Kathmandu, Mar.13:Without striking a deal on their positions on the four categories of Bhutanese refugees, if Nepal and Bhutan hammer out the refugee-verification process, the move will be no better than placing the cart before the horse.
Assuming optimistically that the ongoing secretary level talks between Nepal and Bhutan on the protracted refugee issue charts out a modality for the verification process, will the refugee crisis see the beginning of its end? Not so easily. If the ministerial level talk between the two Himalayan Kingdoms, scheduled to follow the still in progress bureaucratic level talks, does not face a hitch, the practical verification of the refugees may well begin.
In the camps, refugees may be verified under any of the four categories – Bonafide Bhutanese who have been forcibly evicted, Bhutanese who have migrated, Non Bhutanese people, and Bhutanese who have committed crimes – agreed way back in 1993. Even if the process goes uninterrupted, thorny questions will arise for Nepal that has been at the receiving ends in the refugee issue. What to do with the identified refugees? Which categories will Bhutan take back? What will Nepal do with the remaining ones? And so on.
To avert the eleventh hour crisis, these are the questions that need to be answered now – before the actual verification of the refugees begins. Or else, the Pandora’s box may be open for Nepal if Bhutan chooses to stick to its gun citing its Citizenship Act 1985 that prohibits the entry of any refugees except for the Bonafide Bhutanese citizens category. Going by Bhutan’s adamant stand on the three other categories for the last six years, it’s high time Nepal realised why the Dragon Kingdom was all out to propel the idea of categorisation during the first ministerial meeting in Kathmandu.
No doubt, then Nepal was caught napping as it fell into the Bhutanese “ambush” and endorsed the categorisation idea.
After the eighth round of ministerial talks held here last year, officials shared some “good news” that the Bhutanese side had become flexible on taking back the second category refugees – Bhutanese who have migrated – in case they were found to have left Bhutan under critical circumstances. Visiting Bhutanese Foreign Secretary Ugyen Tshering, however, did not confirm to that. All that he told reporters yesterday was that “the harmonisation of the two countries’ position on the four categories of refugees was still an ongoing discussion between the two governments.”
The genesis of the two countries’ disharmony on the four categories marked in 1994 – one year after they agreed to categorise the refugees. It was the same harmonisation fiasco that stonewalled the talks for good three years after the seventh ministerial meet in 1996.
And now, even as both the sides are so much engrossed to work out the modality of the verification process, the harmonisation chapter is nowhere in the scene. If it is, to borrow Tshering’s words, still an ongoing discussion between Nepal and Bhutan, why has it not surfaced strongly in the bureaucratic level meet? Neither a word of it was heard during the secretary level talk in Thimpu last month nor it is in the bureaucratic agenda this time.
If the issue deserves ministerial level treatment, so be it. But, simple logic has it that it should be addressed before the verification of the refugees. For, without that done, Nepal will stand to lose while Bhutan will play the game its rule to keep the majority of its citizens in exile. Much like its calculative move in the early 90’s when it forcefully evicted most of the Lhotsampas making them sign the voluntary migration forms.