Lhotsampa Leave Nepal Refugee Camps

Some 100,000 other Bhutanese have lived in bamboo huts on the Terai plains of eastern Nepal since the early 1990s, when they say they were 'ethnically cleansed' from Bhutan.

Another of the seven refugee camps in the region is Timai, where Hari Maya Gurung is crouching on a dirt floor, arranging the few pots and pans that distinguish this room as her kitchen.Her family used to own 15 acres of land in the village of Leopani in southern Bhutan, where they tended three orange orchards and raised cows and oxen. Today all that she possesses can be found within this small hut.

Gurung's great-great-grandfather was among thousands of Nepalese to emigrate to Bhutan a century ago, building farms in the inhospitable southern reaches of that country. The Gurungs and their ilk – called 'Lhotsampa' in Bhutan – were mostly Hindu and comprised the peasant class in a country that was predominantly Buddhist. Bhutan's rulers largely ignored the Lhotsampa until the later half of the 1900s when the government became nervous of their rapidly growing population and increasing political clout.

In 1985, the government passed a law stripping most Lhotsampa of their citizenship, effectively initiating a campaign to dislocate them from the land.

Gurung says the problems for her family started in the mid-1980s when the police in her village began "verifying" citizenship. Unable to produce the required paperwork, she says all nine of her children were categorised as "terrorists" by the Bhutanese state."It was agony," says Gurung, recalling how she pleaded with the authorities for leniency.

Refugees have always accused the army of setting up barracks throughout southern Bhutan and demolishing their homes. They have also accused the military of arresting, torturing, raping and murdering people from their community.The Bhutanese government has denied accusations that it ethnically cleansed the Lhotsampa from Bhutan. Nevertheless, Gurung remembers the night government officials knocked on her door."Nepal is your country" she says they told her. "Leave Bhutan. If we return and you are still here, we will lock you inside this house and burn it down."

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