Wednesday, January 28, 2009

B A C C taking care Bhutanese Refugees in Bay Area.


By Dhurva Thapa

Bhutanese American Community Center is one of the popular community organizations of Bay area among the Nepalese community living here. The organization has been performing many community activities since its inception. As a result the numbers of Bhutanese Refugees are rapidly increasing in Bay area. Recently according to the US Policy sixty thousand of Bhutanese refugees are likely to come for the permanent settlement as resettlement program and their dreams are coming out of the Refugee camps, where they spent more than 15 years losing all their hopes and desires. Just couple of years back it was believed as the story of forgotten people. But now they are highlighted all over the world as a new comer for resettlement program. Beside US six other nations Australia, Canada, Norway, Netherlands, New Zealand and Denmark -- have offered to resettle 10,000 each. The United Nations describes this resettlement program is one of the largest resettlement program of all time in the modern history of mankind.

According to President of BACC Mr. Bir Thapa they are resettled in California, New York; Chicago, Illinois; Syracuse, New York; St. Louis, Missouri and various other cities and states of US. And bay area has become one of the most desirable destinations for the Bhutanese refugees. As a matter of fact they are feeling more comfortable with the BACC because it is the organization formed by Bhutanese community who came half a decade earlier or even more. And also they are organizing many fund raising to cultural programs and highlighted in local and international online Medias.

For example, Just last month BACC organized a grand Dashain and Welcome Party at one of the local restaurants of Berkeley where more than 150 Bhutanese refugees attended with great festive mood and celebrated it in their own traditional way with great feast and festivals with dancing and chanting. Most of the new faces were seen in the party and they were all excited to be the part of this country, leaving most tragic and desire life in seven U.N. camps in southeastern Nepal -- their home for the past 17 years. They were excited as well as stunt to see the life and development of US because finally they have bright path and hopes with full of light in front of them and they are ready to explore all the possibilities in the land of opportunity.

AS a result they are ready to explore all the possibilities for their families and whole community members with the benefits they can take from the country. They are initiated to work closely with government and Non Profit organizations to provide all the facilities they are likely to get under the refugee resettlement program.

On November 14th the center is teamed up to fight with cold and flu in International Boulevard, Oakland to provide flu vaccination with the slogan lets fight flu together. They are teamed up to help keep communities healthy, children and teachers in school, and parents at work this influenza season. The program was sponsored by Dept. of Health Alameda Country and jointly helped by sahayeta.org and Street level Health Project. Medical Director Dr. William Walling and Kathy Ahoy, Public Health Nurse of Alameda County, co-founded this thriving health service to the homeless, the uninsured and low income population of Oakland in 2000. She came to the USA as a refugee/immigrant from India and speaks Nepali, Hindi and some Chinese. Born in Kalimpong a popular hill station of North Bengal, India, Beside them there were Ashish Hada President of Sahayeta.org and his friends who support to happen this program in Oakland among the Bhutanese Nepali Community.

The Program was started sharp at ten in the morning and continued till 1:30 Pm and more than hundred and thirty immigrant got their flu shot. Ratna Gurung,Lila, Pushpa Rai, Bed Timsina were quite excited to get their shot as they were in the front line. And Dr. Walling was asking them in Nepali language if they are allergic to Eggs. He is fluent in Nepali and actively encouraging all of them to get their shot. The flu shot was followed by formal program organized by BACC and light refreshment was served to all the community members.

Many people think influenza, or "the flu," is just a bad cold. However, it can be a serious condition that can lead to hospitalization or even death. It is said that "Each year, on average in the United States, more than 200,000 people are hospitalized, and approximately 36,000 people die from influenza and its complications. Further, each year, students miss an average of about 38 million school days due to influenza, and parents miss more than 10 million work days caring for these sick youngsters." www.flusource.com.

Said Ananata Gurung announced in his welcome and introduction speech that BCCA is committed to helping keep children, parents, and community members healthy this influenza seasons and always ready to help new comers to resettle here in bay area.". He added "we are trying our best to keep our community well informed and educate them to cope with the new environment and life style of this country and that´s why we are here". On site one of the social worked added. "Today we are expecting to vaccinate at least two hundred people" and the lines of folks show that they are saying the truth. The program is sponsored by Alameda County Public Health Department and hosted by BACC.

