Mindfulness about Bhutan’s refugees

Bhutan is planning an ambitious urban development project at Gelephu bordering India. But some of that land belongs to people the Bhutan regime evicted 30 years ago, and they have land titles to prove it.

The new city called Gelephu Mindfulness City is supposed to integrate development with sustainability and wellbeing, and is being proposed as a way for Bhutan to spur economic growth, create jobs and curb outmigration.

However, the city that is planned to accommodate more people than the present 790,000 population of Bhutan is being built in an area where Bhutan’s Nepali-speaking Lhotsampa people used to farm and live.

Nearly 100,000 Lhotsampa were forced out of Bhutan in 1990-92 (one-sixth of the population at the time), drive across India and dumped in Nepal where they have lived in seven refugee camps supervised by the United Nations and other charities. 

By 2008, the refugee population had swelled to 120,000 and with the help of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) they were settled in the United States, Australia, New Zealand and some European countries.

But about 6,577 stateless people from Bhutan still remain in eastern Nepal where the UNCHR and World Food Programme (WFP) have withdrawn all support since 2016. At least 40% of them are said to be from Gelephu. Eleven of the households even have their land holding titles. About 2,000 of them do not have any refugee papers.

Many of the refugees who remain are elderly or infirm who hope one day to return too Bhutan, or they missed out on the third-country settlement because they did not have registration papers. 

After a scandal last year in which senior government officials were implicated in a scheme to cheat about 900 Nepalis to pay money for fake refugee papers for settlement in the US, the Nepal government has stopped issuing travel documents even to genuine refugees.

‘’These refugees have been deprived of education, healthcare, food and housing, they are left to fend for themselves engaging in menial work in the informal sector,’ the group South Asians for Human Rights (SAHR) states after a monitoring visit to Jhapa district in eastern Nepal.

SAHR has called on the Nepal government to provide the refugees with ID cards and travel documents so they can visit family members settled abroad. It also wants the refugees to be allowed to work legally in Nepal, and grant citizenship to the children born in refugee camps. 

A delegation from SAHR met Nepal government officials in Kathmandu this week, and were reportedly given assurances that the problems of the remaining refugees would be looked into.

Rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have also drawn international attention to Lhotsampa political prisoners who have been languishing in Chemgang Jail in Bhutan. A US Department of State report in 2016 had said 57 people had been detained under the National Security Act.

Many are those who protested in the early 1990s and have now been in prison for three decades, while others were jailed after entering Bhutan to visit family members still there. One prisoner has spent 43 years behind bars at Chemgang.

The ICRC which had been allowed biannual visits to the prisons has not been given permission since the pandemic, and most news about those in jail and teir condition has been provided by prisoners recently released because of poor health due to torture and inhumane conditions.

SAHR has called upon the Bhutan regime to release all political prisoners, allow ICRC visits, and also to take back its citizens who want to return. It has also called upon UNHCR and other international relief organisations to support the Nepal government in providing facilities for remaining refugees.

SAHR was founded in 2000 by former Indian Prime Minister I K Gujral, and is currently headed by Sri Lankan activist Radhika Coomaraswamy.