Bhutan's Forgotten Refugees

If the mention of the small South Asia nation Bhutan brings any reaction to the reader, most likely it is a positive one. This is deservedly so, the country has been at the forefront of Gross National Happiness, an alternative to standard measures of GDP to indicate how well a country is performing. This has brought much scholarly intrigue and importantly examines the limitations of strictly using GDP. Bhutan is also seen as a paragon of transition from absolute monarchy to flourishing democracy. These are all things which deserve to be commended.

Unfortunately, Bhutan also has a more sinister history. This regards the much less publicized plight of its refugees. These refugees largely consist of people from the south of the country known as Lhotshampas. These are people of Nepali decent. They started crossing into the porous border in the late 1800s with large immigration throughout the 1900s, largely coming to Bhutan to work in low skill jobs. To stem the tide of immigration the government passed a law in 1958 claiming that only those who could prove their presence in Bhutan at least 10 years prior could become citizens, while also closing the border to all new Nepali migrants. This was massively ineffective and numbers of Lhotshampas swelled with a government that maintained little interest in actively policing the inflow of migrants. Things started to change in the late 1980s however. The beginning of the “one-nation one-people” policy marked this shift. This started when the first census in Bhutan, carried out in 1988, showed how large the Lhotshampas numbers were. They accounted officially for 28% of the population, unofficially numbers were likely as high as 30-40%. The reaction to this information was swift. Most Lhotshampas were labeled illegal immigrants according to the aforementioned 1958 law being applied to the information from this census. The government instituted efforts at targeting Lhotshampa culture in line with the “one-nation one-people” idea. Mandatory wearing of the Driglam Namzha, the national dress code that is used by the Bhutanese majority in the north, but was alien to these southerners, was instituted. In addition, schools were no longer allowed to teach in Nepali and replaced it with Dzongkha language which most Lhotshampas could not understand. Mass deportations then ensued. All this was met by violent ethnic unrest, and the calling for democracy and respect for minority rights on the part of the Lhotshampas. Brutal ethnic violence on both sides continued until 1993, with the Bhutanese army often forcing Lhotshampas to sign “Voluntary Migration Forms” stating their willingness to leave or coerced videotapes to the same effect to avoid international backlash.

These refugees largely settled in refugee camps in Nepal. These camps ended up taking over 100,000 refugees in, equivalent to 1/6 of Bhutan’s population. On a per capita basis this is one of the largest refugee populations ever. Nepal, despite stoking the violence and calling the violent Lhotshampa groups freedom fighters, refused to allow refugees to settle in Nepal, and was hesitant in even establishing the camps. Bhutan refused to take them back viewing them as non-citizens. Years of bilateral discussions between these two countries got nowhere. In 2001 this was meant to be rectified when Bhutan said it would take some refugees, but to this day not a single refugee has been repatriated to Bhutan. Bhutan’s unwillingness to take back their refugees, despite the rhetoric is clear. The process has been so slow that even the UN, notorious for inefficiency and a glacial pace, decided that another option would be needed. In 2008 the UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees) elected to start third country resettlement, largely to nations such as the US, Canada and Australia.

At the beginning of this year only around 34,000 refugees remained in Nepalese camps, the rest having been resettled. Though even there concerns remain. A recent report by the USA Center for Disease Control and Prevention noticed an alarmingly high suicide rate among Bhutanese refugees. Reasons for this include language barriers, worries about family at home and alarmingly high levels of PTSD, depression and anxiety. One thing is clear, whether it is the initial deportation, Nepal’s unwillingness to allow these refugees to reside in Nepal, or the West’s need to provide considerably more support, blame is widespread for the plight of these oft forgotten people. Lhotshampas have not benefited from the very democracy in Bhutan they first called for decades ago, nor, unfortunately, do they appear to have been calculated in anyone’s definition of Gross National Happiness.