Expelled Bhutanese turn to Mao – and guns


By Don Duncan

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.
While the fourth king was abdicating in Bhutan, a 10-year-civil war between state security forces and Maoist insurgents was coming to an end in Nepal. The success of the Nepalese Maoist insurgency inspired the refugees in these camps, some of whom began to organise into radical militant groups in the past eight years. The refugees say they receive no material support from the Maoists, but their ideological affinity is evident in the groups’ names: the Communist Party of Bhutan, the Tiger Forces, the United Revolutionary Front of Bhutan and the United Refugee Liberation Army. Peopled by young men and women recruited from the camps, these groups are intent on winning a return to Bhutan – by the gun if necessary.

“We are preparing a protracted people’s war,” said a 27-year-old leader of the Communist Party of Bhutan who goes by the nom de guerre of Comrade Umesh. He was nine years old when his family was forced out of southern Bhutan and although he has spent most of his life in exile in these camps, he said his memory of Bhutan is crystal clear and is fuelling his drive to fight back.

“Like every Maoist struggle in the world, we use home-made weapons, explosives for ambushes. After a certain point, we will progress to a hi-tech war,” he said.
For now, their poverty-stricken militancy is made up of second-hand pistols, knives and homemade explosives complimented by a hodgepodge of Marxist, Leninist and Maoist ideology. Moving to “high tech” means the acquisition and training in automatic rifles, machine guns, powerful explosives and sophisticated detonation devices – as yet beyond the reach of this insurgency.

But Indian intelligence sources say this may soon change. According to the sources, the refugee militant groups have recently established alliances with stronger and more experienced Indian separatist groups in the states of Sikkim and Assam, located between Nepal and Bhutan. Groups such as the National Democratic Front of Bodoland and the United Liberation Front of Asom have been active since the early 1980s and are far stronger and militarily more advanced than the refugee insurgent groups.

“Through these alliances, the Bhutanese refugee militants can learn how to make more powerful bombs, how to acquire superior weaponry and how to fight more effectively,” said an Indian intelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorised to discuss intelligence with the media. The source monitors this restive corner of India, reporting back to New Delhi. “This is something Bhutan needs to be worried about,” he said.
But even in their current low-tech mode, these militants have managed to have an effect inside Bhutan. Comrade Umesh and his cadres frequently cross into Bhutan through the thick jungles that straddle its porous border with India. The militants rendezvous in the jungle, their backpacks laden with explosives, knives, guns and communist literature. Frequent reports in the pages of Bhutan’s newspapers detail the arrests of militants and the foiling of their campaigns offer a partial glimpse into this world of the guerrilla operations. Last February, an entire training camp established by the militants was uncovered by the Royal Bhutan Army in the jungles of southern Bhutan, according to the country’s national newspaper, Kuensel. The camp housed 20 militants, of whom 14 escaped and six were arrested with a pistol, four rifles, four grenades and knives, the newspaper reported.

“If all we had to show were our weapons, we wouldn’t get very far,” Comrade Umesh said. “So we also run classes in Bhutan: we have lectures, teach our ideology and train cadres in explosives making and in guerrilla fighting. We are laying the ground work in Bhutan both ideologically and militarily.”

“I think compared to any other groups in exile, these Maoist groups seem to have greater influence inside Bhutan,” said Sukbahadur B Subba, chairman of the Human Rights Organisation of Bhutan, which works closely with the refugees in eastern Nepal.

Bill Frelick, refugee policy director of Human Rights Watch in New York, said the insurgents have not yet reached a critical mass to realistically launch a revolution in Bhutan. But in addition to alliances with powerful terrorist groups in India, there are other factors that might aid the growth of this embryonic resistance.

In late 2006, the United States and a handful of other western countries offered to resettle more than 70,000 of the 105,000 refugees. Already, 7,000 have left and the remainder will be gone within four years, said the UN High Commission on Refugees.
While resettlement will reduce the refugee population to 40 per cent of what it is now, these developments could possibly aid the insurgents, Mr Frelick said. “You could end up with all the more moderate people leaving the camps and you might have a much more militant cadre of people left. The moderating influence would not be there.”

Also, remittances have started to come in from the new, developing diaspora of resettled refugees. As resettlement develops, this cash flow will continue to grow, expanding the insurgents’ funding pool in the camps.

