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With one sixth of the population in
exile, the tiny kingdom of Bhutan has the dubious
distinction of being one of the world's highest per capita
generator of refugees. The roots of the problem lie in the
government's attempts to alter the kingdom's demography in
favour of the ruling ethnic group. Since 1990, over
100,000 thousand southern Bhutanese of Nepalese ethnicity
have been made refugees after being forcibly evicted,
forced to flee persecution and repression, or expelled
after being coerced into signing "voluntary"
emigration forms. Ten years later, the refugees remain in
camps in Nepal administered by the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
The 1990s could have made it as the decade of human rights
because the Second World Conference on Human Rights in
Vienna in 1993 helped put this issue in the spotlight. But
for all the lip-service of defenders of human rights,
selective intervention by powerful nations to resolve
international crises - jumping in only when and where it
mattered to them - only underscored the international
community's hypocrisy. Powerful nations policed the world
with a vengeance: they waged a full-scale war in the
Gulf, sent UN forces to Bosnia-Herzegovina, and mounted
military attacks on Serbia. The world imposed
sanctions on countries and declared no-fly zones over
sovereign territory. The international community even
demanded the head of an elected head of government
as a wanted criminal. Yet, when a hundred thousand people
forcibly evicted from their homeland languished in refugee
camps, these same leaders and governments would not make
the effort to demand that the leadership of a tiny kingdom
abide by internationally accepted rules of civilised
behaviour.
During the last decade of the second
millennium, the international community was active in
resolving crisis after crisis across the globe. The full
military might of the United States was on display in the
Gulf, international forces policed the Balkans, went after
the Serbs in Kosovo and Serbia, and Australia did
its bit for international law and order in East Timor. But
just as the rapid intervention in some areas of conflict
have been impressive, the deliberate unwillingness of the
international community to be involved in resolving other
crises has been shameful. The global apathy toward the
issue of Bhutanese refugees in Nepal is one such example.
If the international community wished to leave a mark
before the end of the millennium by doing one good that
did not appear to be swayed by economic and political
interests, the opportunity was there in resolving the
Bhutanese crisis. Unfortunately, that this did not happen
is an indicator of how human behaviour and political
actions continue to be guided by vested self-interests.
The opportunity to end the second millennium with a
positive act has gone now that 2000 AD has dawned, but
there is still a chance for the world to begin the next
one in truly unselfish and humanitarian manner - the
Bhutanese crisis is still there to be resolved.
BACKGROUND
Bhutan is a country
ruled by a hereditary monarch, His Majesty King 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.
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 was 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.
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.
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