From: World Tibet Network News, Thursday, Jul 27, 1995

Over 200 Tibetans Repatriated by Nepal Despite UN & US Protests -

Forced repatriation of Tibetan asylum seekers is continuing to take place in Nepal, with at least ten refugees deported this month, after they had formally sought government protection. The deportations continue in the face of strong protests from the US, Australia and the UN's High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), and could have repercussions on western aid to Nepal.

Since April 23rd this year Nepal has repatriated over 200 Tibetans who had crossed the Himalayas to seek asylum, including three well-known Tibetan dissidents, while other are currently hiding in the mountains to evade Nepali police, according to diplomatic sources.

The real figure for forced deportations this year is likely to be as high as 400. By June this year refugee arrivals in Kathmandu were down by 520 compared to 1994, suggesting that up to 200 other deportations have probably taken place without being documented by exile Tibetan or western observers in Nepal.

Until April this year the Nepal authorities allowed Tibetan asylum seekers who reached Kathmandu to be assessed by UNHCR officials in Kathmandu before proceeding to India, where asylum is granted. About 2,500 had been helped in this way each year since 1990.

Nepalese Government ministers deny that there has been any policy change, but diplomatic sources say that by 19th June at least 14 groups of refugees, totalling around 210 people, are known to have been handed over by Nepalese police to the Chinese authorities at the border town of Dram, known in Chinese as Zhangmu.

On about 11th July ten more Tibetan refugees, hoping to avoid being detained by local police who might not have training in refugee procedures, formally applied for asylum with district authorities in the Solu Khumbu region in Eastern Nepal. The ten were driven back to the Chinese border and handed over to Chinese police, according to an unconfirmed report from Kathmandu today.

Security patrols have been intensified around Salleri, 70 km south of the Tibet-Nepal border, as well as other villages in the Solo Khumbu area as police search for refugees who have crossed the Nangpa-la, the 5,700 metre pass most often used by Tibetan refugees.

"We have received credible reports that officials of the Government of Nepal have denied newly arrived Tibetan refugees access to the UNHCR and have returned them to Chinese border authorities", a spokesman for the US Government told TIN today.

"The US has urged the Government of Nepal at a senior level to handle these Tibetan cases according to international procedures and practices," the State Department spokesman said, calling on the Nepalese to refer all asylum seekers to the UNHCR for assessment.

The US authorities are reported to have taken the matter up directly with the Prime Minister in Nepal and have issued at least two demarches in Kathmandu. While the State Department emphasised that it has no immediate plans to take action on US aid to Nepal, worth some $25 million per year, it noted that aid cuts could not be ruled out.

"It is quite clear that this issue will get the attention of a number of prominent members of congress," said one US official. "They are the people who control the purse strings", he added.

Australia has also issued a demarche to the Nepalese on the repatriation issue, while the British Government has also made its concerns known. "Her Majesty's Government has expressed the hope that the Government of Nepal will continue to abide by internationally recognised standards - to which Nepal subscribes - for handling refugees, in close co-operation with the UNHCR," said a Foreign Office spokesman today. Nepal is signed the UN Convention on Torture, which forbids deportation to countries where torture is rife.

But there was conspicuous silence from the European Union, which has issued no demarche on the repatriations and which has decided to wait and see if the policy continues before making any collective statement. European inaction reflects the growing reluctance of some EU members, notably some Mediterranean states, to raise human rights issues, particularly in relation to China. The delay, which is achieved by some countries making repeated calls for further information from their embassies, was criticised by other western diplomats. "There is no longer any plausible deniability that these repatriations are taking place," said one diplomat, who added that some of the incidents had been witnessed by his colleagues.

UNHCR has raised the issue both in Geneva and in Nepal, where the local UNHCR representative, Tahir Ali, told VOA in May that he was concerned about "the organised manner" in which Tibetans were being sent back. On 4th July a senior UNHCR official, J. Amunategui, flew to Kathmandu for a meeting with Deputy Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal.

Mr Amunategui, Director of Inspection and Evaluation Services for the UNHCR, expressed the hope that "Nepal would live up to its humanitarian tradition and commitments". Nepal depends on the UNHCR for substantial funding to maintain camps for over 80,000 ethnic Nepalese refugees who have fled Bhutan, none of whom face the practice of repatriation without assessment.

Madhav Kumar Nepal insisted that there has been no change in Nepal's policy concerning refugees, according to the official paper, the Rising Nepal. A Foreign Ministry spokesman repeated the statement on Radio Nepal on 6th July.

Home Secretary Rewati Raman had earlier admitted that some Tibetans had been handed back to China, but insisted that they had asked to be repatriated. It was "at their own request to return home", he is said to have told the Kathmandu paper, the Independent, on 30th May. "Our policy on the matter has not changed", he added.

