Bhutan - Not all rainbows and butterflies

Bhutan is an interesting country, full of contradictions:

• It is landlocked, sandwiched between India and China but has decided to extend trade and military relations only with India due primarily to China's annexing of Tibet. In fact, Bhutan does not even have formal diplomatic relations with China. India, on the other hand, has military bases in Bhutan. 
• As a primarily Buddhist nation, it does not have any meat production or slaughter facilities but it imports all meat from India. 
• It transitioned from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy in 2008. (There are only 6 absolute monarchies left in the world including, oddly, The Vatican.) 
• The fourth King has four wives! The fifth king and all those after can only have one though.
• The fourth King abdicated his throne in his fifties to give power to his 30 year old son. It is now written into the constitution that the King must abdicate at 60. (I asked if it was possible for the line of succession to go to a woman and was told yes but haven't had confirmation.)
• Television and internet are new to Bhutan as well: in 1999 the ban was lifted. 
• It measures its success as a nation in terms of happiness. 
• Bhutan was the first country to ban the sale of tobacco. (Can that be true Wikipedia? Most of my Bhutanese friends smoke!) 

And the monks migrate! Early in the morning all the roads were closed so that the monks could safely walk from their summer home in Thimpu to their winter home in Punakha. This had been announced on the radio as well as the restrictions that would be in place for the King's birthday celebration; the government would shut off all cellular and wifi service for the morning and no cameras would be allowed. Although this was a special occasion some other standard practices seemed overkill; for example the security protocols in the airport were more stringent than some countries that are actually targets for terrorism.

So while our trip focused on the natural beauty of Bhutan, the love and admiration felt for the Kings, and the deep traditionalism of the country, I would be remiss if I didn't at least mention the dark side of Bhutan. As a small, landlocked nation surrounded by two of the largest Asian powers Bhutan has, in fact, held itself together with this very emphasis on tradition. For example, every house in Bhutan must be traditionally built and the national costume is compulsory at school and in government buildings. That is to say the national costume of ethnic Bhutanese - not the thousands of ethnic Nepalis or Tibetans living in the country.

My first interaction with Bhutan as an entity was with the thousands of Bhutanese refugees living in Vermont. That's right, Vermont. In the 1800s, Nepalis were welcomed to Bhutan as farm laborers. They settled there long-term and were given citizenship. When a census was conducted in the late 1980s, tens of thousands of Nepali speakers (in fact about 30% of the population) were "discovered" to be living in the southern part of the country, they were de-naturalized because they couldn't produce land ownership documentation prior to 1958, event though they had lived there for generations. For those who remained, they found themselves to be further disenfranchised and ostracized as they were forced to wear traditional Bhutanese costume and elementary instruction in Nepali was discontinued. Finally, in the early 1990s, the government forced approximately 90,000 Nepali-speaking persons, now classified as illegal immigrants, to leave the country.

Lest we think this is ancient history, the US State Department reports that as of this September, "approximately 34,000 Nepali-speaking Bhutanese refugees remained in two refugee camps in Nepal administered by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)." There are still ethnic-Nepalis living in Bhutan but they are often classified as stateless which means that due to heavy tourism restrictions in the country, they can't travel within Bhutan without permits. Tibetans too face institutionalized barriers to participating in government and becoming citizens.

Also, in an effort to preserve the spiritual heritage of Bhutan, The Religious Organizations Act of 2007 prohibited religious proselytizing and the construction of non-Buddhist centers of worship without backing from a registered religious groups. While I am not a fan of missionaries, these restrictions present larger issues; registration requires Bhutanese citizenship which has translated into a complete lack of new public worship facilities for the Hindu yet stateless ethnic Nepalis and the Indian road crews who have recently arrived.

I'm not saying that Bhutan is a terrible repressive place or that it doesn't have fantastic environmental commitments and policies (which  I'll try to write about later), In fact, I encourage you to read about the United States' own human rights issues. I just thought it was necessary to talk about this. Papa Lee actually mentioned on our trip that given the bad things that he had heard about Bhutan on this issue, he would concentrate his trip on seeing the rainbows and butterflies. And for the rest of my posts I will too. And there are plenty.