KATHMANDU (UCAN) -- Church refugee workers have welcomed a move by officials from the two Himalayan kingdoms to repatriate some of the 100,000 refugees who fled Buddhist Bhutan for Hindu Nepal.

Officials from the two countries met August 20-23 in Bhutan's capital of Thimpu and agreed to accelerate the process of verification of refugees in camps in eastern Nepal.

Jesuit Father Kuruvila Cherian, assistant director of Jesuit Refugee Service, which officially works with the refugees at the Caritas Nepal suboffice in Damak, 560 kilometers east of Kathmandu, welcomed the news.

According to him, some 900 of the families out of 1,500 have been verified in Khudunabari, one of the seven U.N.-supervised camps. Some 600 more families have yet to be verified in that camp.

The danger is that the "refugee syndrome" may set in when people become "passive" and "lose enthusiasm" preferring to settle down in the camps, where they receive basic necessities but are not challenged, than go home, he said.

Pekoe Moktan, Caritas Nepal director, told UCA News that it was getting increasingly difficult for Church agencies to find funds "especially for the higher education of Bhutanese children in the camps."

He said it is fortunate that the crime rate in and around the refugee camps has been quite low as refugees were patient for over 10 years.

"If basic needs are not continually met, refugees, especially youth, will quickly get restless," the Nepal Church aid agency head said.

Nepalese Foreign Minister Ram Sharan Mahat told media Aug. 23 that identifying refugees through a process of verification will now be two times faster or at least 80 percent quicker than the current pace."

The minister said the verification process of all the refugees in the seven camps could take up to three years as against the earlier target of six years.

Earlier this year the two neighboring kingdoms began interviewing the refugees separately, ethnic Nepalese who live in Jhapa district, eastern Nepal camps. The teams check to confirm if family members are Bhutanese citizens.

Mahat said such provisions means that he expected the verification process to be completed to some degree soon, and the first group of refugees from the camps to go back to Bhutan by October.

However, Rakesh Chettri, a Bhutanese refugee leader, doubts an early repatriation. "The Bhutanese national government assembly has taken a stand against repatriating refugees. I do not believe there will be repatriation till all verification is done," he told UCA News.

Some 15,000 ethnic Nepalese families comprising 100,000 refugees live in seven camps. Most fled Bhutan in the early 1990s, claiming they had been persecuted or expelled due to their ethnicity.

Throughout the 1990s, Bhutan's government maintained that most of the Nepalese in the camps are not citizens of Bhutan. This soured relations between the two ethnically and religiously different kingdoms.

The recent talks, the 11th ministerial talks over refugees, has agreed to categorize the refugees for possible repatriation. At present, there are four categories - Bhutanese, non-Bhutanese, Bhutanese who willingly emigrated and Bhutanese with criminal records.

Bhutan insists it would take back only the first category refugees while Nepal maintains that all except non-Bhutanese refugees should be allowed to go back home.

However, they agreed "to harmonize their differences on this issue" and repatriate refugees that have already been interviewed since the process began in the Khudunabari camp last March.

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