Josefina Bergsten

Lok Bahadur Acharya and his family fled their home in southern Bhutan for many generations in 1992. The army had come to their house at night several times and threatened to harm the family unless they left the country. The family tried to resist. Acharya went to the local authorities to file a complaint, but the officials did not care. Then one night, a soldier attacked Acharya's wife by stabbing her in the chest with the knife tip of his gun. The rest of the village had already fled and they realised that if they wanted to live they had to leave at once.

The family has lived in Beldangi III refugee camp in Jhapa province in southeastern Nepal ever since, waiting to return to their motherland. "When we lived in Bhutan we didn't know we would have to face such problems. Our forefathers spent their lives there. It's our country and we were happy to live there with our families. We had our property, our relatives and friends, our land. We spent our lives there. We contributed to the land of Bhutan with our sweat. We didn't know we would be stateless one day," Acharya said.

Acharya and his family are among the 135,000 Bhutanese refugees languishing in Nepal and India, who ran away from a violent ethnic cleansing campaign in Bhutan that tried to rid much of its Nepali-speaking southern population. The majority of the refugees live in seven camps in southeastern Nepal's Jhapa and
Morang provinces.

Tukka Sharma, another refugee who has lived in the Beldangi III camp since 1992, told of the harrowing events which forced her and her family to leave their homeland and become refugees. "The army and police came to our area and abducted women. They said they needed girls for their base camp. They said that a piece of firewood from each house should be carried by a girl from the house to the camp. They needed girls to cook their food, but they were also forced to serve all the men sexually. To escape from this situation they had to flee Bhutan. The families were not willing to send their daughters to serve the police and the army. That's how we all became refugees."

Many others in the camps have similar stories to tell. Saha Badur Baraili, an elderly man who had lost a leg, wants nothing more than to spend his last years at home and be able to pass on his land and property to his children when he dies. Now he has nothing to give them. "I was a farmer. I had a good life there. I used to work the land and earn my money. The police came door to door and told us that we had to go to Nepal. They said, 'you're Nepali, go pay respect to your king.' Then they said that when the army came next time they would burn our house down." Baraili was forced to sign a form written in
Dzongkha, a language he did not understand, which he later found out stated that he had left the country of his own free will and sold his land and property.

Ethnic Cleansing

The refugees constitute one sixth of Bhutan's total population, which gives Bhutan the dubious distinction of currently having produced the largest per capita refugee population in the world. Disturbingly, very little attention has been given to this serious crisis over the years by foreign governments and international media. Tens of thousands of frustrated refugees have been forgotten by the world.

Bhutan is ruled by the Ngalongs, centred around the capital Thimphu in the northwestern part of the country. They are Buddhists of Tibetan origin and make up only between 15 and 20 per cent of the total population of about 750,000. They control both the government and the economy. The Sharchops in the eastern parts are also mainly Tibetan Buddhists but belonging to a different sect of the Ngalongs. The ethnic Nepali Lhotshampas, which literally means those living in the south, constitute about 46 per cent of the population, which includes those refugees in Nepal and India. They are Hindus. All three groups migrated to Bhutan from different directions several hundred years ago and settled peacefully.

In the mid-1980s, the minority ruling Ngalong elite in Thimphu began to feel their position of power threatened by the eastern and southern populations. To reinforce their status as rulers, their Drukpa culture was made mandatory throughout the multi-ethnic country, including the sole use of their Dzongkha language and the compulsory use of the Drukpa national dress, an outfit not only too expensive for many but entirely inappropriate for the hot southern plains. The Nepali-speaking southerners were prohibited from speaking their language, wearing their traditional dress such as the sari, or expressing their traditions. One young refugee said there was no use to complain: "They said, 'if you don't follow the rules of Bhutan you must leave'."

A new Citizenship Act was also enacted in 1985, specifically targeting the Lhotshampas. The act changed the conditions for who was a Bhutanese citizen, rendering void an earlier law that gave them the right to citizenship. The new act stipulated that both parents must be Bhutanese and each family must be able to produce a land tax receipt from 1958. For obvious reasons, most people were unable to produce such a receipt when a census exercise was carried out in the south in 1988. Overnight, thousands of people who had lived in Bhutan for generations were declared non-citizens.

Putting Activists in Jail

Ratan Gazmere, a leader for the refugees and veteran human rights activist who has been fighting for the citizenship rights of the southern Bhutanese for many years, said he witnessed police arresting poor people for failing to wear the traditional dress. "Patriotism comes from the heart not from the dress," he said.

"I thought that it was not right for us to keep quiet anymore, so we formed a human rights organisation-the People's Forum for Human Rights. We thought Bhutan as a member of the U.N. should respect fundamental rights. They were disenfranchising our own people. We highlighted the problems by distributing pamphlets and leaflets, writing in strong language that we want justice," Gazmere said. It did not take long before the police caught the human rights activists, and Gazmere spent 28 months in prison in solitary confinement, often shackled and in handcuffs. 

From 1990 onwards, the Bhutanese government used huge redeployment of its army to the south to expel a large part of the Nepali-speaking population, while raping, pillaging and torturing the people. They used various pretexts, such as not having the right papers, giving donations to illegal political parties, joining demonstrations or being related to anyone who had demonstrated, to force the people to leave their land and property and flee to Nepal.

