The Origins of the Camp Population

The main camp in Jhapa is one of the best run refugee camps you can find anywhere. The UNHCR and the NGOs do not provide such facilities for refugees in Somalia or Bosnia. Visitors to these camps are amazed at the facilities provided there and say they are far better organized than any villages in Nepal ... In the West, they cannot comprehend why anyone should want to become a refugee, lose his job, home, land and all facilities that go with it such as food, drinking water. What they don't understand is the situation in our region is totally different. Our levels of education and income are all at a different level. Coupled with the fact that there were 10 million Nepalis in India, nearly 20 million in Nepal and 87 per cent of them are living on subsistence farming. Many of them don't own land, have no access to electricity, water, sanitation facilities. Many work as construction labourers and if you work very hard you get paid 14-15 rupees a day as wages. You cannot afford to send your children to school or get medical care. Compare this with the facilities available in Jhapa. You get free housing, free electricity, drinking water, proper sanitation, free monthly rations, nutritional sustenance, free clothing, blankets, education up to class 10, and 3 dollars a day. There are eight vocational training programmes and income generating vocational training schemes. And above all, if you work outside the camp, whatever money you earn is extra. Even cooking utensils, gas stoves, soaps are given free.

The Bhutanese government has asserted on various occasions that the camps contain a variety of different categories of people:

illegal Nepali residents in Bhutan; imported Nepali labourers who were claiming to be    Bhutanese nationals by virtue of having worked in Bhutan; dissidents, many of whom had committed criminal and terrorist offences in Bhutan; Bhutanese nationals who had emigrated legally after renouncing their citizenship and selling all their properties; and people from other parts of the region, including Nepal itself, who had never even set foot in Bhutan (RGB 1993:33).

Rose (1994) argues that many of the Nepalis who were expelled from the tribal hill states of the Indian Northeast during the bhumiputra ('sons of the soil') movements of the late 1970s and early 1980s came to settle illegally in southern Bhutan; there they joined others who had entered Bhutan to work on infrastructural development projects in the 1960s and 1970s and then stayed on "formally illegally but with the tacit consent of the government" (Rose 1994:112). These 'illegals', he states, were "asked to leave by the Royal Government of Bhutan' during 1988-90, even those Nepalis who had lived in the country for ten or more years and had made major contributions to Bhutan's development programs" (ibid.). Dhakal and Strawn (1994:186-7) agree that "in line with the objectives of the sixth plan, non-national workers were either evicted or encouraged to leave the country", but they date this to the period 1986-88. Rose states that, after the government's introduction of its dress and language policies, "a substantial number of legal Lhotshampas decided to leave Bhutan and also supported, in principle at least, the violent resistance movement based across the border" (Rose 1994:113).

This statement begs many questions, since it does not take into account the politically conservative nature of Nepali agriculturists and their total dependence on land. It is unlikely that such people would give up their fields, orchards, homes and citizenship simply to express their support "in principle" for a political movement: this is surely a weak pull factor, and stronger push factors must have been involved. Here it is relevant to point out that in every instance of Nepali-led political activism in recent years, whether it be the various political agitations that occurred in Nepal under the Panchayat regime (1962-90) or the Gorkhaland movement in Darjeeling (1986-8), the leaders have come from the educated urban class and have experienced severe difficulties in mobilizing mass support in rural areas.

The argument about whether the people in the camps in Nepal are or are not genuine Bhutanese citizens has raged for five years. The fact that many members of the camp population hold either citizenship cards or other documentary evidence of residence in Bhutan that stretches back beyond the crucial date of 1958 is dismissed by the Bhutanese government, which argues that many of the cards are forgeries and that the 'anti-national terrorists' have often raided census offices and destroyed or made off with documents. It has published documents which it claims prove that people registered in the camps are not bonafide Bhutanese: for instance, the Nepalese citizenship card of one Indra Bahadur Chettri alongside a letter from the UNHCR representative in Kathmandu, dated 24 October 1991, declaring that he is a Bhutanese national who is of concern to the UNHCR (RGB 1992a: 11-1 2). On the other hand, the government of Nepal conducted a survey at the end of 1993 with the assistance of UNHCR and is said to have concluded that there were

10,073 families with citizenship documents; 1762 families with records pertaining to land ownership; 251 families with health documents; 40 families with education certificates; 2494 families with documents such as to [sic] service in the government, marriage certificates and court documents; and only 368 families without any documents (Dhakal and Strawn 1994:540).

Tahir Ali, who was the UNHCR's representative in Kathmandu until the end of 1995, advises that these figures should be treated with some caution, and stresses that UNHCR has not adopted a position on the matter of whether the people in the camps are genuine citizens of Bhutan:

It is most certainly not the case that the overwhelming majority of the people in the refugee camps in Nepal have been definitively determined by UNHCR to be citizens or long-term residents of Bhutan. They claim to be so, and many present documents in this connection. However, UNHCR explicitly recognizes that it is for the governments of Nepal and Bhutan ... to assess and verify these claims (Letter to the Washington Post, 22 April 1994).

