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December 28, 2011
Why Is Nepal Cracking Down on Tibetan Refugees?
Posted by Jon Krakauer
Friction between Chinese authorities and the five million Tibetans who live within the borders of China is on the rise, and nowhere is the strife more apparent than in the neighboring nation of Nepal. Last month in Kathmandu, I spoke with five young Tibetans who had just journeyed across the Himalayas to escape draconian policies imposed by the Beijing government in their homeland. More than six hundred Tibetans have fled to Nepal this year, even though it’s a dangerous undertaking. Asylum seekers have lost limbs to frostbite, perished in blizzards, and been arrested by Chinese border patrols. Some have been shot. The youngest of the refugees I met was a fourteen-year-old girl. She was aware of the hazards but lit out for the border anyway, hoping that if she made it into Nepal she’d find safe passage to India, where in 1959 the Dalai Lama established the Tibetan government-in-exile, and where more than a hundred thousand Tibetan refugees presently reside.
According to an informal arrangement hammered out twenty-two years ago between the government of Nepal and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (U.N.H.C.R.), Kathmandu pledged to allow Tibetans to travel through Nepal en route to India, and to facilitate their transit. Lately, however, this established protocol has been ignored with increasing frequency. Nepalese police have been apprehending Tibetans far inside Nepal, robbing them, and then returning them to Tibet at gunpoint, where they are typically imprisoned and not uncommonly tortured by the Chinese. According to “Tibet’s Stateless Nationals,” a hundred-and-thirty-three-page report issued by the Tibet Justice Center, a relatively small number of these Tibetans have been beaten, raped, and/or shot by the Nepalese police—abuses confirmed by several refugees with whom I spoke during my recent visit to Nepal.
These violations of the U.N.H.C.R. agreement and international law were bought and paid for by Beijing. According to a confidential U.S. embassy cable published by WikiLeaks in 2010, China “rewards [Nepalese forces] by providing financial incentives to officers who hand over Tibetans attempting to exit China.” Another cable stated, “Beijing has asked Kathmandu to step up patrols … and make it more difficult for Tibetans to enter Nepal.”
With an annual per capita income of $645—less than two dollars a day—Nepal is desperate for whatever alms China offers, never mind the strings attached. In 2009, Beijing promised to promote tourism to Nepal, invest in major Nepalese hydropower projects, and increase its financial assistance by approximately eighteen million dollars annually. In return, Kathmandu pledged to endorse Beijing’s “one-China policy” (which decrees that both Taiwan and Tibet are “inalienable parts of Chinese territory”) and to prohibit “anti-Chinese activities” within Nepal. Activities deemed unacceptable include gathering for prayers on the birthday of the Dalai Lama and displaying the Tibetan flag. On November 10th, after a Buddhist monk in Kathmandu doused his robes with kerosene and ignited himself to protest Chinese thuggery, a spokesman for Nepal’s Home Ministry declared that the government was considering revoking “all the rights granted to Tibetans residing in Nepal,” despite the fact that Nepal’s constitution guarantees such rights as freedom of expression and peaceful assembly to all persons, and Nepal’s Supreme Court has ruled that restricting Tibetans’ civil rights is illegal.
An estimated twenty thousand Tibetan refugees now live in Nepal, mostly in settlements established after the 1959 invasion of Lhasa by the People’s Liberation Army prompted many Tibetans to flee. For the next thirty years, Nepal welcomed Tibetans, and every Tibetan in the country was issued a “refugee identity certificate,” known as an “R.C.” But Kathmandu stopped accepting additional Tibetan refugees in 1989, ceding to pressure from Beijing, and that pressure has been intensifying. Since 1998, the Nepalese government has refused to issue R.C.s to Tibetans, including children born in Nepal to refugee parents who’ve been residing in the country for decades.
The upshot is that a generation of Tibetans who’ve spent their entire lives in Nepal don’t exist as far as the Nepalese bureaucracy is concerned. Lacking R.C.s, these young refugees cannot obtain driver’s licenses, apply for jobs, or open bank accounts. It is difficult or impossible for them to attend Nepalese schools. Without an R.C., a Tibetan has no legal right to remain in Nepal and may be deported to China at any time—yet Kathmandu refuses to provide these refugees with travel documents that would allow them to immigrate to nations such as the U.S., Canada, and India, where they have been offered asylum.
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao was slated to travel to Kathmandu on December 19th for an official state visit, leading a hundred-and-one-member delegation from Beijing. Wen was expected to sign a commitment to provide Nepal with a five-billion-dollar line of credit—in return for promises from Nepal to clamp down even harder on Tibetan refugees. At the last minute, however, Beijing postponed the visit indefinitely; according to an official quoted by AFP, the delay had to do with security concerns, specifically the “possibility of protests from Tibetan exiles.” The Chinese ambassador to Kathmandu, Yang Houlan, had previously warned that “Nepal is turning into a playground for anti-China activities,” prompting speculation that Beijing is using the postponement of Wen’s visit as a cudgel to discourage Nepal from softening its policies toward Tibetan refugees.
At a refugee settlement outside the city of Pokhara, a Tibetan in his twenties proposed a simple step to dial down the tension: “If the government is worried about Tibetans threatening Nepal’s security, give us R.C.s.” Such a move would be win-win for all parties, he suggested, because it would allow the authorities to “know what we are doing, and we can get education and jobs.”
“How would it harm China for me to have an identity card?” a Tibetan teen-ager wondered at another refugee settlement. “I was born in Nepal. I’m seventeen years old. All I want is the opportunity for education and a job. How does denying me such things help anyone?”
