee camp leaders, who built their political power base on hopes of returning to Bhutan, intimidated other Bhutanese to the point of violence and even death, said Father Varkey Perekkatt, field director for Caritas Nepal, a Catholic non-governmental organization that oversees the refugee camps’ education system. One refugee who publicly spoke in favor of resettlement had his hut burned and his family chased out of the camps last May.

“Some groups are putting a cloud over the refugees’ decision through intimidation,” said Father Perekkatt. “There needs to be an atmosphere where refugees are free to make their choice.”

For 15 years, Chet Nath postponed major life decisions until the day he would be living back in his homeland. He put off marriage. He put off children.

“Then one day I realized I had passed half my life here in the refugee camp. I realized I couldn’t keep delaying. That is why I married late and had a child late,” said Chet Nath as he played on the bed with his three-year-old son Kushal. “I had never expected it would take so long to get back. I am still hopeful we’ll be back.”
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Bhutan is best known in the west – if it’s known at all – as a small Asian country that measures its prosperity in terms of Gross National Happiness instead of Gross National Income.

Ethnic Nepalis began settling in Bhutan in the 19th century. Many became eligible for citizenship via the 1958 Nationality Law, but by the 1970s the government saw the growing group as a threat to the country’s cultural identity. Starting in 1977, Bhutan enacted laws – sometimes retroactively – that tightened citizenship requirements. A 1988 census found that 100,000 people were illegal migrants. And most, if not all, of those people were ethnic Nepalis. According to Kinga Singye, minister counsellor at Bhutan’s mission to the United Nations in New York, this was no coincidence. He said that many ethnic Nepalis illegally entered the country in the early 20th century, took advantage of the Bhutanese government’s weak administrative structure of that period and were able to obtain citizenship papers.

By 1989, the Bhutanese government struck Nepali language classes out of schools and required everyone to observe traditional Bhutanese dress and customs. Resistance led to job losses, school closures and house raids in the south, where most ethnic Nepalis lived.

First-hand accounts and news reports from the time show that by late 1990, Bhutan began intimidating ethnic Nepalis into signing “voluntary migration” forms. The trickle of refugees transiting west through India to Nepal turned into a torrent. The Indian government began driving and leaving refugees at Nepal’s eastern border, where a refugee camp was set up. Despite their role in the situation, India says it is not a player in the Bhutanese refugee issue.

“We’ve always maintained this issue is between Nepal and Bhutan and needs to be solved between the two,” said Gopal Baglay, spokesperson for the Indian embassy in Kathmandu. “In addition, it’s a humanitarian issue that needs to be solved quickly.”

At the height of the exodus in 1992, the camp swelled with 10,000 new arrivals a month. The United Nations Human Rights Commission (UNHCR) stepped in at Kathmandu’s request. Eventually, a total of seven camps were built in two of Nepal’s eastern-most districts.

Bhutan has been mum on the refugee and repatriation issue since 2003, when bilateral talks with Nepal broke down. But all along, Bhutan has insisted that ethnic Nepalis left Bhutan of their own accord.

“When the (refugee) camps started, they [ethnic Nepalis in Bhutan] heard about free food, housing, healthcare and education and people said, ‘Why don’t you come to the camps?’ So people went,” said Singye of Bhutan’s mission to the United Nations in New York. “Our king even went down and explained to them that they should not leave, but they did not listen. People who are Bhutanese and were forced out – it’s a very small percentage.”
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The bumpy dirt road to the Beldangi complex of camps is lined with Bhutanese refugees walking and bicycling to Damak, a small town a few miles from the camps. Tucked away behind trees and ignored by the world, Beldangi I, Beldangi II and Beldangi Extension camps overflow into each other, housing nearly half the Bhutanese refugee population. People have languished here for 17 years, living a life dependent on UNHCR and other aid organizations for food and fuel rations. They lack electricity and running water. Old newspapers double as wallpaper inside rows of bamboo huts, which stand just a few feet apart. People bathe, dress and socialize in the open.

To be sure, the conditions are far better than in other refugee camps around the world, according to aid workers. In addition, there are plenty of schools in the camps and an education system that rivals the Nepali system, according to both refugees and aid workers. But the Bhutanese are not legally allowed to hold jobs outside the camps and have no legal means of becoming permanent Nepali residents; a sense of despair and a lack of purpose hang in the air.

