Exiled Bhutani human rights leader Tek Nath Rijal has appealed to the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to appoint a special envoy for repatriation of the more than 100,000 Bhutani refugees in Nepal.

"The United Nations must play its role to repatriate the refugees to their original homesteads with honour and dignity," Rijal has said in a letter he submitted to Annan on 24 January at the UN headquarters in New York. "I fervently believe that the appointment of your special envoy for Bhutan would provide an avenue for reviving the stalled Nepal-Bhutan dialogues and their eventual repatriation with honour and dignity as citizens of Bhutan."

Rijal said he was worried by the restlessness among refugee youths in the UNHCR-run camps in Jhapa and Morang. "In the face of uncertainty, these camps could become recruiting grounds for Maoist rebels of Nepal and for separatists groups of India's northeastern states," Rijal added, "The refugee problem, if left unaddressed could pose new security challenges in the region."

Nepal and Bhutan have been incommunicado after holding 15 rounds of ministerial talks between 1993-2003. All that happened in those years was the verification of a little over 12,000 refugees in one of the seven camps. But since that went nowhere, the international community has floated the idea of repatriating refugees to third countries and assimilating them in Nepal. Rijal has opposed this, telling us last year: "That would be a most unfortunate move, it would mean Bhutan got away with what they did to us."