Twenty-three-year-old Rakesh Subba* doesn’t look like your typical refugee: denim jeans, fake Nike runners, smart check shirt and eyes that mirror a constant smile. Sitting in a small roadside eatery in Nepal, cigarette in hand, he could be just another migrant worker.

But as he speaks, it becomes clear that Rakesh’s life has very much been one of a stereotypical refugee.

“I want my independence back. I want my life back, my family’s life back, and my homeland back. Mostly, I want the dignity of a life which was taken from me.”

Born in Bhutan and by his reckoning Bhutanese to the bone, Rakesh and over 100,000 fellow refugees have languished in seven UNHCR-administered camps scattered throughout the eastern districts of Nepal for over 15 years.

Despite words weighted by brutal memories, Rakesh smiles as though he’s told a joke. As though he hasn’t suffered at the hands of a brutal regime. As though his parents had not been beaten to incapacitation, his eldest brother not shot dead and his family home not razed.

Today, with no passport or identity papers, Rakesh is one of the ‘disappeared’, a living legacy of a forgotten act of alleged ethnic cleansing, a man who has no nation to call home.

Before what Rakesh calls ‘the troubles’, his home was a quiet market town in south west Bhutan, the small Himalayan kingdom which until 1974 was closed to the world.  Since opening its exotic doors to outsiders, the nation has become a darling of the tourism world, renowned for its Buddhist ways and applauded for its protective cultural and environmental policies.

But few commentators have turned their attention to Bhutan’s southern lands where the event that now tarnishes Bhutan’s Shangri-la image unfolded.
In the latter part of the 19th century, Bhutan welcomed thousands of Nepali settlers, the so-called Lhotshampa immigrants who responded to the country’s need for workers to help open up and cultivate its southern fields. Despite a royal decree granting nationality to all Lhotshampas in 1958, ethnic boundaries developed, an imaginary divide separating the predominantly Hindu settlers in the south from the ruling minority of the Ngalongs in the north. The Lhotshampas’ growing influence quickly became a threat to the ethnically sensitive powerbrokers in Thimpu.  Under the call of nationalism, the government began implementing exclusive policies which, by design or default, targeted and ostracised the Lhotshampas.
“They called it the ‘One Nation, One People’ policy,” says Rakesh. “It was tailor-made to extort Lhotshampas of our fundamental rights. We were forced to speak Dzonkha, the national language, and adopt the dress, costume, traditions and culture of the ruling Ngalongs,” he says.

A Human Rights Watch worker who spent several years undertaking research at the refugee camps confirms Rakesh’s claims. “They introduced extremely discriminatory citizenship laws as a way to forcibly expel tens of thousands of people,” says Nisha Varia, who is now based in New York and specialises in refugee women’s issues and violence in refugee camps. 

“The government held a census but they only implemented it in the south where the Lhotshampas were,” says Varia, noting that most Bhutanese lacked official identification and so had no way of proving citizenship.

The Ngalong’s cultural impress quickly became a brutal measuring stick. The impact on the lives of the Lhotshampas whose language, religion, culture and traditions were vastly different soon became a spark of resentment, one amplified by the proposal of a green belt along the Bhutan-India border which would leave at least a third of all Southern Bhutanese homeless.

The result in late 1990 was Bhutan’s first-ever mass uprising with thousands of protestors converging on administrative offices in demonstration.

King Wangchuk – recently voted by TIME Magazine as one of the ‘Top 100 people who shape our world’ – is alleged to have ordered the final exile in 1992, the majority of Lhotshampas forcibly evicted in the ensuing upheaval. Bhutan’s estimated population at the time was 698,950, meaning up to 15 per cent of the population had been forced to flee. For a country not at war, it is a staggering proportion.

Prominent Bhutanese activist and Chairman of the Human Rights Council of Bhutan, Tek Nath Rizal, charges the government with ethnic cleansing tactics reminiscent of those seen in parts of Eastern Europe at roughly the same time in history.

“The Bhutanese policy and behaviour towards the people of Nepalese origin was not different than in Bosnia,” says Rizal.
There is no evidence of actual genocide in Bhutan – most Lhotshampas fled terrorized but alive. However Rizal’s point remains clear: Bhutan ridded itself of an ethnic group it no longer wanted and got away with it. According to Bhutannewsonline.com “this has made Bhutan one of the highest per capita refugee generators in the world.”      
It’s a dubious honour resulting from events that Rakesh remembers only too well.
“Images of that day haunt me,” he says, recalling a peace rally demonstration in 1990 at Geylegphug, a market near his home, which was broken up by Royal Bhutan Army (RBA) soldiers.

“That morning, my father was in the Pooja (prayer room). A group of soldiers came, interrogated us, then went upstairs to get him.
 
“After fifteen minutes they brought him out half dead. His clothes were stained with blood, his face was battered, he had wounds and bruises all over his body and was unconscious.” It was over two weeks before Rakesh and his family saw their father and husband again. 

They were not alone in their suffering. The RBA is accused of arson, rape, custody deaths, random killings and wide-spread torture. “They forced us over the border at gunpoint,” says Rakesh. “But not before forcing us to sign ‘voluntary migration forms’ which renounced our rights to citizenship. The choice was simple: sign and leave or be killed.”

 “There were a number of human rights violations that took place,” says HRW’s Nisha Varia. “I interviewed a number of women who had been raped by Bhutanese authorities during the expulsion. A number of activists were jailed and tortured, many of them prisoners of conscience. Amnesty International did a lot of work in terms of documenting those cases.”

Today the refugees rely heavily on the aid of UNHCR, but with repatriation negotiations between Nepal and Bhutan effectively disbanded, especially given Nepal’s own internal troubles of late, even the UN is running out of patience, at one point in 2005 threatening to pull out of all Eastern Nepal refugee camps.

UNHCR representative Abraham Abraham’s frustration has been made clear saying in one of his many speeches on the subject, “UNHCR has carried out its protection mandate in close co-operation with Nepal and extended its expertise and assistance in the search for durable solutions. Nonetheless not a single refugee has been able to voluntarily repatriate to Bhutan or avail of another durable solution.”

Even if some refugees should be allowed back into Bhutan, the UN body has been refused access to the country to monitor, and therefore ensure the safety of, any repatriations.

In response to accusations of massive human rights abuses, Bhutan has played up to its ostensibly peaceable reputation, preferring to focus international attention on its Shangri-la image, anecdotally content citizens and an enviable environmental record.
There’s no denying that the nation’s much discussed ‘Gross Domestic Happiness Index’ has brought exactly that to many Bhutanese and the refugee issue has barely dusted the benevolent reputation of King Wangchuck. Indeed, inside Bhutan it is hard to find anyone who will speak critically of His Majesty. Outside, even TIME Magazine is content to perpetuate his benevolent image.
And so Bhutan gladly assumes its mantle as the world’s real life Shangri-la, as proudly touted on tourism marketing material the world over and despite the collective and growing voice of over 130,000 refugees.
No doubt author James Hilton who first coined the term ‘Shangri-La’ in his classic 1933 novel Lost Horizon would enjoy the irony missed: for the paradisiacal Shangri-la of his story was also intimated to be nothing more than a fairytale.
*name changed to protect identity