“Presently children are not that interested in their studies,” said Jamuna Karki, principal of Tri Ratna Secondary School. She was once a student here herself, and returned – despite the paltry salary – to give back to the community that brought her up. “They see their elder brothers and sisters are so qualified but they are without jobs. In the camps there are so many unfulfilled desires.”

Chet Nath’s first weeks in this new environment were a surprising contrast to Bhutan. He was 19 when his family left their five-acre farm in Bhutan. He still remembers his last days there.

Months of police intimidation and government pressure convinced Chet Nath’s parents that the family had to leave Bhutan. They sold their cows, sheep and goats at 10% of their value and sold their land to the government at less than 10% its private market value; Chet Nath’s parents reasoned that when they returned to Bhutan, it would be easier to reclaim their land from the government than from a private owner.

“I saw the field ready for paddy plantation. My father plowed until the day we left,” Chet Nath said of the last time he saw his village in July 1992. “I saw many crops growing and not harvested. I wondered if we could come back next month or the month after that and work in the fields. I wondered what would happen to our house. Would thieves take everything? After I left my village I couldn’t control my tears.”

As Chet Nath and his eight brothers and sisters walked out of Bhutan, he thought back on the years they all lived in Bhutan. He thought about how Bhutanese he was – how he spoke the language, wore the clothes and observed the customs, and then he felt sorry for himself. He and his family walked across the Bhutan-India border in July 1992 and were then driven west and deposited at the Nepal-India border.

Upon arriving at the Goldhap refugee camp in Nepal, Chet Nath and his family encountered thousands of exiled Bhutanese and could not receive an authorized site for building a bamboo hut, something they had never done anyway. They managed to build one, living there for five months before authorities assigned them a hut number at the new Beldangi Extension camp. The family prepared themselves for several months in the camp.

While still at Goldhap, Chet Nath volunteered to be a teacher. He strongly felt children’s education should not suffer because of grown-ups’ circumstances. On the first morning, he was heartened and overwhelmed to see hundreds of children sitting in an open field dotted with trees. He approached the person in charge.

“There under that far away tree over there are two classes without teachers,” Chet Nath recalled the headmaster saying. “Pick one.”

Chet Nath walked toward a group of upper kindergarten students and imagined the children would cheerfully greet him with shouts of “Teacher! Hello!” but no one said a word. He asked questions to gauge their level of learning. Some students did not know their ABCs while others knew all their multiplication tables. Chet Nath divided the students into three groups and walked from group to group, thus starting a teaching career that led him to his current position as a part-time accounting and business teacher at a college in Birtamod. (Though it is illegal for Bhutanese refugees to work outside of the camps in Nepal, many work under-the-table as teachers).

He grew to love his profession and his students but he still hoped to return to Bhutan. Last May, when he heard that hundreds of Bhutanese refugees would stage a “Long March” to Bhutan from the Nepalese border town of Kakharbitta, he decided to go as a reporter for the Bhutan Press Union, a group of Bhutanese refugee journalists. He saw hundreds of men lined up at the Mechi Bridge, eager to cross into India and walk to Bhutan.

“On the bridge, at the beginning I was so nervous,” said Chet Nath. “I had gone to the long march only to report the news and the Indian police beat and broke my right knee after snatching the press card I showed to them.”

Uma Devi, his wife of five years, was working at her accounting job at a Bhutanese refugee non-governmental organization (NGO) when she got the call her husband had been injured on Mechi Bridge. She was shocked because “in the morning I told him not to go, not to participate in this, but he ignored my voice,” she said.

After months of recuperation and rehabilitation, Chet Nath can walk again with a bit of pain in his right knee. The medical expense strained his family’s finances but he has returned to his under-the-table teaching job. Since the Mechi Bridge incident, one of Chet Nath’s sisters has decided to join her Bhutanese refugee husband in the Netherlands, where he unexpectedly sought asylum during a business trip. In a recent e-mail, Chet Nath wrote he is still waiting for signs that Bhutan will repatriate refugees. “Otherwise, as my wife tells, ‘We have to look for the future of the son,’ we might decide for resettlement as well.”

-Laura Elizabeth Pohl, excerpted in Foreign Policy in Focus