First group of Bhutanese refugees depart Nepal for Britain after years in UN-run camps

By Binaj Gurubacharya (CP), August 9, 2010

 

KATMANDU, Nepal — A group of Bhutanese refugees expelled from their Himalayan homeland nearly two decades ago left Nepal for Britain on Monday to begin new lives after living in United Nations-run camps for years.

More than 100,000 ethnic Nepalese — a Hindu minority in Bhutan for centuries — were forced out of Bhutan in the early 1990s by authorities who wanted to impose the country's dominant Buddhist culture. They have lived as refugees in Nepal ever since.

Thirty-seven refugees left Monday and will be followed by many more, said Stephen Jaquemet, an official with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Nepal.

Britain is the eighth nation to take in Bhutanese refugees. So far 32,000 have left for Western countries, most to the United States.

"I am going to Britain so that my children will have a good education and future. We are hoping for a better life," said Krishna Ghimire, 51, who lived in a camp for the past 19 years.

Bhutan refuses to allow the refugees to return, saying most left voluntarily and renounced their citizenship. Nepal — worried about the cost of integrating them into society — has refused to offer them citizenship.

Relations between Nepal and Bhutan have been strained over the issue. Several rounds of talks were held over the last decade but no significant progress was made.

The refugees have lived in seven U.N.-run camps about 310 miles (500 kilometres) east of the capital Kathmandu.

The United Nations — with the help of the United States and other countries — set up the resettlement program in July 2007. More than 60,000 refugees signed up, while the rest said they preferred to wait in camps or try to return to Bhutan. The first refugees began leaving Nepal in November 2007.

The tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan ended more than a century of royal rule in 2008 with its first parliamentary elections. Bhutan has long been a holdout from modernity — a mountainous land where Buddhist kings reigned supreme. It only allowed the Internet and television in 1999.