We’ve been writing about this for months and months, but this week there are fresh threats from Bhutanese Maoists living in refugee camps in Nepal to use violence against fellow refugees who have signed up for resettlement.
The long and short of the issue is that the Maoists want to overthrow the government of Bhutan (Shangri La) and they need numbers. They won’t have numbers if 60,000 refugees head to the US over the next five years.
BELDANGI REFUGEE CAMP (Nepal), Oct 16: In a secluded corner of a refugee camp in southern Nepal, Nirmal Chettri outlines his plans for waging a bloody “people’s war” on the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan.
With the intense stare of the ideologically fervent, the 26-year-old said his organisation, the Bhutan Communist Party (MarxistLeninist-Maoist), was ready to start killing for its cause.
He also warned that his faction would step up attacks on thousands of Bhutanese refugees who are leaving the camps in Nepal to start new lives abroad.
“There will be a lot of casualties and destruction but we cannot shy away from fighting for justice,” said Chettri, one of around 100,000 Bhutanese of Nepalese origin who were forced to flee Bhutan in the early 1990s.
The refugees have languished in UN camps in southern Nepal for more than 15 years, and now — after the United States of fered to resettle at least 60,000 — many are preparing to leave.
Around 50,000 have signed up for international resettlement, and 5,000 have already left.
But Chettri and his comrades want to stop the exodus, because he believes the refugees have been “brainwashed and hypnotised” and that the resettlement programme reduces his party’s chances of destroying Bhutan’s monarchy ….
For those of you who think this Bhutanese refugee flow to the US is driven purely by humanitarian zeal, think again. The Bush Administration has apparently chosen to save Bhutan from communism by bringing tens of thousands of third worlders to the US. I guess they figure they will have a twofer as well by supplying big businesses, like meatpacking companies, with cheap labor.
The Refugee Resettlement program of the US State Department is used for political reasons. It is aided and abetted by the ‘do-gooder image’ cover it gets in the media and among the volags that make their living resettling refugees.
If you would like to know what we have previously written on this subject, just type “Bhutan” into our search function.