Kathmandu, May 25: The ninth round of Nepal-Bhutan ministerial level talks on the repatriation of close to a hundred thousand Bhutanese refugees in Nepal were “inconclusive” despite a little progress on the verification process.

“The talks were inconclusive but both of us agreed to begin verification of the refugees within a couple of months’ time,” Foreign Minister Chakra Prasad Bastola said upon his arrival at the Tribhuvan International Airport from a four-day Bhutan visit. “We have also agreed to form a team for the purpose.”

The Bhutanese authorities wanted “some more time” to respond to the issues they could not agree with Nepalese delegation, said Minister Bastola, who was much enthusiastic about the resolution of the decade-long deadlock before the visit. He, however, declined to mention the issues. “I will disclose them in Parliament.”

“You need constant confidence building for resolving such problems. They (the Bhutanese authorities) are enthusiastic but asked for a week’s time to respond to the issues we could not agree on,” he said.

“Bhutanese Foreign Minister Jigmi Thinely will call me in a week’s time and we will jointly form a verification team through the diplomatic channel within a week after that,” he said.

The beginning of the end of the problem has started with the bilateral agreement to verify the refugees on the camp to camp basis, Bastola said.

In September last year, the two countries met at the ministers’ level in Kathmandu but, for the eighth time in seven years, they failed to make any headway in verifying the Bhutanese refugees.

Seven years ago, Nepal and Bhutan agreed on four categories for the refugees — those who were forcefully evicted from their homes in Bhutan, those who left voluntarily, criminals and non-Bhutanese.

Kathmandu insists that Thimpu must take all its people back but Bhutan has refused to do so saying that there are non-Bhutanese living in the camps.

When UN High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata was in Kathmandu during her South Asia visit, she said a process of categorising some of the 98,000 refugees living in U.N.-supervised camps in eastern Nepal would start in a month after the ministers’ meeting.

The refugees, most of whom are Hindus of ethnic Nepali origin, began to flee from Bhutan ten years ago. They demand political freedom and allege that they were victims of ethnic discrimination in the predominantly Buddhist Kingdom of Bhutan.

Ogata visited their camps in Morang and Jhapa districts of eastern Nepal in early May and assured them that they would be going back home.

Before Ogata left for New Delhi, she said the ministers of Nepal and Bhutan would meet in May and that the actual verification of the refugees would begin in a month after that meeting.