September 16, 2008--Kathmandu
137 Tibetans are currently in detention at Kathmandu’s Tibetan Reception Center (TRC). As reported on September 11, many of them face imminent deportation.
Last week, growing Chinese pressure on Nepal to curb the “anti-China movement” and seven-month-long protests in Kathmandu resulted in Nepal’s new Home Ministry’s issuing a decree saying that, from now on, Tibetans without proper documentation would be deported. The assumption by many Tibetans was that the group would be deported to China, where further punishment would be inevitable.
The good news: Those currently in detention who do not possess Refugee Certificate (RC) cards will be deported to India rather than China.
The bad news: If it hadn’t been for American and UNHCR swift intervention, the detainees seemed destined to be shipped off to China.
The question now arises: Where will the next group of Tibetans who are arrested be sent? Will all future deportations require last-minute interventions by the American Embassy and the UNHCR?
Based on numerous reliable sources, here is the chain of events that has spared the 137 Tibetans from having been handed over to Chinese authorities.
The Tibetans who were arrested last week were singled out because they had been detained many times over the last half –year for protesting in front of the Chinese embassy. Last week, however, instead of being released from jail after a few hours later, (as had become the standard police procedure), the 137 were held in prison over night. A grilling process began. When many of the detainees refused to answer police inquiries about their resident status in Nepal, officials told them that if they didn’t possess RC cards, they would be deported to China. “Even if you aren’t sent back to China,” police officials were reported to have added, “You will serve a five-year sentence in a Nepali jail.”
The American Embassy and UNHCR then intervened through negotiations with Nepal’s Home Ministry, which resulted in the Tibetans’ temporary relocation to the Tibetan Reception Center – a safe haven for them until the identity and resident status of each individual is either authenticated or discounted by the UNHCR.
In the meantime, the media has been sealed off from Tibetan Reception Center.
But in conversations I’ve had with Tibetan leaders outside the compound, I have learned that “at the very least 50% of the detainees do not possess RC cards and will soon be shipped out. Those who have RC cards will be allowed to return to their home here in Nepal.”
Tip of the iceberg.
There are approximately 20,000 Tibetans now living in Nepal. Many of those thousands are without RC cards. The question is when will they also be arrested and deported, as has been decreed by the new Home Ministry? Will it be a fight each time a batch of refugees are brought into jail as to whether or not they are sent to India or China?
This is not the first time Tibetans have been saved by a last-minute UNHCR intervention.
In the fall of 2005 during the Dashain Festival, I happened to be visiting the Tibetan Reception Center when the then director received a phone call saying that a teenage Tibetan, who had just escaped over the Himalaya into Nepal, had been picked up by the Nepali police and thrown into the Dillibazaar prison in Kathmandu. The boy was penniless, but was told he had to pay a $325 fine within the next 24 hours. If he couldn’t come up with the cash, he would be taken to the Sino-Nepali border and handed over to Chinese officials on the other side.
The director and I rushed down to the Dillibazaar jail. We persuaded police officials to let us see the boy. He had not been harmed but he was obviously shaken. He told us that he was a young monk trying to make his way to Dharamsala, India, so that he could study with lamas of a higher caliber than those available in Chinese-controlled Tibet.
I paid the police fine and eventually the young monk reached safe haven in India.
But the point is: No one knows how many other Tibetans– without someone to bail them out – have been whisked back to China and certain imprisonment.
In 2004, a well-know case of 18 Tibetans, who were detained in Kathmandu, were eventually sent back to China, in spite of worldwide protest.
In February 2008, Chinese authorities successfully snatched a newly arrived Tibetan on Nepali soil. The Chinese insisted that he was a known criminal in Tibet. He was returned to China soon after.
How the Chinese define “criminal”
The reality is that any Tibetan who now tries to escape China and enter Nepal without a proper visa, is regarded as “criminal” and should be promptly returned to Chinese authorities. According to International Campaign for Tibet (ICT) in Washington, DC:
"The Nepal government has taken a series of moves against the Tibetan community in Kathmandu, in deference to what it says is Chinese pressure to stop activities by Tibetans that it deems as anti-China. In January 2005 it closed the Office of the Representative of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Welfare Office, both of which had been operational with the consent of the Nepal government since the 1960s. Tibetans perceive themselves as increasingly vulnerable under the new Maoist regime in power in Nepal, and many fear their status will deteriorate further.”
It already has.
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