Domestically, Bhutan’s Achilles heel is the population of ethnic Nepalese who remain in the country, estimated to number up to 100,000. Comrade Umesh and the insurgents believe their foothold in Bhutan is through this disgruntled community, many of whom resent the government for past atrocities and still face curtailed rights, including denied citizenship, restrictions on movement and lack of access to state services.

“All these groups need is 200, maybe only 100 people with guns inside Bhutan to make a real impact,” said the Indian intelligence source. Already the disruption waged by the insurgents is significant: more than a dozen bombs exploded in southern Bhutan and in the capital over the past year.

“This is something we are concerned about,” said Ugyen Tshering, Bhutan’s foreign minister, whose party’s office was next to the site of a bomb that detonated in Thimphu in Jan 2008. He remembers a window in the office shattering. “It was of sufficient power to have caused casualties; luckily it didn’t,” he said.

Despite this threat, Bhutan has been reducing the size of its army, from more than 9,000 troops to fewer than 8,000 in the past two years. From now on, Bhutan’s leadership has said, its new weapon of choice is democracy.

“The best way a country like Bhutan can defend itself and prevent security problems has to be through the people,” said Jigme Y Thinley, the prime minister. “Bhutan cannot grow, cannot enjoy harmony, until every citizen believes and enjoys equity and equality.”

Perhaps with that in mind, the government has begun addressing social deficiencies in state services in the predominantly ethnic Nepalese regions of Bhutan. For example, half of the 30 schools closed down in these areas since the upheavals of the early 1990s are scheduled to reopen by the end of the year.

“By the end of five years, there will be absolute parity in terms of the provision of services and infrastructure,” Mr Thinley said. “This is how we can prevent conditions for discontent and disaffection from growing in our country.”

For now, the discord continues to come into Bhutan in the backpacks of Comrade Umesh and his cadres. According to Kuensel, Comrade Umesh’s militant group, the Communist Party of Bhutan, was responsible for the most recent attack on Bhutanese soil – an explosion and ambush that killed four forest guards in southern Bhutan on Dec 30.

“The ethnic Nepalese in Bhutan are still not fully aware politically,” Comrade Umesh said early last month. “But we are working on that. It takes time to make people aware of the suppression they live under, but once they become aware they will be willing to join the fight.”

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Point of no return


Going west rather than home

“I HOPED the king might ask us to come back. But it’s been 19 years and we still haven’t been called back,” Vidhyapati Luitel laments. Toothless and wheezing, the 79-year-old solemnly holds up his Bhutanese citizenship card. He and his family also have title deeds for land they owned in Gelephu in southern Bhutan, where his father migrated in 1919.

Now, though, home is a small bamboo hut in Goldhap, one of seven camps where over 100,000 Nepali-speakers have been living since—they say—fleeing or being ejected from Bhutan after 1990. There had just been big demonstrations, and some violent acts of terror, by members of the ethnic-Nepali minority. This followed new laws which deprived many of them of citizenship, strictly imposed the national Tibetan-related culture and ended the teaching of Nepali in schools.

Mr Luitel says soldiers started knocking on doors at midnight and asking who had demonstrated. He says that he had not, but it made no difference. “They took some young and old people to the river bank,” he says. “They made us get down and beat us hard with a stick. Later they told us to leave the country and go to Nepal.” Others say they were imprisoned, tortured and only released on condition that they sign documents promising to leave Bhutan.

Such accounts are dismissed by the government in the Bhutanese capital, Thimphu, a pleasant town of clean streets and bracing mountain air. A minister, Yeshey Zimba, says the allegations of violence are untruthful propaganda. “That is not in the nature of the government nor the people of Bhutan to do such things.” Indeed, the then king did on several occasions ask ethnic Nepalis not to leave. But most testimony says officials and soldiers ignored this. The government maintains, though, that most of those who left were illegal immigrants. Mr Zimba says many Nepali-speakers entered the tiny country, then “felt comfortable” and so stayed. “But they are not Bhutanese.” Many Nepali-speakers remain among the population; some are government ministers.

Bhutan admits that some of those who left are its citizens but says the number is small. That assertion seems doubtful in the camps, where elderly people abound and the idea of Bhutan as home seems deep-held. But two recent developments appear to be dimming the refugees’ hope of returning. One is the growth of new far-left militant groups in the camps. Festering in Khudanabari camp, one young man says that northern Bhutanese have been resettled on land abandoned by those who fled. He praises a bombing campaign launched to overthrow the Bhutanese government. The emergence of such militancy has caused alarm in Bhutan.

