For seventeen years Bhutan has ignored the plea by the southerners to peacefully solve their problem. Each time they attempted to return home, Bhutan unnecessarily blamed them as anti-nationals and terrorists. Now, that the movement has turned real violent, the RGOB has its wishes fulfilled. The real question is, whether the Maoists will stop their actions at Phibsoo or will it expand elsewhere.

Bhutan may drive home some sympathy from outsiders, but this is an internal affair that it has to tackle on its own. Bhutan could be dragged into a long drawn struggle with the Maoists. At the end, none of the parties will win anything. But Bhutan as a country will surely lose. A solution could always be worked outwithout waiting to see the worst. And for that, the RGOB has the onus to lead the Maoists into peace and reconciliation.

And yes, no one but the refugees themselves are the living proofs of the ethnic cleansing. When they can do that with their own life stories, what more is required?

They therefore turned a humananitarian matter into a political problem for Bhutan. So before we start talking about the humanitarian issues I think it is important for the UNHCR to either withdraw their baseless claims or defend them. So far their only defense has been the claims of the refugees themselves. And that’s hardly a neutral source of factual information.

It is important to hold Bhutan responsible and accountable for violating the rights of its citizens who came from different ethnic and cultural stock. The real stake holder is the governemnt of Bhutan and the real place for rebuildng hope is Bhutan. It is where the ramp meets the road.

The bottom line – forced expulsion of the nepali speaking southerners is a carefully planned state strategy to depopulate and minimize the southern population to 25% of the total population. The Bhutanese regime hopes to fan away potential troubles from the southerners by keeping their population under control. Maintaining a demography in which the northerners have an upperhand is uppermost in the regime’s plans. Bhutan’s statistics shows that its population was 1.2 million in 1971 when it joined the UN. Now it is a little over 600,000. Where did half of the popualtion go? It may be approprite to reflect here that some papers reported the southern Bhutanese constituting almost 50% of the Bhutan’s total population. Guess the links!

There are, as always, a spate of articles, written by half-baked journalist based in Nepal, who did not even have the professional ethic to get their facts right in the first place. A good many of them are blatantly aimed at creating discords of all hues and to misinform the general mass. A number of reports are pock-marked with factual errors and may be this has led to not many people in the international arena taking any note of the issue any more.

Bhutan, as a nation, is in a far more stable and better position than it ever was. And there is a renewed sense of national fervour. In spite of all the ill-efforts being put into, we are becoming more convinced in our conviction that this issues, which was brought about on the so-called helpless refugees by the politically and radical-charged actions of their brethren in the early 1990s, will linger on with no possible and immediate respite.

The first settlement of nepalese in bhutan wasn’t in the 19th century, it was from the early 1900s. There were more and continuous flow of settlements after the development plans began in 1961. The source of the illegals was from this wave.

The refugees weren’t legal citizens that were ‘driven out’ because they refused to wear the gho and kira. Why would they be wearing the gho and kira in the refugee camps then? And teaching Dzongkha in those schools? Something is clearly not right with this picture.

The so-called refugee crisis in southern bhutan is a problem created by politically-minded activists of nepali origin, like the problems they created in Darjeeling, Sikkim, Kalimpong and North Bengal. In Assam and Meghalaya, they were brutally chased out by the locals before their numbers became large enough to pose a real threat.

“approximately 103,000.” These figures are ludicrous, and seem to change with ever fervid and illogical attack by the Nepalese media. Bhutan sticks by the facts that there were only 4000 ethnic Nepalese who left, half of whom were forced by the other half which were dissidents in a immature “if we can’t stay, then why should you.” impulse.

the rest were all poor Nepalese from surrounding areas who wanted the free aid that was being given to the 400 refugees. Poor screening meant that in less than one year the numbers ballooned to 100,000. Bhutan does not have the manpower to expel a seventh of their population!

These claims are grounded in irrationality.