'They said Bhutan was their country, not ours'
04 Apr 2008 11:00:00 GMT - Written by: Peter Biro
Purushottam Ghimire, 30, has lived in quiet desperation for most of his adult life. Surviving on humanitarian food rations, he is unemployed and unable to leave the confines of Goldhap, a camp in eastern Nepal that houses nearly 10,000 of the country's 108,000 refugees from Bhutan.
"It's not a good or interesting life we have here," he contemplates as we sit down over a cup of tea under a blue tarpaulin flapping in the wind. "We have neither Bhutanese nor Nepali citizenship and we are not allowed to work. All of us here have become inactive and depressed."
In the early 1990s, the Bhutanese government began expelling its citizens of Nepalese origin, known as Lhotsampas. Seen as a demographic and cultural threat, the authorities stripped them of their citizenship and drove them from their homes in a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing. They now live in seven refugee camps in Nepal's eastern Jhapa district.
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