Refugee Camp Closure Ceremonies

The seven UNHCR-managed refugee camps established in the Jhapa and Morang districts of eastern Nepal from 1992 onwards became, over three decades, the defining landscape of Lhotshampa life in exile. Beldangi I, Beldangi II, Beldangi III, Khudunabari, Timai, Goldhap, and Sanischare housed a peak population of over 107,000 people — an entire society, with its schools, temples, markets, football pitches, and informal street-life compressed into tarpaulin and bamboo settlements on the Nepali plains. The closure of these camps, accomplished in phases between 2007 and the early 2020s as the third-country resettlement programme relocated the majority of residents to eight countries, was at once a logistical success story and an occasion of profound collective mourning.

For the Bhutanese government, which maintains that most Lhotshampa departures from Bhutan in the early 1990s were voluntary, the camp closures represented the conclusion of a crisis it did not acknowledge as one of its making. For UNHCR and the international community, they marked the near-completion of one of the largest and most complex resettlement operations since the Vietnamese boat people programme. For the refugees themselves, the closures were neither triumph nor resolution — they were the closing of a chapter whose injustice had never been addressed.

The Process of Consolidation and Closure

Camp closures followed a process of consolidation rather than simultaneous shutdown. As resettlement departures reduced populations in the smaller camps — Timai, Goldhap, and Khudunabari — remaining residents were transferred to the larger facilities. Khudunabari, the last of the eastern group of camps, was relocated between March and May 2012. By 2016, only Beldangi and Sanischare remained, with a combined population of approximately 11,762 — a fraction of the peak figure. The camps were formally wound down in the early 2020s as the final rounds of resettlement processed the remaining eligible population.

The physical closure process involved multiple parallel administrative steps: the handover of camp infrastructure to Nepal's Department of Civil Aviation and relevant district authorities; the winding down of UNHCR and NGO service contracts; the final departure of international staff; and the deregistration of the camp population from UNHCR's protection mandate. For the camp residents who departed through resettlement, the process involved months of biometric registration, cultural orientation, medical screening, and waiting — waiting that some residents described as more nerve-wracking than the original departure from Bhutan, because the stakes of this departure were known.

Ceremonial Farewells

The departures that preceded camp closures were marked by informal ceremonies of farewell rather than formal state occasions. Families gathered at temples for final pujas before departure; community elders offered blessings; photographs were taken with neighbours who were resettling to different countries and might never be seen again; and the camp infrastructure itself — the bamboo and tarpaulin structures that had been home for twenty years — was examined with a mixture of relief at leaving and pain at the realisation that even this inadequate shelter had constituted a life.

Oral testimonies collected by journalists, NGOs, and community organisations document the emotional complexity of departure. Some community members described an overwhelming desire to take soil or river water from the camp site as a tangible connection to a place that, however imperfect, had been the only home their children had known. Others described the departure as a second displacement: having already been expelled from Bhutan, they were now leaving the Nepal that had sheltered them, bound for countries whose languages they did not speak and whose cultures they could barely imagine.

The Remaining Refugees and the Camps' Legacy

Not all camp residents chose resettlement. An estimated 6,000 to 7,000 refused to participate, hoping instead for repatriation to Bhutan or local integration in Nepal. These individuals — mostly elderly, strongly attached to the ideal of return, or excluded from resettlement by health or security criteria — remained in or near the former camp sites after UNHCR support ended. Their situation, examined in detail in the article on statelessness of remaining refugees, illustrates the unfinished business that the camp closures left behind.

The physical sites of the former camps have been repurposed in various ways. Some land has returned to agricultural use; some structures have been adapted for local Nepali communities. The camps left no permanent monument to the Bhutanese presence — a fact that community members and human rights advocates have noted as another erasure in a long history of erasures.

References

1. "In Camps." BhutaneseRefugees.com. http://bhutaneserefugees.com/in-camps
2. Gazmere, Bikash, and Bishwo Nath Ghimire. "Bhutanese refugees: rights to nationality, return and property." Forced Migration Review. https://www.fmreview.org/gazmere-bishwo/
3. "Transitions without Justice: Bhutanese Refugees in Nepal." International Journal of Transitional Justice, Oxford Academic, vol. 18, no. 2, 2024. https://academic.oup.com/ijtj/article/18/2/267/7633472
4. "Beldangi refugee camps." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beldangi_refugee_camps