For more than 15 years, the Bhutanese government painted circles around Kathmandu's authorities, as well as those concerned in the international community, regarding the repatriation of the Nepali-speaking Lhotshampa refugees. After Thimphu's Ngalong elites noticed a 'demographic imbalance' in the making during the late 1980s and early 1990s these erstwhile citizens of Druk Yul were unceremoniously herded out of the country and made stateless. For long years; the Lhotshampa made up the second-largest refugee community in Southasia, after the Afghans residing in the NWFP in Pakistan. They also had perhaps the poorest international refugee profile, weighed down by the 'Shangri-La' image of a home country that purported to be able to do no wrong, along with the subliminal understanding among many in the international community (including India) that there was always a Nepal to take the Lhotshampa in.
Fortunately, the steadfast support of the UN's refugee agency, UNHCR, helped the Lhotshampa to remain together as an exile community. This also allowed the refugees to maintain their desire to go back home to their hill villages in the southern districts of Bhutan. The Lhotshampa thus became a festering sore on the 'happy' image that Thimphu was trying so hard to promote. With constant prevarication, the leitmotif of the Bhutanese delegations during over 17 rounds of talks with Kathmandu, the refugees remained in limbo in the hot plains of Jhapa and Morang districts in eastern Nepal.
Given the unlikelihood of repatriation to Bhutan under the 'right of return' principle, the refugee leaders and concerned internationals started thinking of alternatives. The one that presented itself was third-country resettlement, and it seemed that the relative docility of the Nepali-speaking refugees made them a welcome category for Western countries with policies of taking in limited numbers of refugees. In 2006, the US announced that it would be willing to take in 60,000 refugees and more if required. Canada, Norway, Denmark New Zealand, Australia and the Netherlands quickly followed suit with commitments to take in smaller numbers. The process of resettlement subsequently began in early 2008 under the aegis of the International Organisation for Migration, and to date more than 25,000 have already left for their new overseas home.
This process was almost unable to get off the ground in the first place due to wrong-headed notions among some in the refugee leadership, who maintained an all-or-nothing attitude on repatriation back to Bhutan. This created needless confusion as the right of return would not be abandoned in accepting resettlement, which was urgently required as a humanitarian measure. After all, there was fear of donor fatigue in supporting the seven refugee camps in Nepal, with repatriation looking to be a very remote possibility.