Kathmandu, August 18
The UN Refugee Agency has decided to shut down its office in Damak, 27 years after it was set up to assist Bhutanese refugees living in eastern Nepal.
According to state-run news agency RSS, the UN agency has written to the government saying that it will shut its Damak office by the end of 2020. The office was set up in 1992 after hundreds of thousands of Nepali-speaking Bhutanese refugees fled the Himalayan kingdom. The government of Nepal had written to the UNHCR to provide assistance to look after the refugees.
More 130,000 Bhutanese refugees have been resettled in countries such as the US, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, Denmark and the UK since re-settlement began in 2012. Around 6,500 of the refugees continue to live in camps as re-settlement has been halted since December 2018.
After the closure of the UNHCR office, camp residents will have to avail services from local governments, authorities say. The UN body is also planning to help the refugges build ‘semi-permanent’ shelters ahead of the planned closure.
