Pratibha Tuladhar
Gulf Times
July 22, 2013
A group of Tibetan women at the Tibetan Refugee Camp in Pokhara comb sheep wool before processing it into yarn for carpet-weaving.
Tsultrim Dorjee was still in his mother’s womb when his family fled Tibet in 1959, the year an uprising against Chinese rule was crushed and the Dalai Lama escaped to exile.
With their eight children, Dorjee’s parents were among the first Tibetan refugees to enter Nepal after the Chinese takeover. Dorjee’s mother, Tsering Kyipal, gave birth to him during the month-long trek across the Tibetan plateau. She lost five other sons and her husband before they reached their destination. Dorjee now works as a welfare officer in a Tibetan refugee camp in mid-western Nepal.
“My mother came begging all the way until we arrived in Nepal, where we became refugees,” says the 54-year-old, whose grey hair has begun to thin. Wrinkles show prominently above his high cheekbones and under his eyes when he smiles.
Dorjee has lived in various refugee settlements in the country but that doesn’t make Nepal home. “I speak Nepali and look Nepali. But I find that Nepalis cannot pronounce my name properly.” He says out loud his first name Tsultrim, which means morality in Tibetan.
What bothers him more, however, is his lack of identification documents. The Nepalese government issued refugee cards to the first 20,000 refugees who arrived in the 1950s and 60s, but in 1989 the practice was discontinued.
Even those who already had the documents, like Dorjee, found they were no long renewed. As a result, half of the estimated 13,500 Tibetan refugees in Nepal have no refugee card and that number is growing all the time, according to the Central Tibetan Administration in Dharamsala in India.
Refugee cards enable the owner to open a bank account, obtain travel documents and a mobile phone, and apply for higher education. Pema Lama, 35, was born and raised in a Tibetan refugee camp in Pokhara. Educated in Nepal and India, he works at a shop in the camp selling Tibetan carpets and handicrafts.
“The thing is, this is my home, but I don’t belong here,” says Lama. “Even if you’ve lived here for 50 years, you cannot become a citizen of Nepal and neither are you identified as a refugee.”
Apart from exceptional cases, people born abroad can only get Nepali citizenship if their father is Nepali and has the papers to prove it. “Some people bribe government officers and buy citizenship,” says Dorjee. “But not everyone can do that.”
The Home Ministry says it doesn’t have any plans to restart the issuing of identity cards to refugees. There are 11 Tibetan refugee camps in Nepal. Nearly 10,000 refugees are said to live in Kathmandu alone.
Hundreds of Tibetans enter the country hoping to cross to Dharamsala in India, where their spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, lives. Nepal has a gentlemen’s agreement with the United Nations to let Tibetan refugees transit without hindrance, but some are arrested for travelling without documents.
In recent years, the government has taken stricter measures, clamping down on any activities on Nepalese soil they see as anti-China. The Chinese government has meanwhile stepped up military aid to improve security along the border.
In 2010, a Tibetan monk set himself on fire in a refugee camp in Kathmandu. In March 2013, a Tibetan man died in a self-immolation in the Nepalese capital, protesting against the “Chinese occupation” of Tibet.
“The state has been clamping down on Tibetan refugees from time to time using different excuses,” says Bhawani Prasad Kharel, General Secretary of the National Human Rights Foundation, which advocates for the rights of refugees in Nepal.
“Police conduct arbitrary arrests and threaten to give them up to the Chinese authorities unless they pay,” Kharel says. Kharel says many cases of harassment and extortion go uninvestigated. “In some of the cases we investigated, the police would not even admit they had made arrests.”
Last month, Tsewang Dolma, the Tibetan Youth Congress leader, moved to India after she said she was being stalked by the security services. Her friend Yeshi (who asked to be identified only by her first name) was arrested and only released after she paid 800,000 rupees ($8,570) to the authorities.
In the refugee camp, Dorjee says he hasn’t experienced or seen this kind of hostility. “We have no problem on the personal level as the people here have always welcomed us. But the problem we face is on the political level.”
But even as they call for the freedom to study, work and practice their religion, they find themselves caught up in a regional struggle for political influence, says rights campaigner Kharel. “It’s not as easy for them to raise their voice in Nepal like it is in India, due to the Chinese pressure the government faces,” he says. The refugees in Nepal may have dropped their demand for a “Free Tibet” as a result, but their longing for home never fades.
“I talk to elders about Tibet and based on that, I create a picture in my mind of what we had to leave behind,” says Dorjee.