Moreover, in the past year refugees have started leaving the camps to live in the West, a process instigated by America. Helped by the International Organisation for Migration, over 6,000 have left, and more are on their way. They know they will probably never see Bhutan again. At the airstrip nearest to the camps, two busloads arrive for a flight. Many, especially the elderly, look apprehensive. In Goldhap camp, Mr Luitel’s wife says she is too old to move to America but has few illusions about returning to her birthplace. “There might be a new king in Bhutan but I guess they will not take us back,” she says.

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Situation of resettled folks in New Hampshire

Source: APFANEWS

New Hampshire (USA), January 13: Doug Hall, an American volunteer who has been helping some of the Bhutanese as they settle into their new homes in New Hampshire, told Bhutan News Service that adults who have no English speaking skills are mostly finding difficult to get a job.

"The first Bhutanese refugees to arrive here came in April 2008. Many of the adults in the families that arrived in April, May, June, and July were able to find jobs in only a few weeks or months", told Hall.

He said that the resettled families that have arrived since July are having a more difficult time finding jobs.

"Economy in the USA is in a recession and many Americans have lost their jobs in the past six months," said Hall adding, "This means that the refugees face more competition for fewer jobs than they did only six months ago."

According to Hall it is not impossible for a 'refugee' to get a job. But it is much more difficult now.

Hall has even observed that refugee adults who do not speak or understand English will have a much harder time getting a job than those who have good English.

He said that those who have prior work experience, for example as a teacher, a shopkeeper, a social worker, a news reporter, will be able to get a job more quickly.

"There are some cities in the US where the refugees may find it easier to get jobs than other cities. But, everywhere in the US it is more difficult now than it was six months ago."

Last month, Jon Greenberg from here reported to National Public Radio that majority of the Bhutanese in New Hampshire were jobless. Bhutan News Service

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Over 60,000 Bhutanese refugees want to resettle - U.N.

Source: Reuters

KATHMANDU, Jan 7 (Reuters) - More than half the Bhutanese refugees living in camps in Nepal for over 18 years want to resettle in Western countries under a scheme started last year, the United Nations refugee agency said on Wednesday.

More than 103,000 people of ethnic Nepali origin in southern Bhutan fled or were forced to leave in the 1990s after demanding greater rights and representation.

Bhutan says most of the refugees were illegal immigrants and left voluntarily.

Several Western countries, including the United States began resettling them last year after many rounds of ministerial meetings between the two South Asian nations failed to repatriate the refugees.

The U.N. said more than 8,000 refugees had already been resettled in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, the Netherlands and Denmark so far.

Another 18,000 were expected to find new homes this year, it said.

"We are pleased to see so many refugees starting their lives afresh after living in difficult conditions in the camps... and to learn that those resettled are adapting well in their new country," Daisy Dell, UNHCR representative in Nepal, said in a statement.

Since the programme started last year more than 60,000 refugees have expressed their interest to find new homes in the West, a U.N. statement said.

The U.N. also advocates voluntary repatriation to Bhutan for those refugees who wish to do so.

The Western offer for resettlement has left the refugees split with some wanting to go back to Bhutan while others want to look for better education and job opportunities in the West. (Reporting by Gopal Sharma; Editing by Bappa Majumdar)

Sunday, January 4, 2009

Internationalize Bhutanese refugee issue’

Source: SANA

KATHMANDU - Former foreign minister Dr Prakash Sharan Mahat, on Thursday, said the Bhutanese refugee problem would be solved if India took interest in resolving the decade-and-a-half old festering refugee problem.

“India says Bhutanese refugee issue is a bilateral one between Nepal and Bhutan,” Dr Mahat said. “India is apathetic to the refugee issue, since it has its own interests in Bhutan’s autocratic regime.” If India takes interest, the problem could be be solved, he added.

Mahat suggested it was high time the Nepali government moved ahead to internationalize the issue.
Bhutanese refugee leader Tek Nath Rizal, also said that the problem cannot be solved bilaterally.

He claimed that the Bhutanese government’s attempt to put up a new constitution for approval through referendum is nothing but a ploy to hoodwink the international community. “The referendum doesn’t hold any meaning, as half of the people in Bhutan are still illiterate.”