d a b a l it h e b h u t a n e s e r e f u g e e s
Prelude
Geography
At the foothills of the Himalayan mountain range that runs along the political boundary between China and India lie two small countries – Nepal and Bhutan. These land-locked political entities, squeezed between two giant neighbors upon whom they are often dependent economically and politically, have largely gone unnoticed by the media and public in the West, except perhaps by mountaineering enthusiasts, the ganja-smoking hippie generation of the sixties and the more recently arrived tourist crowd searching for exotic cultures and landscapes.
Facts and Figures
Nepal has a population of roughly twenty million people, most of whom are immersed in an agrarian economy. The annual per capita income is approximately one hundred and eighty US dollars while the cost of living is estimated to be twenty-seven times less than that in the United States. The country instituted a parliamentary system of government in 1990 and since then has been on a tumultuous and fickle political journey.
Bhutan, among the few remaining kingdoms in the world, is ruled by king Jigme Singe Wangchuk, a descendant of a Buddhist dynasty with its roots in Tibet. While there are contentious reports on Bhutan’s population, the official record claims six hundred thousand people. A large percentage of the population comprises Drukpas – descendants from Tibet who practice Buddhism. The remainder comprises Lhotshampas – immigrants from Nepal with stark cultural differences compared to the Drukpas.
The Conflict
The Lhotshampas are believed to have started immigrating to Bhutan since the late eighteen hundreds in search of farmland and economic prosperity. They settled in southern Bhutan, which had been shunned by the Drukpas because of malarial conditions. Despite being in a new country, the Lhotshampas retained their cultural identity, religion (Hinduism), language (Nepali) and lifestyle through the years.
Until the mid 1980s, for perhaps a century, there had been little visible conflict between the Drukpas in the north and the Lhotshampas in the south. However, in 1985, inconspicuous tensions between the two groups surfaced with a fervor, resulting in numerous public demonstrations, fighting, killings and ultimately a mass exodus of Lhotshampas from the country. Between 1988 and 1994, more than a hundred thousands Lhotshampas had sought refuge in the Bhutanese refugee camps in south-eastern Nepal built under the aegis of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees.
Bhutanese Refugees - Glimpses of Nepal - Bookmarks - d a b a l i