During the 14 years since the refugee crisis started, little progress has been made to solve the situation. "The government of Bhutan has embassies in many countries, they have friends and access. They are trying to twist this problem. People see the Shangri-La of the world from the outside but inside is a different story," said Tek Nath Rizal, a leading activist who had been jailed for 10 years and endured severe torture and solitary confinement.

Chance to Return Home Slim 

Bhutan has consistently tried to delay and avoid a resolution of the refugee crisis. They refused to allow anyone, including the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), to monitor a joint verification process agreed with Nepal in 2001. Only a team each from Nepal and Bhutan conducted the process for 12,000 people in Khundunabari, one of the refugee camps, over 10 months. Gazmere pointed out that it would take another seven to 10 years to complete verifying all the refugees at such a pace. 

It took another eight months and much pressure before the results were released in mid-2003. Only nearly three per cent of the refugees vetted were determined to have been forced to leave while more than 70 per cent were Bhutanese but had left voluntarily. Another three per cent were "criminal" Bhutanese and about 20 per cent were determined to be non-Bhutanese. In reality, at least 97 per cent of the refugees have proof of being Bhutanese.

However, almost nothing has happened since then and Gazmere believes there is less chance for the refugees to be allowed back home in an acceptable way. "We have argued that, to return, the refugees must be given full citizenship, their land and property and security." But the Bhutanese government has only given vague indications that the less than three per cent who were verified as having been forced to leave would be allowed to return, with no guarantees of the return of their land. The great majority -who left "voluntarily"-may be allowed to return but must stay in a temporary camp for two years and there are no guarantees of citizenship, or the return of their property and land. The rest will not even be considered by Bhutan.

UNHCR Plans to Quit

Despite the fact that no resolution has been reached, the UNHCR, under financial strain from lack of funding to look after 20 million refugees around the world, has announced that it is phasing out its activities in the camps. It wants others to "share the burden". This has triggered much discomfort among the refugees who feel increasingly abandoned. The UNHCR has tried to ease their fears by claiming that it will be replaced by other organisations and will not leave until alternatives have been found.

Misko Mimika, chief of the UNHCR office in Jhapa, said: "We are trying to bring this whole programme to a resolution, to promote a solution...Now we are a bit more pro-active because the high commissioner is saying enough is enough...With the phase-out the Nepali government is responsible. So we hope that something shall move if we pull out. We expect to happen. The phase-out will raise the profile of the issue and there are indications that things are moving. Countries are becoming increasingly concerned."

The UNHCR has been pursuing a threefold solution of returning some refugees to Bhutan while the rest would either be integrated into Nepali society or resettled in a third country. Human rights groups have criticised this approach as playing into the hands of the Bhutanese government but many have conceded that it is no longer realistic to believe that every refugee can go back home.

But Rizal and others who are fighting for the right of the refugees to return cannot accept the fizzling out of the issue by integrating them in Nepal. They said it would only encourage Bhutan to continue with their ethnic cleansing programme.

The international community must become more involved and put pressure on the government of Bhutan as well as Nepal to include them in negotiations and future verification processes, activists said. The two countries have insisted for over a decade that they can solve the issue bilaterally, but with very little result.

The regional power, India, on which Bhutan is dependent, could help solve the issue and force Bhutan to accept the return of all its citizens, some observers argued. Yet the Indians have been unwilling to disturb their relationship with the royalty and government of Bhutan as many favours could be lost for both sides, they said. To help the refugees, activists said donor countries to Bhutan could impose conditions on their donations.

'I Think about Food 24 Hours'

Throughout this, the refugees are suffering. They have been in a state of limbo for up to 14 years with no homeland, no right to work and no perceivable future. Frustrations are growing, depression and suicides are increasing. With organisations gradually cutting costs and pulling out, food rations and non-food items are also being cut. Janka Bahadur, who is a sector head in Beldangi III camp, said: "Organisations provide 400 grams of rice per person per day...We get 300 grams of potatoes per week and no fruit or milk or ghee. The total is only half as much as needed. It is enough to survive but not enough to live on. It affects me all the time. I'm thinking what to feed my children tonight. I think about food 24 hours. I find no excuse for not providing the kids enough food. I have sold my wife's jewellery and we have nothing left to sell. I was 96 kilograms before; but six months ago we ran out of money, now I am 60 kilograms."

"All of us are mentally sick and frustrated. We have lost our mental courage. We do not have healthy minds anymore. We need to wait and ask others for food because we can't earn for ourselves," said Sukamati Sunar, a middle-aged woman who lives in the Khundunabari camp. "We ask for citizenship anywhere, an address and an identity card of any country. We would accept to be slaves in a country rather than remain refugees. As slaves we would have the right to fight for our rights and we could work. It would be a happy life in comparison to this," she said. 

A whole generation of children has grown up and been educated in the camps. What is their future? Can they ever go back home in Bhutan? The older people in the camps, who long for their homeland and want nothing more than spending their last years in Bhutan, are worried that the young generation will turn to violence as their sense of hopelessness and un-belonging increases. Virtually all the refugees say they want to return to Bhutan but many concede that other solutions could also be acceptable if it means they can start their lives again. "We cannot be refugees forever.

Organisations cannot support us forever. We need to go back or we will die soon. If they think they can keep us here for many more years they want to see our dead bodies and destroyed lives," Bahadur said.