Last year, then Asst. Secretary of State Ellen Sauerbrey traveled to camps in Nepal and announced that the US government had agreed to take 60,000 ethnic Nepalese who had been pushed out of Bhutan. Here is an article from the Observer that seeks to explain the latest news from the region:
The small Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan is hailed as the last Shangri-la in a region plagued by conflict and poverty. Attracted by its policy of Gross National Happiness, Western media have held up the country’s apparently peaceful transition to democracy as a model of wise governance by a Buddhist regime protecting its culture from the ravages of consumerism.
But behind its facade of otherworldly charm, Bhutan holds a secret. Twenty years ago, its monarchy, threatened by an increase in Bhutan’s ethnic Nepalese population, hit on a simple solution: ethnic cleansing. Families who had been living in Bhutan for generations were stripped of their citizenship. One hundred thousand Hindu Bhutanese – around one sixth of the country’s entire population – were driven into exile and their land redistributed among the Drukpas, Bhutan’s Buddhist elite.
I suppose one way to look at this is to ask if the Nepalese had been illegal immigrants to Bhutan in the first place (although the article claims they were citizens), settled in, and when the government of Bhutan tried to send the ethnic Nepalese back to Nepal they are accused of ethnic cleansing. Wonder if that charge will soon be leveled at the US government if illegal aliens are urged to return to their own country. Just wondering, don’t throw eggs!
Enter the Maoists (Communists):
Now a combination of divisions among the refugees, renewed tension inside Bhutan and the surprise election victory by Maoists in Nepal, is threatening a plan that finally gives hope to 107,000 refugees who have been languishing in camps in eastern Nepal for the last 17 years. Tens of thousands of unregistered refugees are living stateless and in abject poverty in Nepal and India.
Read it all and go back to all of our previous coverage of the situation with the Bhutanese refugees and see if you can get a firm understanding of the situation. You can see from past posts that I sure don’t get the full picture.
Update already: Moments after posting this I came across an article from St. Louis about the first Bhutanese family to arrive in that city. They are Hindu and St. Louis has become home to a very large Muslim population primarily Bosnians. I guess the old melting pot will need some firing up! Note the article says 60,000 Bhutanese will come this year. That figure must be wrong because we are expecting to take only 70,000 80,000 refugees world wide this year.