The New York Times, 17 November 2016
The Nepali police have detained 41 Tibetans who were trying to cross the border into India, according to a police officer who spoke to the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The police officer, Rajendra Bista, works in Dhangadi, an area 270 miles southwest of Kathmandu where the detentions took place. The Tibetans had been on a bus to India, the officer told a journalist for the foundation.
The Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of the Tibetans, lives in northern India, and many Tibetans who live under Chinese rule try to make pilgrimages to see him. The Tibetans then decide whether to try to stay in India, sometimes for many years, or return home. Although the Dalai Lama advocates greater autonomy for Tibetan regions within the framework of Chinese governance, the ruling Chinese Communist Party accuses him of being pro-independence and labels him a “splittist.”
To get to India, Tibetans cross into Nepal at the rugged Tibet-Nepal border along the Himalayas, often without passports, and then travel onward to India.
In recent years, Nepali security agencies have been detaining more Tibetans and sending them back to Chinese-ruled Tibet, as well as limiting protests by Tibetans in Nepal. The country is one of the world’s poorest nations, and the Chinese government has offered economic incentives to the Nepali government and to specific regions in the country, including Mustang, a Buddhist area that borders central Tibet.
Mr. Bista, the police officer, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on Tuesday that the detainees had no travel documents. An immigration official in Kathmandu, Basudev Ghimire, said his agency would look into whether any of the Tibetans, among them monks and nuns, were refugees or whether they should be sent back to the country from which they came.
Refugees would be handed over to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which runs a transit center in Kathmandu, he said.
The foundation’s report said that fewer than 200 Tibetans arrived in Nepal in 2013, a sharp drop from earlier numbers.
China increased policing of the Tibetan border after a widespread Tibetan uprising in the spring of 2008. Before that, 2,000 to 4,000 Tibetans arrived at the United Nations transit center in Kathmandu each year. In 2008, 500 to 600 went to the center.
About 20,000 Tibetans live in Nepal, many without passports.
In 2014, Human Rights Watch published a 100-page report that detailed how Nepal had “imposed increasing restrictions on Tibetans living in the country as a result of strong pressure from China.”
A summary of the report said: “Tibetan refugee communities in Nepal are now facing a de facto ban on political protests, sharp restrictions on public activities promoting Tibetan culture and religion, and routine abuses by Nepali security forces. These include excessive use of force, arbitrary detention, ill treatment in detention, threats and intimidation, intrusive surveillance and arbitrary application of vaguely formulated and overly broad definitions of security offenses.”
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