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Voluntary Emigrants'
The Bhutanese government is anxious to depict many of the
refugees as 'voluntary emigrants' who have been enticed or intimidated into
leaving for the camps by the dissident political parties operating in exile in
Nepal. In April 1994, one such group of some 34 families left for the camps from
the Dorokha sub-division of Samchi district in southwest Bhutan, having signed
'voluntary emigration' forms. The eviction/emigration was carefully
choreographed and the émigrés were even videotaped as they declared that they
were departing of their own free will. The New Delhi correspondent of the London
Times, who was visiting Bhutan at the time, was taken to meet the
émigrés and filed a report that reflected what he had been told:
A farmer of Nepalese descent, Ganeshyam Pockeral [sic], in a
few days will sign away his citizenship of the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan,
where he was born, and move to a United Nations camp in Jhapa, east Nepal. He
will not say so, but he is part of a campaign of ethnic expansion. He is not
being expelled. His land has not been confiscated. He has not been threatened or
coerced. The government, dominated by indigenous Drukpas, wants him to stay:
indeed, it has tempted him with money ... What he does not say is that he is
convinced he will return and reclaim his land, and more besides, when southern
Bhutan is controlled by ethnic Nepalese (Times, 2 April 1994).
A very different picture of this episode emerges from a joint
statement signed by 27 family heads (including Ghanashyam Pokhrel) who were
among a group of 284 people from Dorokha who arrived in the refugee camps on 9
April 1994. One claimed that he had been served with a notice to leave Bhutan
because his older brother had already left, others said they had been told to
leave because they were unable to produce certificates of origin (because their
relatives had left Bhutan and taken such documents with them), one because his
brother was an 'anti-national', and so on. They said that they were told
collectively to leave their houses on 25 March and gather in Samchi town, where,
presumably, they met the Times correspondent. On 7 or 8 April each was
videoed individually, and made to state that he or she was leaving voluntarily.
The video recordings have since been shown to foreign visitors to Bhutan
(Amnesty International 1994:15-16).
Bhutan's national newspaper, Kuensel, reported that a
decree from the king of Bhutan which urged the people not to leave had been read
out to the group. This decree was said to have been dated 26 March, but the
people claimed that it was not read out to them until 7 April, by which time
several of their houses had been demolished. Nonetheless, it did result in
five families and two individuals staying on.
The lengthy Kuensel report, published on 9 April 1994,
depicted the families' 'decision' to leave Bhutan as something incomprehensible,
and began:
39 families and seven individuals from Samtse have
relinquished their citizenship and opted to leave the country despite efforts by
the government to persuade them to stay back.
The gup (headman) of the Denchukha block was quoted as
saying,
all the reasons given by them are excuses. They have no
reason to leave the country as they have not been mistreated by the local
authorities, the government or the security personnel. The real reason is that
they have no love or loyalty for the country.
The article ends with a quote from the district administrator
of Samtse (Samchi):
I wonder how people who have refused to stay back in Bhutan
despite all our efforts to persuade them to withdraw their applications to
emigrate can be accepted as refugees in Nepal.
During a brief visit to Damphu in the Chirang district of
southern Bhutan in September 1992, this writer was told by the district
administrator (Dzongdag) of the lengths to which he and his staff had gone to
dissuade local villagers from moving to the refugee camps: but, he said, even if
his officers deliberately held up the processing of their voluntary emigration
papers, the villagers would simply 'abscond' without going through the
formalities. They would even dismantle their houses, it was claimed, in order to
re-use the timber in the refugee camps in Jhapa. In private, this writer was
allowed to meet seven 'applicants for emigration'; these were men of between
about 25 and about 50 years of age whose names I was unable to record. All
assured me that they were in the process of withdrawing their applications. I
wondered who they thought I was and asked them what the district administrator
had told them before he had brought them to see me: 'he didn't say anything' I
was told, and evidently my subjects thought that I suspected some measure of
tutoring. Despite my rephrasing the question several times, the same reply was
given: 'nothing, he didn't say anything'. Generally, my questions drew only
monosyllabic replies. Later, an elderly man approached me in a shop on the main
street and launched straight into an emotional appeal in Nepali, claiming that
his son had already left for the camps in Nepal and that the local police were
trying to force him out, but that he refused to leave. Of course, it was
impossible in the circumstances to corroborate these claims.
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