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The Growth Of Decent
In 1989, concerns about the census were brought to the
attention of the two Royal Advisory Councillors elected to represent the south
and the Councillors conveyed them to the king in a lengthy appeal that requested
that the 'cut-off date' for citizenship be altered from 1958 to 1985, the year
the new Citizenship Act came into force. The government's response was to
imprison one of the Councillors, Tek Nath Rizal, for three days on a charge of
sedition. Rizal subsequently fled to Nepal where he joined six other dissidents
who had established the 'People's Forum for Human Rights' and printed a pamphlet
entitled Bhutan: We Want Justice. This 5,000-word document played a
crucial role in influencing the manner in which the Bhutanese government
responded to dissent in the years that followed. Some of the document's wilder
passages have been quoted by those who wish to argue that the aim of Rizal and
his colleagues was to overthrow the legitimate government of Bhutan (Shaw
1994:162, n.16), for instance:
The hour has struck for the historic conflict. We the
Bhutanese Nepalese have a culture we cherish, a language we speak, a dress we
wear, a religion we follow. They are all ours. They are part of our identity. We
shall not allow any power to take them away from us. We shall resist, we shall
fight to the last man of our race all repressive laws intended to wipe out our
racial identity. THIS DOCUMENT IS A PROTEST AND A PROPHECY. A protest to the
powers that intend to put shackles on us. A prophecy that a whirlwind of
rebellion will shake the hills of Thimphu and bring down the rising towers of
terrorist power.
A second, more temperate passage was quoted by Amnesty
International in a 1994 appeal for the release of Tek Nath Rizal:
The great crime of the government at the moment is that it
does not respect individual identity. A government is for the people. It is
bound to respect individuals. The dress, the language, the religion are the part
of every man's identity. Bakhu [gho/kira] does not make a Bhutanese. The cowl
does not make the monk. A Bhutanese does not become a lesser Bhutanese when
he/she does not wear them ... Identity is primarily the core, the soul of a
person or nation. It is sheer ignorance to identify it with dress or language.
Is it too difficult to understand that a Nepalese will not lose or gain his
Bhutanese identity by wearing or not wearing Bakhu. Identity is something deeper
than a piece of cloth you put on.
In November 1989, five months before the collapse of Nepal's
discredited Panchayat administration, Rizal was arrested by Nepalese police,
handed over to the Bhutanese authorities, and taken back to jail in Bhutan. He
has remained there ever since, and was sentenced to life imprisonment in
November 1993 by Bhutan's High Court, under a National Security Act enacted in
1992. The king granted him a pardon three days later in which his release was
made conditional upon the governments of Bhutan and Nepal finding a solution to
"the problem of the people in the refugee camps."
Serious unrest began to spread across southern Bhutan from
early 1990 onward, and during the early stages persons unknown, who were
possibly allied to the Bhutan People's Party (BPP) formed in June 1990, seemed
to have adopted the violent tactics espoused by an extremist element of the
Gorkhaland National Liberation Front. On 2 June 1990 the severed heads of two
government officials were found at a border checkpost in Samchi district: a year
later the Royal Government began to publish photographs of dead and maimed
southern Bhutanese who, it claimed, had become the victims of a concerted
movement launched by 'anti-national terrorists' (RGB 1991). The government
accused terrorists of destroying schools, health facilities, bridges, police
posts, electricity pylons etc.
The People's Forum for Human Rights, the Bhutan People's
Party and the Students' Union of Bhutan 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 demands that was
clearly influenced by the wave of democracy movements and human rights activism
that had swept across eastern Europe, and had very recently reinstated a
multi-party democracy in Nepal. There are allegations of outside involvement and
that both demonstrators and security forces committed acts of violence (Muni
1991). After the demonstrations, the Bhutanese army and police began the task of
identifying participants and supporters. These were arrested and questioned, and
often beaten, tortured and held for months without trial. Batches of such
prisoners were released in amnesties announced by the king: several hundred in
September 1990, 727 in August 1991, 74 in October 1991, and so on. Almost
without exception, those released left Bhutan and joined relatives in the
refugee camps in Nepal. As the annual censuses progressed, people who had been
classified as full citizens in an earlier census began to find themselves being
evicted from Bhutan because they had a relative in jail or in the refugee camps.
According to the Citizenship Act of 1985:
Any person who has acquired citizenship by naturalization may
be deprived of citizenship at any time if that person has shown by act or speech
to be disloyal in any manner whatsoever to the King, Country and People of
Bhutan (Article 6c; RGB 1993:57).
This provision seems in practice to have been extended to all
those who opposed, or were related to others who opposed, the government's new
policies: Thronson quotes from a government circular issued by the Bhutanese
Home Minister on 17 August 1990:
..any Bhutanese citizen leaving the country to assist and help
the anti-nationals shall no longer be considered a Bhutanese citizen. It must
also be made very clear that such people's family members living under the same
household will also be held fully responsible and forfeit their citizenship (Thronson
1993:18).
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