Now, your Supreme Court judge who is a Class X fail from Dr. Graham’s Homes, Kalimpong will continue to impress Bhutanese with his colourful speeches with the quotes from Shakespears which he is known to do. He is empty in head, what kind of justice you expect him to deliver. I have an idea, you should have a shadow supreme court judge with proper Law Degree who will check and balance him.

This man, who was High Court judge for almost four decades could have taken step to train Bhutanese with proper Law Degree. By now at least the judges at the High Court should have been the ones with Law Degree. No, he would not do that on purpose because he didn’t like the idea of having someone with Law Degree in Bhutan because then he wouldn’t be able to bullshit Bhutanese.

Good Luck with your Class X fail Supreme Court judge !!! which is possible only in Bhutan.

I will come up with some more “Possible only in Bhutan” when I get time.

4. All your big shots with lot of money are interconnected, Prime Minister is well connected with other rich and influential Bhutanese that he will get away with bloody murder while you ordinary Bhutanese keep sulking ad whining. He is connected to the King through marriage of his son.

5. I will be back with more when I have time. I need to go to work to earn my living and pay taxes to my Government so we can feed hungry and needy Bhutanese through our Government’s contribution to WFP and other UN agencies.One of you guys once said in the forum that western countries are taking Bhutanese refugees because they don’t have people to clean their toilets at the airport, to this I got to say ” HOW DO YOU LIKE BEING FED WITH THE MONEY CONTRIBUTED BY THE TOILET CLEANERS IN THE WESTERN COUNTRIES”

1. For your information, Lepchas ans Limbus are the native people of Sikkim not Bhutias. Bhutias came to Sikkim from Tibet like you Drukpas did from tibet, your Shabdung too fled from Tibet. At least Sikkim and India have given due recognition to Lepchas and Limbus, they are protected as backward tribes. Native people of Bhutan are Doyas and Totas who live in remote isolated villages and your Government has done nothing to uplift them. So, for your information Bhutias in Sikkim and Drukpas in Bhutan are also immigrants like people of Nepali origin.Just because Drukpas are in power it don’t make you more Bhutanese than us.

2. How can you justify the resettlement of Bhutanese from other parts of Bhutan on the land of evicted southern Bhutanese. Your Gunda Boss, King Jigme Singye looted the land from us and distributed them in the name of Kasho, Kasho my foot. He is disgrace to Budhism, he will rot in hale. You hypocrates claim to be Budhists but you are the most materialistic people in the World. GNH, my foot, everybody is after money in Bhutan. Your PM goes around preachng GNH but as soon as he gets home he is into business of making money by granting big money minting projects to his nephew and son. You guys can only write about it in the forum but can’t raise your voice in your country for fear of being thrown in jail. While PM and MPs are in the race of looting the country you Bhutanese can only be silent witness, how do you like that. You go ahead keep doing Laso la , yes la.

3.

Posted on: 2009/12/15 2:59

The origin of the crisis, which has exposed bureaucratic bungling and nationalist fervor at their worst, lies not so much in Bhutan as in Sikkim, which provided a foreshadow of what could have been the fate of Bhutan.

With porous borders and a weak state apparatus, the diminutive kingdom of Sikkim had become a destination of choice for a creeping ongoing uncontrolled immigration from nearby Nepal.

As the Nepalese slowly increased in number they also brought with them the political factionalism and dissent that plagued their country of origin. By 1975, the local Sikimese Bhutia had become a minority in their own country and the level of political unrest had become such that New Delhi had to step in and annex Sikkim.

The lesson was not lost on the Bhutanese, who were also exposed to similar immigration pressure from Nepal and where government circles had come to the conclusion – a view shared by many Western specialist of the region – that Bhutan was destined for extinction if decisive measures were not taken to bring to a stop what had become a process of creeping demographic encroachment.

Thus, by the early 1980s, the government of Bhutan started to tighten rules regarding immigration. Likewise, residency requirements regarding the acquisition of citizenship, though still relatively liberal in comparison to those of many Western countries, were made more stringent. Admittance to government service was also restricted to nationals and the use of the national language, Dzongkha, was made mandatory for official business.

These measures were increasingly badly received by the immigrant community and with unrest spreading in southern Bhutan, where most of the newcomers had congregated, the authorities decided to resort to a more radical solution – the wholesale expulsion of immigrants. Thus, between the end of 1990 and 1992, some 100,000 illegal immigrants were expelled from Bhutan.

While there was considerable debate as regards the precise composition of the group, the fact that some 70,000 moved to Nepal, which had no common border with Bhutan as it is separated by a strip of land that is part of India, made a compelling case for them being of Nepali origin. As for the remaining 30,000, they moved to India, where they joined the some four million strong Nepalese community.

While the expulsions were at times brutal, for the half million indigenous inhabitants of Bhutan what was at stake was the cultural survival of the last Tantric Buddhist kingdom in the Himalayas.

Had events been permitted to run their course, the 70,000 who arrived in Nepal would have faded away and the impact of their arrival in a country of some 28.5 million inhabitants which, for all practical purposes was their own, would have passed unnoticed. That events took another turn was due to an odd set of circumstances, namely the failure of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the UN refugee agency, to properly address the Kurdish crisis in northern Iraq in 1991.

