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Background
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 (see Aris and Hutt 1994; Hutt 1994), and by a further visit
to Nepal in 1995. Refugee camps in Southeast Nepal at the
his article focuses in large part on the specificities of a
comparatively obscure refugee situation - that of the approximately 100,000 people
who have arrived in Nepal since 1990, claiming Bhutanese refugee status. It
outlines the socio-historical background to the problem, describes the way in
which it has unfolded, and evaluates the refugees' claims through a survey of
documentary evidence and field visits to Nepal and Bhutan. By measuring the
realities of the situation against a theoretical model proposed by Anthony D.
Smith in 1994, it then considers the extent to which the problem has arisen as
the result of a conflict between two differing modes of ethnic nationalism: the
new style of nationalism promoted by the Bhutanese state since the late 1980s,
and the demotic nationalism of the cross-border Nepali population of the broader
region. Although the paper addresses this particular case in some detail, its
discussion is relevant to other instances where refugee flows have been caused
by the formulation of new, more exclusive models of the nation state.
Introduction
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 (see Aris and Hutt 1994; Hutt 1994), 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 1,660,167 (Savada 1993:46); 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 Smith (1994), in which
the rise of nationalism forces the flight of an excluded minority. Smith 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, i.e. on
ethnicity in the narrowest sense ... Here lie the seeds of a collective
exclusiveness that so frequently begets persecution and homelessness (Smith
1994:190).
. .. 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 (ibid.: 195).
Smith compares 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." Smith 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 ethnie 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.
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