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    Background


    Bhutan is a country ruled by a hereditary monarch,Jigme Singye Wangchuck. The King is both the Head of State and Head of Government although since 1998 much of the powers have been transferred to a Council of Ministers nominated by the King and vetted by the 150-member National Assembly. By rotation one member of the council takes on the duties of Head of Government.
    Planting the rice
    Of course there no constitution in Bhutan, a beautiful country controled by evil person who presents himself as a king taking all the power of Bhutan.

    The population of Bhutan is a subject of much speculation since the exact figures have never been divulged by the government. In the mid-1960s the government instructed officials to state that the country's population was 900,000. When the kingdom became a member of the United Nations in 1971, the population was stated to be 1 million. This figure was routinely increased to reflect the growth rate and had crossed 1.4 million by 1990 when the King announced in an interview to an Indian journalist that the actual figure was closer to 600,000. Taking this figure as more likely, the total population at the end of 2000AD is around 750,000.

    The reason behind this secrecy regarding population statistics is political and stems from concerns over the break-up between the three main ethnic communities that live in Bhutan. Western Bhutan, the centre of power, is inhabited by Ngalongs of Tibetan origin and make up between 15 and 20 percent. Eastern Bhutanese, the Sharchops, are of Indo-Mongoloid or Tibeto-Burman origin and constitute around 40 to 45 percent. Both these groups share a common religion (Buddhism) and Tibetan-derived culture. The third group, ethnic Nepalese who are mainly Hindus, comprise immigrants of more recent origin (late 19th century onwards) who were granted citizenship in 1958. This southern group makes up between 40 and 50 percent.

    Since 1990 some 110,000 southern Bhutanese have been forced to abandon their homes and flee to India and Nepal. The roots of the political crisis in southern Bhutan obviously lie in the leadership's concern over the growing southern Bhutanese population, both as a percentage and in terms of real numbers. The perceived threat of being swamped by ethnic Nepalese was heightened during the 1980s by the wave of democratic movements across the globe and nearer home in Nepal and the Nepali-led Gorkhaland movement for a separate state in India. Recognising this threat, a policy with an eventual goal of balancing the demographic pattern was initiated in the mid-1980s; the idea was to set right a historical error of judgement - the grant of nationality in 1958 to ethnic Nepalese settled in the south. One might sympathise with the Bhutanese, but the methods employed were foul and in total disregard of international nationality laws.

    The grant of citizenship in 1958 was by royal decree. The new citizens were not granted papers nor were there any major changes in the lives of the people then. Bhutan was still a medieval kingdom in 1958 - there were no motorable roads, no electricity, no hospitals or other government public facilities. There were just 5 primary schools in the entire kingdom. There was no individual certification of grant of nationality because neither the government nor people considered it necessary at the time. In 1985, the government enacted a new Citizenship Act. In 1988 the government began taking a census in southern Bhutan based on the 1985 Act. The census was one of inclusion and not exclusion - each person was expected to prove he/she was domiciled in Bhutan in 1958 to qualify as a Bhutanese by registration according to the 1985 Citizenship Act. The government started with a fresh slate; the onus was on the individual to prove his or her credentials. It was not made easy by officials who demanded tax receipts for exactly the year 1958, not even ones issued earlier would do ostensibly because that might imply the person may have left the country before 1958 and returned only after the cut-off year.

    Nepalese origin in south Bhutan The ridiculously stringent conditions above were to impact on the legal status of many more people because of two amendments to nationality laws. The Marriage Act of 1977 had prescribed that only children born of Bhutanese fathers, not either spouse as before, would be considered Bhutanese citizens. The 1985 Citizenship Act tightened this requirement further and required both parents to be Bhutanese for citizenship by birth. Applied retrospectively and in tandem with the 1958 tax receipt stipulation, the government could declare tens of thousands of legal southern Bhutanese as non-nationals. A person born in Bhutan in 1959 suddenly became an illegal resident during the 1988 census when either parent could not prove his/her presence in the country in 1958, the cut-off year. Thus began the woes of southern Bhutanese.

    Attempts by southern Bhutanese to persuade the government to review the census implementation exercise were unsuccessful. The government deemed one such attempt, the submission of a petition by Royal Advisor Councillors Tek Nath Rizal and B.P.Bhandari in April 1988, an act of sedition. Youth in schools, colleges and villages became agitated and began to express dissent. This gave the government an excuse to become more aggressive and overtly discriminatory. The 'One Nation, One People' policy was adopted stringently with a uniform compulsory dress code and dropping of the Nepali language from the school curriculum. A green-belt plan was unveiled that threatened to make a third of all southern Bhutanese homeless. When the people reacted by rising up in mass protests all over southern Bhutan, the government began a massive crackdown. Thousands were arrested and among them hundreds detained for years without trial. Starting from a small group of dissidents who escaped the crackdown launched by the authorities, the refugee community grew as security forces plundered and terrorised villagers in the south following the protest demonstrations of September-October 1990. But the exodus peaked during in the first half of 1992 when the government initiated a campaign of systematic expulsion by forcing people to sign "voluntary" emigration forms before deporting them. The flood of refugees eventually stopped, but not before a hundred thousand had been forced to leave Bhutan. Just as people had suddenly mysteriously "volunteered" to leave in droves, there were no more "emigrants" - the government had met its target of reducing its southern population by a third.

