Nepal police arrests 17 fleeing Tibetans

Saturday, February 27, 2010

The Associated Press
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Kathmandu -- Nepalese police said Friday they have arrested 17 Tibetans who illegally entered Nepal from Tibet by crossing over the mountainous border.

“We have arrested 10 Tibetan women and seven Tibetan men who entered Nepal without valid travel documents,” said Deputy Superintendent of Police Dhiraj Pratap Singh, chief of police in Dolakha district where the arrests were made Thursday.

The Dolakha district lies 150 kilometres east of Kathmandu.

“We will hand them over to the Department of Immigration on Monday after interrogation,” Singh told Kyodo News by phone.

Last year, the government warned that illegal Tibetan migrants would be deported back to China.

But so far, not a single illegal Tibetan migrant has met such fate even though the Immigration Department had warned that 10 arrested in the same district in January would be made an example of to discourage others from illegally entering Nepal.

The 10 Tibetans were eventually handed over to the Office of the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), which assisted their transit to Dharamshala in northern India where the exiled Tibetan leader, the Dalai Lama, is based.

Nepal is home to nearly 20,000 Tibetans who possess valid refugee papers. It stopped issuing Tibetans refugee status in 1989, but that has not stopped Tibetans from illegally entering the country.

It is believed that most of those who reach Nepal without being arrested live here, while most those arrested eventually make it to Dharamshala with the assistance of UNHCR.

Nepal toughened its stance on illegal Tibetan migrants at the behest of China after Tibetans had organised almost daily anti-China protests in Kathmandu from March 2008 to protest the Chinese crackdown on similar protests in Lhasa. But such protests have died out in recent months.