Final Internship Report Ben Liston Why would these people come to Nepal? This is not the most common question I encountered in Kathmandu as anyone who visits Nepal knows, that honour would go to you wanna smoke hash, THC, good-time, mare-ee-wanna? But the question of why? truly lingers. I always pause, even now, back in Canada, when people ask me this question because it s complicated and not so easily dismissed and, ultimately, because it offers a way into the lives and experiences of the people I worked with this summer. Why would asylum seekers fleeing civil war in Somali, political oppression in Sri Lanka, religious persecution in Pakistan, travel by land, sea and air to the poor mountain nation of Nepal to claim refuge? Nepal s a developing nation ranked 138 in the Human Development Index, the lowest standing of any Asian country besides Afghanistan. Significantly, Nepal is a country that has not signed the 1951 Refugee Convention or the 1967 Protocol, and considers all asylum seekers to be illegal migrants. It is a nation still transitioning from a decade long civil war, struggling mightily to keep the fragile peace process alive as the elected Constituent Assembly continually misses deadlines to promulgate a constitution. Why come here? Well, it s not for the hash or the souvenir prayer flags. Beyond that, the answers vary in the particulars while sharing something fundamental. Some asylum seekers entrusted their lives to human smugglers and the promise of a comfortable North American or European life, only to be unceremoniously deposited at the neglected Tribhuvan International Airport. Others were impoverished and struggling in neighbouring India, when they caught wind that Nepal offers cheap, simple visas and a cheap, simple life. Still more took the first flight to the first country that wouldn t turn them back. Every story has, at its core, anxious flight and refuge desperately sought and an eventual arrival at the gates of United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Kathmandu. Once here, the urban asylum seekers apply to be recognized as refugees by the UNHCR, and if successful they will live on the accompanying subsistence allowance for years while holding out hope that one day another country, one that accepts refugees and recognizes their international human rights, will agree to resettle them. For my internship, I dealt with the first stage of the refugee claim: country of origin information research, or COI, and refugee status determination, or RSD, for asylum seekers, or A/Ss (I was warned that the UN may be drowning in bureaucracy, but the HCR is just ablaze with acronyms). I would hear the refugee s story, research the situation in the county of origin, scour relevant directives and guidance notes and treaties and precedents, and eventually write a decision, concluding whether or not this person met the Convention definition of a refugee. It was, at least initially, an intimidating position. After two years of legal education, I would determine whether an asylum seeker was a refugee, whether he has a well-founded
fear of persecution, whether she was lying, whether they had other options. To be an arbiter of such personal information and consequential determinations was, and is, unsettling. It s a feeling of uneasiness that I became familiar with in Kathmandu. Something along the lines of who the hell am I to be doing this? I m afraid there are, again, few satisfactory responses, though two I latched on to were 1) because someone needs to, and 2) because this is a singular opportunity to learn about the complicated application of universal human rights law to affected individuals, to put human faces to a Convention that can seem so very abstract from a classroom in Toronto (answer 2 is affectionately known as the Internship Justifier). The research was always compelling and eye-opening; I would compile research about the swift and alarming reprisals against President Rajapaksa s political rivals following the latest Sri Lankan election or I would solicit information about the state-sanctioned torture of Palestinian-origin citizens from UNHCR colleagues in Jordan and Kuwait. From there, consulting internal policy guidelines and established precedents, I would work through the RSD analysis, applying law to the accepted facts. This legal analysis was an exceptional glimpse into the daunting and conflicting role of the decision maker. Still, I know that, many years on from now, the stories are what will linger in my memory. In an otherwise empty room, I d sit at a desk across from the nervous claimant, asking and listening and transcribing on a computer. Ask: what happened? Listen: death and torture and hideouts and setbacks and fear and family and on and on. Type. Repeat. And always, at some point I would arrive at the inevitable question: Why did you come to Nepal? Each of the urban refugees in Kathmandu has this distinct journey, some personal ordeal of travel from one form of hardship to another. A memory not only of the persecution fled, but of the travel itself, the massive effort and expense and sacrifice, all to end up in another dire situation in the Himalayas. No status, no money, no rights, no common language and, once the expired visa fees start to accumulate, practically no way out. You can t describe such a turn of events as bad luck. The term s too feeble, unable to bear the weight of the narrative. So I would just stay silent and start to type again. Anyway, a discussion of poor luck in such circumstances is perverse. These are people journeying from worse to bad, a simple inversion that should engender some amount of hope, and probably does in some cases. I met people whose wives, husbands, mothers fathers, sisters, brothers, children, friends, neighbours were killed, sometimes in front of them. I interviewed a man who described being beaten until he vomited blood in the Arab Spring uprisings in Jordan. Another man from the Democratic Republic of Congo detailed his flight from his village when the Mai Mai arrived and threatened him with death unless he picked up arms with them. He has not seen or heard from his wife or children since that day. For these people Nepal s poverty and pollution and legal and social barriers are relative frustrations, rather than tragedies.
Still, the frustrations are real, and for those who have experienced trauma, they are, at times, overwhelming. Working in this trying context, I believe UNHCR Nepal does an incredible job of assisting and counselling individual refugees while simultaneously advocating on their behalf. The staff members I worked with are inspiring in their dedication to the work, their grasp of the situation, and their honest sympathy for the refugees. But dedication and sympathy do not necessarily solve every problem, at least not quickly. Still, it s about as far as anyone at UNHCR can go. True empathy with the refugee s daily ordeal in Nepal is ever elusive; there is an inherent gap. And so when a refugee blocks the road to demand more assistance, or physically threatens a staff member to demand resettlement, or attempts to hang himself from the gate to feel that his voice is heard, or screams and shouts and breaks down crying, there s very little to do. Desperation breeds frustration and so what? Just as a laudable international law enshrining refugee protection occasionally struggles and falls frustratingly short in this imperfect national context, so too will the best efforts of the best people. You can never do enough, there s not the time, capacity or legal framework necessary. The best intentions, the best people, the sturdiest principles, might end up sadly inadequate in practice. So, why would anyone come to work with refugees in Nepal? Well, for me, I had a choice. I had comfort, I had food, I had remarkable people doing great work and I got to be a part of it all while taking on an amazingly varied workload. But maybe the best response is a non-answer, one that I can better articulate after my summer in Kathmandu: there are other, tougher questions, with answers that balance not between principle and practice, but between life and death. Working with the urban refugees in Kathmandu is one small attempt to struggle with the former in order to tip, every so often, ever so slightly, the balance of the latter.