He has a point. Nepal’s bullying of its Tibetan community is more likely to incite unrest inside China than to dampen it. The Dalai Lama has repeatedly and unequivocally stated that he and his followers “do not seek independence for Tibet.” But few Chinese trust such assurances from a man their leaders have long characterized as a conniving monster. Beijing is adamant that granting concessions to any Tibetans, even Tibetans in exile, poses a dire threat. The great fear is that Tibetan dissent will inflame other ethnic groups inside China, initiating a chain reaction that culminates in the People’s Republic suffering the same fate as the Soviet Union. Given Chinese perceptions of what’s at stake, and Beijing’s ability to purchase apparently limitless influence in Kathmandu, the future doesn’t look bright for Tibetan youth now coming of age in Nepal.
Photograph by Prakash Mathema/AFP/Getty Images.
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Keywords
China;
Nepal;
Tibet
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I would like to see these alleged statements by the US lauding the Nepalese government's handling the Tibetan situation in Nepal. Earlier this year, in the "2010 Human Rights Report) released by the State Department, the report condemned the Nepalese Government for confirmed reports of the Nepalese government returning Tibetans to Chinese occupied Tibet. What sort of government returns refugees to the country they are fleeing from, fully aware of what will happen to them once they are in the hands of such repressive authorities? The Maoists and UPN-CML reneged on the "Gentleman's Agreement" in 2008, as cited in the article "Nepal Deporting Tibetans to China Secretly" in the "Indian Defense Review" issue of April 15, 2011, or read more about this and other articles concerning Nepal and Tibet at dwhammerblog.blogspot.com.
Posted 12/29/2011, 7:26:24pm by dwh
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Oh please "JRINALDI" you are too much of an apologist. I have no view on Tibetan independence, but the fact that Nepalese police are robbing and raping Tibetans is a bit over-the-top no? Or is that the Nepalese police are only raping 30% of the refugees, while the Chinese government is demanding that they rob and rape 100%?
Posted 12/29/2011, 2:33:22pm by PxP
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No, the UN Agreement has stipulated that Tibetans be allowed to transit through Nepal to India. The sticking point is that Nepal does not, in its constitution, recognize refugees as a valid, existential and political status. From what I have read the US Government has not indicated that they feel that the Nepalese government is doing a "good" job, and have, in fact, registered deep concern over the treatment of Tibetan refugees in Nepal. I live part time in Nepal, and have assisted Tibetan refugees at the Tarshi Palkhiel Refugee Camp outside of Pokhara, and I can attest from personal experience that what Mr. Krakauer states here is spot on. Prachanda, the Maoist leader, offered a few years ago to send refugees back to Tibet, a violation of many UN Human Rights agreements that the Nepalese government has signed on to. There have been videos taken of Chinese border guards shooting Tibetan refugees attempting to cross into Nepal in the Himalaya. Nepalese police brutalized pro-Tibet protesters during the run up to the Beijing Olympics in 2008 in Kathmandu and Lalitpur. I helped a Tibetan family relocate from the refugee camp, to the US, and on to Canada, and though the husband, like many Tibetans of his generation, was born in Nepal in the refugee camp (he is 43 now), and had the right to residency status, he was never granted this status, and the government let it be known that it would cost thousands of dollars to have his status readjusted, on top of the regular fees. Almost everyone of his generation in the camp, and outside of it, born in exile in Nepal, cannot get their ID cards, and therefor exist in legal limbo: they cannot work, own land, even travel. Really, the list of crimes and prejudicial acts against Tibetans, legally residing in the country, and those of Tibetan origins, such as the Tamang, Sherpas, and others, is too long to reiterate. But the assertion that China, through the Maoist Party in Nepal, is trying to control Nepal's domestic policy, is undeniable. The International Campaign for Tibet has had its Nepal workforce team detained and beaten up by Chinese government squads IN Nepal. Why should the US worry about irritating a "volatile" China, when their policy towards Tibet, and those who are in a position to help Tibetans, has been perfectly clear for the past 60 years - exterminate Tibet. I suspect that part of China's contempt for Nepal's right to sovereignity stems from the fact that the Nepalese Government allowed the CIA to train Khampa guerillas, and launch attacks, from Mustang, a semi-autonomous region in Nepal, up until Nixon signed detente with Mao, then disbanded the entire operation, but now I'm getting a little off track. In short, China cries foul when it deems that foreign powers are meddling in its internal affairs. Yet it is doing the same here to Nepal, but some posters condemn Americans for "irritating" the Chinese - is this our biggest concern in foreign affairs? Maybe himalayanaid.org receives significant funding from the Chinese.
Posted 12/29/2011, 12:55:41pm by dwh
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Your assessment is fundamentally incorrect in one key aspect: The UN agreement, as it is, simply stipulates that transiting Tibetans that are captured by Nepali forces in Nepal are to be turned over to the UNHCR for a determination of status. It is tremendously irresponsible and dangerous to put forward the idea that Nepal must somehow guarantee safe passage for Tibetans. Such false assertions irritate a volatile China which in turn pressures Nepal to increase its oppression of Tibetans. It would certainly have benefited your level of accuracy here if you would have done a bit of research on the U.S. position regarding this issue as offered by Ambassador Scott DeLisi. You would have uncovered the fact that the U.S. believes Nepal is doing a good job in handling Tibetans considering the tremendous pressures exerted upon their efforts by a China that seeks a more repressive treatment. James Rinaldi himalayanaid.org
Posted 12/28/2011, 8:32:34pm by JRinaldi
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Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/12/why-is-nepal-cracking-down-on-tibetan-refugees.html#ixzz1hyShjz00
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