Dear Editor,
I am a research fellow at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris. My subjects are history and anthropology, and my fields Tibet and especially Bhutan, where I spent and still spend a considerable amount of time: ten years from 1981 to 1991, and three months every year since then. I have received the IIAS Newsletter for at least four years. Not only do I enjoy reading it, I also find it an invaluable source of information on Asia, given the high academic standards of the contributors. These details are, I think, necessary to explain my surprise at reading, in IIAS Newsletter 18, the article (p. 19) entitled 'Bhutanese refugees: middle of nowhere' by Rajesh Giri.
From the title, I thought this would be an assessment of the situation of the refugees who have been in the camps in Nepal since 1990/91, and whose predicament, which nobody contests, should be solved as quickly as possible. In fact, the article is an undisguised attack on Bhutan, and is ridden with errors of historical and ethnic fact. I would like to mention a few of them:
- Mr Giri writes that 'the Drukpas form 20% of the population, occupy the northern part of Bhutan and speak Dzongkha. Sharchops of Indo-Burmese origin, in the eastern region constitute around 30% of the population. The Nepalese speaking people of Indo-Aryan origin, the Lhotsampas make up about half of the population.'
The term Drukpa, a complex blanket term, has three meanings in Bhutan today: a) it is the name of the State school of Buddhism; b) it is the official Dzongkha term for all Bhutanese citizens, regardless of their ethnic origin; c) it designates all people of Tibetan and Tibeto-Burmese origin living in central and northern Bhutan and practising Buddhism. Therefore the Sharchops are also considered, and they consider themselves, Drukpas. To say that the Sharchops are of Indo-Burmese origin has no meaning as this classification simply does not exist. They are of Tibeto-Burmese origin and do constitute 30% of the population.
Northern Bhutan is sparsely populated by pastoralists who are of Tibetan descent, speak dialects of Dzongkha, and are called by the generic term of 'Bjop'. To say that the king belongs to the Drukpa group of northern Bhutan, is therefore a terminological error as the ethnic description leading to this statement is inaccurate.
As for the Lhotshampas, the Dzongkha term for 'people of the southern border', although they are all called Nepalese (another complex blanket term), they are not all, as Mr Giri assumes, of Indo-Aryan origin and Hindu. A part of them are, but what about the groups of Tibeto-Burmese origin like the Lepcha, Limbu, Rai, Gurung, and Newar? Most of them are Hindu but a few are Christians or Buddhist. There are also the groups of even more direct Tibetan descent like the Sherpa and Tamang, who are also Buddhist. The 'Nepalese' population of Bhutan is far from being unified and to say that they are all Indo-Aryan and Hindu seems to me a very light assessment.
- To say that 'Other than members of the ruling feudal class, no person may become a member of the National Assembly' is a factual error. It is also an insult to the Lhotshampas ('Nepalese') living in Bhutan and who have members representing them in the National Assembly.
- Contrary to what Mr Giri says, contacts with foreign countries were never cut off and media were not dismantled. In fact the weekly newspaper 'Kuensel' never ceased, even for one week, to publish its Nepalese edition, and the daily radio (BBS) programme in Nepalese was never dismantled. Major Western publications such as 'Newsweek' and 'Time' were always available, as well as all the Indian magazines and newspapers.
- Nepalese is in daily use all over Bhutan and is one of the languages at the National Assembly as well as at the Court of Justice. If Nepalese is not encouraged in the schools, it is the same with other languages such as Bumthangkha and Sharchopkha, in order to promote Dzongkha as a national language.
- Contrary to what Mr Giri says, Bhutan has, for several years, regularly received delegations of the UNHCR, the Red Cross, and the UN Working Group for Arbitrary Detention in order to discuss the issues of refugees and prisoners, as well as to seek advice on reform of the judicial system. As for Amnesty International, a delegation visited Bhutan as recently as November 1998, and travelled to eastern and southern Bhutan.
Because of its high standard, I have always considered the IIAS Newsletter as a forum where academics can debate their ideas, but never thought it was a political tribune for the spreading of biased information. Therefore I feel it is my duty as a historian and an anthropologist to correct some of the errors found in this article, which project an inaccurate picture of Bhutan to readers.
Dr Françoise Pommaret
CNRS, Paris
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