By Tendar Tsering
DHARAMSHALA, September 12: Barely weeks after Kathmandu assured Beijing of sustained crackdown on anti-China activities on its soil, the Nepali government arrested 20 Tibetan teenagers for entering the country illegally from Tibet, Sunday.
The Agency France Presse (AFP) reported that 15 Tibetan boys and five girls, aged 16 to 18 were stopped at a remote western Himalayan village in Nepal after crossing the border from Tibet on foot.
The AFP quoted a police spokesman Binod Singh saying that the teens were arrested by the local police on Sunday morning.
Nepali police started chasing them after they were seen at Pandusen Saturday night. They had reached the border district after trekking for 16 days.
According to the news agency, a police official is accompanying the teens to Kathmandu where they will be handed over to the immigration authorities in Nepal.
It is reported that the teens are expected to be given safe passage to India, which hosts the exile headquarters of the Tibetans.
The ‘Gentlemen’s Agreement’ between the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and Nepal government provides for cooperation in the safe transit of Tibetans from the border regions through Nepal and onward to India.
However, Tibetans refugees escaping into Nepal have faced deportation on earlier occasions. The US State Department in March last year reported that Tibetan refugees deported by Nepal for illegally entering its territory suffer torture at the hands of the Chinese authorities.
Earlier this year the whistleblower website Wikileaks revealed that China could have rewarded Nepal security officials to arrest Tibetans attempting to enter Nepal.
“Chinese government rewards (Nepali forces) by providing financial incentives to officers who hand over Tibetans attempting to exit China,” the confidential diplomatic cable created by the US embassy in New Delhi on February 22 quoted an unnamed source as saying.
Nepal and Tibet share 1,414 km of common border with 34 major passes between the two.
Each year, thousands of Tibetans refugees try to escape Chinese rule in Tibet but the numbers have seen a decline following stricter border patrolling on both sides at the behest of the Chinese government.
