Nepal, Bhutan to begin jointly verifying refugees in Jan.+

0 Comments | Asian Political News, Jan 1, 2001

KATHMANDU, Dec. 28 Kyodo

Nepal and Bhutan said Wednesday they have agreed to appoint a joint panel to verify the nationalities of nearly 100,000 Bhutanese refugees sheltered in eastern Nepal in a significant step to repatriate them.

The agreement was reached at Nepal-Bhutan foreign minister level talks that concluded in Kathmandu on Wednesday.

According to a joint news release, the panel will visit the refugee camps in January to begin verification.

Nepal and Bhutan earlier disagreed over verification mechanisms. Nepal maintained that the refugees should be verified on the basis of family units, but Bhutan insisted on identifying individual refugees.

Bhutan has now agreed to verify the refugees on the basis of family, said Gyanchandra Acharya, a Nepalese Foreign Ministry official. This means the nationality of family members will be determined using papers from only the head of each family and individual family members will not have to produce documents.

Bhutan, which has agreed to take back the refugees, has claimed that more non-Bhutanese inhabit the camps run by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

But Nepal contends this, saying more than 90% of the refugees hold some kind of documentary evidence of being Bhutanese.

The refugees, all of Nepalese ethnicity, were driven out of their homeland by Bhutanese security forces following a pro-democracy movement in Bhutan in the early 1990s.