Expelled Bhutanese turn to Mao – and guns
Don Duncan, Correspondent
Last Updated: January 28. 2009 9:30AM UAE /
THIMPHU // The cliff-perched fortresses that dot this Himalayan nation’s mountainous perimeter are a testimony to a long-standing effort to keep out foreigners. But in the 1980s, Bhutan, a tiny Buddhist nation of just 600,000 inhabitants sandwiched between China and India, found itself with what it considered a foreign problem.Bhutan’s minority population of ethnic Nepalese had mushroomed to represent one-third of the kingdom, causing the then king, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, to launch a policy called “one nation, one people”, a campaign that stripped many ethnic Nepalese of the Bhutanese citizenship they had acquired and also curtailed the rights of those who were illegal. According to the US state department and several human rights NGOs, the campaign ended with the expulsion of 105,000 of Bhutan’s ethnic Nepalese, plus beatings, torture and murder perpetrated by the Royal Bhutan Army in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
“We left because we were scared that they would imprison us, that they would beat us, that I would be raped,” said Matimya Moktan, 41, who went to Nepal in 1991 and now lives in a small wattle and daub hut with her three children and husband in the Beldangi I camp, one of seven refugee camps dotted across the plains of eastern Nepal.These camps are where those expelled from Bhutan ended up. Locked in political limbo, somewhere on the remote margins of the diplomatic agendas of Bhutan, Nepal and India, a number of these refugees have formed militant organisations that is gaining force and sophistication and that could soon become a significant security concern for Bhutan as it takes its first shaky steps towards democracy.Last year, Bhutan became the world’s newest democracy, two years after King Jigme Singye Wangchuck abdicated his throne in favour of his son, ending almost a century of autocratic rule. By the time Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, 28, was crowned Bhutan’s fifth king in November, the country’s political system had been completely overhauled with a democratically elected government and a new constitution. Bhutan’s king is now the head of state of a constitutional monarchy.
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