The Home Ministry of the Nepalese government also conducted a sample survey in the camps between 14-22 February 1995. A total of 883 households was surveyed, and the sample drawn from each of the camps was in proportion to that particular camp's share of the total refugee population. The survey results show 794 households (89.92 per cent of the sample) holding Bhutanese citizenship cards, and 81 households (9.18 per cent of the sample) holding land tax receipts or proof of land ownership. Nearly half of the sample reported having signed 'voluntary migration' forms, which in many cases involved surrendering documents to the Bhutanese authorities. Of the total of 1563 individual asylum-seekers screened at the Kakarvitta screening post on the Nepal-India border between June 1993 and March 1994, 43.7 per cent held Bhutanese citizenship cards and 20.2 per cent held land documents (UNHCR March 1995). The occupants of every hut this writer entered during four days in the camps were able to produce old land tax receipts, citizenship cards, or both. 

Rose notes that

it should not be a major problem to ascertain which of the 'refugees' in the Jhapa camps actually qualify as citizens of Bhutan by using the very detailed pre-1988 village records in Southern Bhutan (Rose 1994:115).

But with the two governments at such odds over the very identities of the 88,000 it is not surprising that a move toward joint verification still remains a remote possibility.

The Camps

The first 234 prima facie refugees arrived in Nepal at the end of 1990, and were followed by several hundred per month, reaching a total of about 5,000 by September 1991. At this point the government of Nepal formally requested UNHCR (which had been providing some ad hoc assistance since February 1991) to coordinate all emergency relief assistance. A feature of the early inflow was that many families had already been out of Bhutan for months, but had not been permitted to set up camps in Assam or West Bengal and claimed to have been subjected to harassment by both Indian and Bhutanese police. The largest inflow occurred during 1992 with an average of 300-600 arrivals per day during the period March-July, bringing the total to nearly 50,000. The flow of new arrivals gradually decreased through 1993 and 1994 to a trickle during 1995 of one or two per day. The Bhutanese government has made much of the fact that the Nepalese government did not begin to screen arrivals until a very late stage (June 1993), and has also adopted a hostile attitude to UNHCR operations in Nepal. The Bhutanese Foreign Minister has on several occasions argued that, because the number of asylum-seekers increased greatly after UNHCR stepped in, UNHCR's recognition of the refugees and its subsequent involvement in the camps exacerbated the problem:

Has there been a sincere effort by any of the politicians, members of the media, and the intelligentsia in Nepal, to reflect and find out whether the establishment of the refugee camps itself could have been the real cause of the refugee problem? (Lyonpo Dawa Tsering, interview in Himal 7.4 July/August 1994: 26).

Although UNHCR explicitly acknowledges a distinction between the procedures used to afford prima facie recognition to groups of asylum-seekers in the first instance and the screening procedures for individuals that were subsequently introduced, it insists with some force that there can be no question that the people in the camps are bonafide refugees. Tahir Ali argues that if the UNHCR were to afford assistance only to persons who had been screened and assessed on an individual basis, and not to the large number of people in the world who have been given blanket recognition as prima facie refugees, it would not be fulfilling its role (personal communication, March 1996). However, a recognition of refugee status does not in itself imply an acceptance that each individual is of a certain origin or nationality.

The first arrivals set up three camps inside Nepal: first at Maidhar, then at Timai and Sanishchare. The first bamboo huts at Maidhar were erected on the banks of the river Mai, but as the numbers grew the camp spread into the riverbed itself, which was then dry. Mortality rates were very high and malnutrition was rife because many of the first arrivals had already spent months struggling to survive near the Bhutan border in India. Before the summer rains struck, the Maidhar camp was dismantled and its residents were dispersed to other camps. There are now eight camps on five different sites. All of these are in the Jhapa district of Nepal, except Sanishchare, which is in Morang district. The Beldangi site, with a total population of over 43,000, is the largest human settlement in Jhapa district, which in 1991 had a total population of 593,737. The camps' population figures as of 30 September 1995 were as follows:

Timai                 8,389
Goldhap             8,069
Beldangi I         15,201
Beldangi 11      19,108
Beldangi II Ext.   9,539
Sanishchare       17,360
Khudunabari (N) 7,320
Khudunabari (S)  3,894
Total                 88,880

At the end of September 1995 UNHCR reported the presence of a further 264 registered refugees living outside the camps, and an estimated 15,000 nonregistered refugees, also living outside the camps (all figures from UNHCR October 1995). Timai and Sanishchare are the oldest existing camps, while Khudunabari, the newest, was established in February 1993.

All the camps are situated under trees on 222 hectares of marginal forest land. Conditions are basic but decent, although life is very uncomfortable during the summer rains and the population consists mainly of hill people who are not accustomed to the high temperatures of Nepal's Terai lowlands. The huts are made of bamboo and plastic sheeting, and last for about three years. Thus, the oldest are becoming dilapidated. Most of the people have few clothes or other possessions. Registered refugees receive rations of rice, pulses, oil, sugar, salt, and blended food from the World Food Programme. The Nepal Red Cross also supplies some vegetable rations and basic household items, including kerosene stoves and kerosene to reduce the use of firewood. Refugees do not receive cash payments unless they are employed by the implementing agencies; in such cases the wages they receive are lower than the local rate for equivalent jobs. The refugees in the camps cannot keep animals, and have no land to work. Unless they work as teachers in the camp schools or have some minor administrative role, there is very little for them to do. The contrast between camp life and life in Bhutan was emphasized in most conversations this writer had with camp residents in February-March 1995. Most refugees (77 per cent at the end of 1993 (UNHCR March 1995)) were agriculturalists in Bhutan, and many had left behind land and property of considerable value, of which they often had photographs.

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