In the wake of the first Gulf War in 1991, the US government encouraged the Kurds in northern Iraq to revolt against Saddam Hussein. When, however, Saddam turned against the Kurds, Washington did not come to their help and the result was a massive population displacement which saw hundreds of thousands of Kurds seek refuge in areas in northern Iraq not under Saddam’s control, while others sought refuge in Iran and Turkey.

The exodus caught the then-high commissioner for refugees, Madame Sadako Ogata, completely unprepared and exposed her to a wave of criticism both from Western governments and the non-governmental organization community.

To mitigate censure for her failure, Ogata created, within the UNHCR bureaucracy, a so-called Emergency Response Unit allegedly responsible for ensuring that the refugee agency be capable of responding at short notice to a sudden refugee crisis anywhere in the world.

However, with no further crises in sight but an unemployed emergency unit at hand, the UNHCR bureaucracy became a solution in search of a problem. That problem suddenly emerged in 1992, when the government of Nepal asked the UNHCR to take charge of the group expelled from Bhutan on the grounds that these were “refugees”, that is, foreign nationals who had fled persecution in their country of origin.

Normally, the UNHCR, before intervening, would have undertaken a survey of the caseload to determine exactly their nationality and reasons for departure. Had this been undertaken, the inescapable conclusion would have been that the overwhelming majority were actually Nepalese and hence, by the fact that they were in their own country, did not qualifying for refugee status.

But Ogata did not run a tight shop and spurred by the urge to be perceived as active, the UNHCR opened seven camps without undertaking even a semblance of a survey of the arrivals. Over subsequent years, as the UNHCR kept on pouring money into the camps, Bhutan and Nepal embarked on a series of protracted and fruitless discussions as to how to deal with the group.

While Bhutan acknowledged that among the camp population there might be a few bona-fide Bhutanese citizens whom they could accept back, they where wary of exposing themselves to a massive return. Conversely, the Nepali authorities, already embroiled in a major internal crisis, were insisting on the wholesale return of the group. By then, the camps had become hotbeds of opposition to the Bhutanese government and were in part controlled by various Marxist groups, including some of Maoist extraction.

In 1996, a senior UNHCR official on a visit to Bhutan acknowledged that the UNHCR should never have opened the camps in the first place, with the extenuating explanation that the decision to do so derived from plain stupidity rather than evil intent. But Japanese Ogata was not one to acknowledge her mistakes, and though she visited Bhutan in November 2000, she remained impervious to any recommendations to close the camps.

By the time Ogata left the UNHCR in December 2000, the situation in the camps had undergone a thorough Palestinization and with Nepal dead-set against local integration schemes, no solution appeared in sight other than the prospect of an unending financing for the camps.

Within the UNHCR, it was not a situation with which the hardcore bureaucracy found fault. With the agency’s existence justified by the existence of refugees, the incentive was in opening camps rather than closing them and the more refugees to care for so much the better. And when the beneficiaries were not exactly “refugees”, the temptation to stretch the rules and thus increase the number of the organization’s constituents proved irresistible.

It was only in 2004, with the nomination of a new director for Asia, that the UNHCR started to reconsider the issue. With neither repatriation nor local settlement in the cards, resettlement appeared as the only viable option. Thus, by 2006, following a Canadian initiative, the so-called “Core Group” of countries which had monitored the problem and that included Australia, Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway and the US, decided that they would all offer resettlement slots to the camp population. With the US ready to accept up to 70 000 and a resettlement rhythm of some 20,000 a year, it was estimated that in four to five years the problem could be solved and the camps closed.

The announcement of the resettlement scheme provoked a major outcry throughout the camps. Fearful of losing their captive constituencies, the various political factions active in the camps, such as the Bhutan Communist Party, the Bhutan Peoples’ Party and the Democratic Socialists, supported by exiled movements, launched a massive campaign against resettlement. Riots erupted and in May 2007 three camp inhabitants who had volunteered for resettlement were killed. As for the Nepal government, for whom the camps represented a source of income, it was only after severe pressure from the “Core Group” that it agreed to deliver exit permits to those who had been accepted for resettlement.

While the resettlement selection process proved laborious for most of the camp inhabitants, the opportunity to move to a developed country finally proved irresistible. Thus, this December, the UNHCR announced that 25,000 refugees had signed up for resettlement in the West. The Nepal office of the UNHCR said the US had so far accepted the largest number, 22,060, followed by Australia (1,006), Canada (892), Norway (316), Denmark (305), New Zealand (299) and the Netherlands (122).

With the trend towards resettlement now irreversible, it is only a matter of time before the Bhutan “refugee” issue is brought to its final conclusion.

(Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

He is probably making his final efforts as to keep his income generating source, the refugees. I am saying this as he was always willing to make money launching so called Back to country campaigns. he was lured by that kind of campaigns. if you closely examine his activities after being released from jail in the Bhutan you can easily decipher his motives.

It would be great if this news agency can stop interview such a beast that makes money out of suffering of the class the media proclaims to speak for. Jai Bhutan