Tibetan refugees in Nepal are scared

As China’s influence grows in Nepal, Tibetan refugees are feeling the pressure, SIOFRA O’DONOVAN reports for Irish Times from Kathmandu.

LIKE MOST other young Tibetans here, Dawa, a teacher in his 30s, does not have legal residence in Nepal. He arrived from Lhasa in 1991. While Tibetans who arrived in Nepal prior to 1989 are eligible for a refugee registration certificate (RC) allowing them to remain in the country, thousands live here illegally.

“I don’t like living here any more,” he admits. “I have to get home by 8pm, to avoid police questioning me.”

Dawa has travelled back to Lhasa, Tibet’s capital, regularly since he left, to see his parents. Eventually, he would like to return to Tibet. “I do have hope that Tibet will be free, but I’m not sure how much good demonstrations do for us, in Nepal.”


Tseten Norbu, a businessman and protest leader in Kathmandu’s Tibetan community is from Shigatse, western Tibet, and lives in exile in Nepal. He continues to organise campaigns to free his country from Chinese rule, despite the risk of arrest by Nepali authorities.

Eleven Tibetans were arrested in his neighbourhood before March 10th on charges of anti-China activities and have been sentenced to three months’ imprisonment. “We don’t protest against the Chinese people, only the Chinese Communist Party which is opposed to Tibetan religion and culture.”

There is increasing despair among the community here, particularly among the most vulnerable, those without papers. The Nepali government now requires that all Tibetan shops, restaurants and businesses be officially registered. To do that, you need 50,000 Nepali rupees (€500) and proper residence status in Nepal.

“I know a woman with a clothes shop who went there with her RC card and all the money. They refused to accept her documents,” says Karma Dondrup, a refugee living in Kathmandu.
To get round the problem, often Nepali citizens register businesses in their name, to help Tibetans who cannot do so.

The Himalyan Sherpa, Tamang, Dolpo, Mustang and many other ethnically Tibetan Nepali tribes sympathise with Tibetans.

They share the same devotion to the Dalai Lama, and practice Tibetan Buddhism.

Other young Tibetans are working as political activists, independently or with NGOs. Yeshe Zangpo, from Amdo, Qinghai province, came into exile in 1994 to study Tibetan in India, crossing into Nepal over the pass at Solokumbu in the Mount Everest region. “We hid in gorges by day and travelled by night.” It took 26 days to get from Lhasa to Kathmandu.

He has been editor of a political newspaper in Kathmandu since 2008. “I spoke to my brother last week at home, and he told me to stop doing this. He said I should think of their safety.” The Chinese government punishes the relatives of those they see as separatists and members of the “Dalai Clique”. “I am always afraid in Kathmandu,” he tells me, “there are so many Chinese spies here.”

Apart from restaurant, antique and clothes businesses, teaching work and a minority who undertake the more risky work of political activism, the staple work of many Tibetans in Nepal since 1970 has been in the carpet industry as weavers and dyers.

Many of these factories have now fallen victim to the global recession and problems within the Nepal Labour Union and have closed, leaving thousands of Tibetans without work.

Some enterprising young Tibetans, Damdhul and Tenzii Wangdu, have now founded Café Dream Factory, a community project that works to redress the sense of purposelessness that is endemic among the refugee youth.

The group supports young artists and musicians and their office creates employment networks for young Tibetans . While there are some 29 monasteries in the Kathmandu district of Bouda, a Tibetan enclave, only 8 to 10 per cent of the refugees in Nepal are monks or nuns.

Many of the monasteries in the enclave are owned and largely populated by ethnically Tibetan Nepali citizens but the high lamas are usually Tibetan.

Jamyang Geshe la came into exile from Kham in 1985 to study in a monastery in southern India, as most Tibetan refugee monks do. “We could not study Buddhism properly in our monastery in Tibet, there was too much political instruction. Eventually, there will be no monks left in Tibet.” He runs a Buddhist centre in Bouda.

“If we can’t learn Tibetan, we can’t read the scriptures and our religious purpose is stunted,” says Dawa Tsering, a monk who gives regular religious and political speeches in the Kathmandu area.

Asked how he felt about living in Nepal these days, he said: “We have no refugee rights here. We can’t do anything here anymore, without being scared.”

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