We have written 31 posts in which we have mentioned “Bhutanese” refugees who are coming to the US in large numbers now (we have agreed to resettle 60,000 over the next few years), and it wasn’t until this week that the whole issue became clearer to me.
Who are the “Bhutanese” refugees? How did they become refugees? Why are we and other western countries resettling so many? and Why is there agitation in the camps (to the point of violence) by some to halt the resettlement?
From World Politics Review, I am beginning to see the light! The Bhutanese are really ethnic Nepalis who had been entering Bhutan since the 1800’s and a rise in ethnic nationalism caused them to be expelled.
By the 1980s, when the ethnic Nepalese bloc mushroomed to represent one third of the kingdom’s population, Bhutan responded with a “one nation, one people” policy that at once bolstered the majority Drukpa culture by mandating its traditional dress and language for all, and restricted the rights of the ethnic Nepalese population. After a series of civil rights protests by the ethnic Nepalese, many of whom were Bhutanese citizens, the state clamped down — hard.
“We left because we were scared that they would imprison us, that they would beat us, that I would be raped,” Matimya told World Politics Review. In the weeks leading up to her family’s departure from Bhutan in 1991, she says, the army had begun to take women away from their houses.
This was just one tactic in what human rights groups say was a widespread campaign of ethnic cleansing of a minority population that claims to have arrived in Bhutan as early as the mid-1800s. Other tactics, say the refugees, included torture, beatings and the destruction of property.
That is one side of the story. The new Bhutanese democracy government has another side. They say the Nepalis had been illegal aliens in Bhutan, and had come to Bhutan because Nepal was a mess. Although they don’t say it here, it appears that the rise in population of the ethnic Nepalis could ultimately swamp the democracy. This made me think about illegal Mexicans in the US.
But in today’s Bhutan, which in March made the transition from a century of absolute monarchy to become the world’s newest democracy, another narrative prevails.
“Deep inside, they know they never belonged to this country,” says Bhutanese Prime Minister Dorjee Y Thinley in his office in Bhutan’s capital Thimphu. What is labeled elsewhere as an ethnic cleansing of Bhutanese citizens is seen in Bhutan as the “regularization” of an illegal immigration problem that had been left unbridled for decades. “They are refugees not of Bhutan, but of the ecological degradation, political upheavals, economic deprivation and insecurity in Nepal,” Thinley says, referring to Nepal’s 10-year civil war that ended in 2006.
But, Nepal doesn’t want them back either which is why they have lived in camps for going on 20 years.
From a publication at Arizona State University:
Joanne Morales, director of refugee programs for Catholic Charities Community Services, said the Nepali government established new eligibility requirements for Bhutanese citizenship in the 1980s that disenfranchised many ethnic Nepalis, stripping them of their civil rights. Since then, all ethnic Nepalis from southern Bhutan have been living in seven different camps in eastern Nepal since they were expelled from their homes more than 16 years ago. Of the more than 100,000 refugees in Nepali camps, the United States will consider resettlement for at least 60,000 of them.
“These refugees have literally been physically forced out of Bhutan and have nowhere to go,” says Morales…
So, they should be referred to as Nepalis. But, the plot thickens. The reason that there is violence and agitation in the camps is that Maoists (Communist ‘community organizers(!)) among these refugees want the Bhutanese /Nepalis to be able to return to Bhutan and I would guess ultimately overthrow the democratic government there. I wrote about that earlier here.
And so, like it or not, we are scooping up tens of thousands and resettling them in a town near you.