Nearly half of the 108,000 Bhutanese refugees in Nepal will soon be resettled in the USA with the help of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), officials from the Nepalese government, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the IOM have told IRIN.
– We signed a MOU (memorandum of understanding) recently with the Nepalese government and we will soon have official contact with the refugees, IOM’s David Derthick told IRIN after his visit to Damak, some 500km southeast of Kathmandu, where most of the refugees are living in camps.
Derthick said he had gone there to establish an IOM office to help the US government, which had selected IOM as its Overseas Processing Entity (OPE) for the Bhutanese refugees.
Since 1990 Bhutanese citizens of Nepalese origin – known as Lhotsampas in Bhutan – have been evicted from their homes by the Bhutanese government, which introduced a new law stripping them of citizenship and civil rights because of their ancestry.
Damak municipality is home to six of the seven Bhutanese refugee camps in Nepal.
Kilde: www.irinnews.org