    This account of the Bhutanese refugee crisis is informed primarily by visits made to Nepal and Bhutan in 1992, by a conference on Bhutan in London in 1993, and by a further visit to Nepal in 1995. Refugee camps in Southeast Nepal at the time of writing (March 1996) accommodate a total of 88,000 Nepali-speaking people, many of whom possess documentary evidence of long-term residence in southern districts of Bhutan. An estimated 15,000 other refugees from Bhutan are said by UNHCR to subsist elsewhere in Nepal, plus an unspecified number in Northeast India. To put these figures into perspective, it should be borne in mind that the official total population of Bhutan is very small. In 1988 it was estimated at 1,451,000, in July 1992 at 1,660; a revised figure of 600,000 was announced by the king of Bhutan in October 1990. This account will attempt to assess the extent to which the Bhutanese crisis resembles the situation described by different associations, in which the rise of nationalism forces the flight of an excluded minority.

    The Amnesty International defines nationalism in the following terms: whereas territorial nationalisms are content to endow their nation with a common history and mass culture, such that people of different origin can join and participate in both, ethnic nationalisms predicate shared history and culture on a myth of common ancestry. on ethnicity in the narrowest sense ... Here lie the seeds of a collective exclusiveness that so frequently begets persecution and homelessness… Ethnic nationalism does not involve a specifically racist component, but manages to exclude non-members within and deny their rights, while preserving their essential humanity. Instead of being exterminated, they are rendered homeless. As indigestible minorities in their own homes, they suddenly find themselves deprived of a homeland. They are felt to constitute a threat to the continued existence, and purity, of the emergent ethnic nation. They must therefore be denied citizenship in their own land, rendered defenceless and homeless and ultimately driven out.

    Everyone able to compare two kinds of pre-modern ethnic communities: the 'lateral' which is confined to the upper strata of a society - "the monarch and his court, the nobles, priests and officials, sometimes the richer merchants", who "evince no interest in disseminating their ethnic culture to outlying groups or lower strata"; and the 'vertical' in which "the ethnic culture is more widely diffused through the social scale - we find artisans and urban traders, and even some peasants, drawn into a more sharply defined ethnic community." Amnesty states that the ethnic community in this latter case consists of "the people" who can be mobilized by religious and political leaders and he characterizes this ethnic community or ethnic as 'demotic' or popular. Has the problem described in the pages that follow arisen from conflicting nationalisms: the nationalism of a 'lateral' ethnic community and the nationalism of a 'vertical' one? This question will be considered in the conclusion of course.

    Political Unrest Dissent was growing in the south because of what the Southerners thought was an attempt by the government to force out Nepali-speaking citizens, and to impose the Drukpa culture. In July1989, a small group of dissidents, led by Tek Nath Rizal, a former Royal Advisory Council member in Bhutan, set up the People's Forum for Human Rights (PFHR) in Nepal. Between October and December 1989, 45 people were arrested in Bhutan for writing and circulating "seditious pamphlets." Six were held for between 26 and 28 months before being released, and Tek Nath Rizal is still imprisoned. The Bhutan People's Party was formed by Nepali Bhutanese in India in June 1990. With the PFHR, it organized mass public demonstrations in southern Bhutan in September and October 1990 that were unprecedented in the kingdom's history. The demonstrators submitted a list of 13 demands for radical changes in the political system as well as basic civil rights. It was alleged that both demonstrators and security forces committed acts of violence.
    Teej festival


    After the demonstrations, the Bhutanese army and police began the task of identifying participants and supporters, who were classed as Ngolops (anti-nationals), and the flow of refugees out of Bhutan began. It reached a peak in May 1992, with 11,000 arrivals recorded for that month in the camps in Nepal. The refugees brought with them detailed allegations of torture, brutality, and rape. The refugee problem The Bhutanese government rejects the refugees' allegations and argues that it now faces a problem of terrorism in southern Bhutan. Village leaders and officials have suffered intimidation, facilities have been destroyed or damaged, there have been a few instances of political assassination, and ordinary villagers have been robbed and assaulted. However, while many crimes of violence and robbery in the south are now blamed on ngolops in Bhutan's only newspaper, it is not clear that all such crimes are politically motivated. As the refugee camps began to grow in 1991, Bhutan disclaimed responsibility, arguing that the people in the camps were illegal immigrants, Nepali nationals, migrants from India, or southern Bhutanese who had left voluntarily. It cast doubt on the authenticity of the citizenship documents still held by two-thirds of the camp residents, and expressed the fear that a plot was afoot to turn Bhutan into a Nepali dominated state. Representatives of Nepal and Bhutan met several times to discuss the problem, but their discussions were either fruitless or ended in bitter disagreement. The first breakthrough occurred in July 1993, when a Nepali government delegation visited Thimphu, Bhutan's capital.

    In a joint communication, the two countries' home ministers announced that a joint committee would be set up to "determine the different categories of people in the refugee camps who are claiming to have come from Bhutan," and to arrive at a "mutually acceptable agreement on each category to provide a basis for the resolution of the problem." The Bhutanese stated (in a document published in May, 1993), "the royal government of Bhutan will accept full responsibility, for a bonafide Bhutanese national who has been forcibly evicted from Bhutan." But clearly, many matters still need to be clarified if the problem is to be resolved. Nor will any final resolution be sustainable if it does not take full account of the fears of the Drukpa Bhutanese, and of the grievances and aspirations of their southern compatriots. An important development affecting the already imprisoned Tek Nath Rizal occurred toward the end of 1993. On November 16, Rizal received a life sentence for his political activities. But on November 19, the king of Bhutan announced that Rizal would be released as soon as Bhutan and Nepal had resolved the refugee problem.