Beldangi Refugee Camps

The Beldangi camps north of Damak were the largest of several refugee settlements in Jhapa district that housed Bhutanese refugees — ethnic Nepali Lhotshampa expelled from Bhutan from 1990 onwards. At their peak the camps held over 100,000 people across the district. Since 2007, the UNHCR has overseen a major third-country resettlement programme, and the camps have gradually emptied as residents were resettled primarily to the United States, Canada, Australia, and European countries.

The camps are still partially inhabited — some residents chose not to be resettled, and the process is ongoing — and are administered with UNHCR and NGO support. The Tri-Ratna secondary school near the camps was established by and for the refugee community. Visiting the camps is possible but requires some sensitivity; they are not a tourist attraction but a functioning, if unusual, community. Interaction with the remaining residents, who have complex feelings about resettlement, repatriation, and the decades spent in limbo, can be sobering and illuminating. Local guesthouses can advise on appropriate visits.

things to do sight history
A story
The Bhutanese refugee crisis was one of the least-covered mass displacements of the 1990s. Over 100,000 ethnic Nepali-speaking Lhotshampa were expelled from Bhutan between 1990 and 1993 — often from families that had lived there for generations — in a policy of enforced cultural homogenisation. They ended up in camps in eastern Nepal, where many spent fifteen to twenty years before third-country resettlement in the US, Canada, Australia, and Europe. The Beldangi camps at their peak housed around 50,000 people.