"Whenever I have contact with the Government and the relevant officials they always assure me there is no change in the government policy," said Tashi Namgyal, the Dalai Lama's representative in Kathmandu. "I hope this stands and I hope the repatriation of these refugees will be stopped,"

The deportation policy began in April within days of Prime Minister Man Mohan Adhikari's first official visit to Beijing since Nepal's Communist Party won a general election last year, and could indicate increasing closeness to China. Last month police in Kathmandu raided book shops in Thamel, the tourist area of the city, seizing stickers with the slogan "Free Tibet" and detaining at least one shopkeeper, according to a tourist who witnessed a raid on 23rd June. New elections are due to take place in November, giving the Nepal Communist Party a chance of strengthening its position.

- Leading Dissidents Repatriated: Daughter Appeals -

The most serious case reported so far involves three prominent Tibetan dissidents who had recently been freed from prison in Lhasa. One, 64 year old Tsewang Palden, was on conditional release, and is certain to be returned to prison for his attempted escape to Nepal. He was handed over with nine other Tibetans on 18th June.

Tsewang Palden, a carpenter from Lhasa, had been conditionally released last November after serving 3 years of a 5 year sentence imposed in December 1991 apparently on suspicion that he had links with the exile Tibetan government. His daughter, Sonam Drolkar, a well-known political prisoner who escaped from prison in Lhasa in 1991, today appealed to international organisations to help get her father released.

Sonam Drolkar, who was herself tortured for six months in a Lhasa prison, says she has no details of her father's physical condition or of his current whereabouts. "I am especially concerned that we don't know where they are being held", she said of her father and other deportees. "To be arrested again is especially dangerous", she said, speaking from Dharamsala, N. India.

The other former political prisoner amongst the ten people handed over on 18th June was Dawa, a 29 year old monk from Ratoe monastery 50 km south of Lhasa, who completed a 4 year sentence in April 1993 for starting a pro- independence demonstration.

Thubten Tsering, a 70 year old monk from Sera monastery in Lhasa, was handed back to the Chinese by the Nepal authorities on 17th June, one day before Tsewang Palden. He had just completed an 8 year jail sentence, imposed in 1987 because he discussed Tibetan independence with an Italian tourist in Lhasa. 18 other Tibetan asylum seekers were handed over to the Chinese with him, including 5 children under 13 years of age. One of them, Dorje Phuntsog, from Lhasa, is a 5 year old boy.

The three political activists were among a group originally of 31 people who had walked across Tibet for two months, often without food, before climbing a Himalayan pass in western Tibet and entering Nepal. They were detained by Nepali police near Baglung in western Nepal, 90 km south of the border, on 9th or 11th June, and driven 180 km to Kathmandu, where UNHCR representatives were refused access to them.

Home Ministry officials contacted on 18th June denied all knowledge of the group, who had spent the previous day in police custody in Maharajganj in Kathmandu, less than 2 km from the Ministry, and by then had been deported.

After one day in prison on the Chinese side of the border, Dawa, the youngest of the three political prisoners, escaped from the Chinese police and safely reached UNHCR officials in Kathmandu after walking back across the border and walking for a week through the Nepalese countryside.

"Ten of us were handcuffed in pairs and driven to Dram," said Dawa. "A plain- clothes Nepalese man took us across the bridge to the Chinese side and handed us over to the Chinese police," he added, indicating that the hand-over was carried out not by police but by Nepalese immigration officials, who are less likely to have acted without central authorisation.

Dawa spent one night in a Chinese jail near the border bewfore the prisoners were moved to larger prisons inland. "All ten of us were handcuffed together in a line, with the first one handcuffed to a bar in the window, so the ones by the window couldn't lie down," said the monk, who escaped the next day by jumping out of a truck and hiding in the forests near the border. The group of ten, all men in their 20s, included four monks from Sera monastery near Lhasa. Tsewang Palden, who was with Dawa in the truck, was too weak to jump from the vehicle or to complete the walk back to Kathmandu.

Tibetans face increased efficiency by Chinese border security forces, who intercepted 6,838 "illegal emigrants" throughout China in 1994, a 23% increase on the previous year, according to the People's Daily on 16th January. The number of Tibetan asylum seekers detained by Chinese police is not known. Under Chinese law people crossing the border without permission face a sentence of up to one year in prison, or many years more if accused of trying to contact the Dalai Lama and his government.

In May the Chairman of the Tibet Autonomous Region in his annual work report, published in the Tibet Daily on 8th June, called on officials to "accelerate the construction of border defences" and to strengthen the "reserve armed forces and militia" in order to assist "the military, the police and the civilians to make greater contributions to defending the border [and] safeguarding the motherland's unification".

Last month M-17 helicopters were introduced to carry out border patrols in the Xinjiang military district, which includes western Tibet, according to the Liberation Army News on 15th June, monitored by the BBC Summary of World Broadcasts. The use of the helicopters, replacing yaks and horses, marked the advance of "our frontier defence towards modernisation, with boundary control changing from surface to three dimensional", the paper quoted the district's frontier defence director as saying.

- [names of 19 deportees available from TIN] [end] -