During the nearly two decades they stayed in UN-overseen camps in southeastern Nepal, Bhutanese exiles and their community leaders regularly pushed for international support and solidarity, in an attempt to strengthen their call for the establishment of inclusive democracy and human rights in their homeland. Since full-scale third-country resettlement began in November 2007, this support has begun to materialise in unexpected ways, and already indicates a newfound strength within the new Bhutanese diaspora of the West. Opponents of the resettlement programme had regularly argued that accepting such an offer would weaken their struggle for democracy – tensions that, in the beginning, even led toattacks on refugee leaders and laypersons who vocally supported the resettlement option. Yet already, these concerns are being proven unfounded.
Despite early misgivings, by now the majority of refugees – currently around 85,000 among a total of 108,000 – have declared their interest to leave the camps and attempt to set up new lives in the West. Resettlement countries include the US, which has agreed to take in the majority of those who want to leave, as well as Australia, Canada, Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark and New Zealand, and potentially the UK. Within a year of the start of that process, the new diaspora's growing presence began to be felt. In December 2009, a group of Europe-based Bhutanese exiles demonstrated in Geneva against the Thimphu government's delegation tasked with presenting an official report before the UN'S Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of human rights. Significantly, demonstrators were even allowed access to the meeting hall, requiring the Bhutanese delegation to present their report in the presence of members of the refugee community. The delegation was later forced to accept various recommendations put forth by the representatives of other member states on behalf of the exiled Bhutanese, including that Thimphu commit itself to resuming talks with Kathmandu regarding repatriation, and improve the human-rights situation in the country, among others.
Together, these turns of events were taken by exiles and activists as a triumph. Except for a few previous instances, due to their political status refugees had not been able to protest what they saw as Thimphu's deceit regarding its process of democratisation. Most of the refugees belong to the Lhotshampa, the southern, Nepali-speaking Bhutanese community that has for decades been marginalised or actively persecuted by the Bhutanese state. Following a forced mass exodus in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the refugees found few outlets in which to air their complaints while in exile in Nepal. However, the Kathmandu platform had its limits, as became clear in retrospect.
Durga Giri, the chief coordinator of the Bhutan Advocacy Forum Europe, which organised the Geneva protests, says the resettlement offer has already turned out to be a blessing in disguise for the pro-democracy movement. "Testimonies of human-rights violations in Bhutan are no longer confined to bamboo refugee huts in Nepal," Giri said recently. "In fact, the perspective offered by settling into new countries has given us leverage to re-organise the movement for human rights and inclusive democracy."