The Sorry Saga of Bhutan's North
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Wednesday, December 24, 2008
CORONATION MOVIE
CORONATION OF JIGME KESAR NAMGYAL WANGCHUCK AS THE 5TH KING OF BHUTAN
Coronation and Expectations: a Story From Bhutan
By Govinda Rizal (Kyoto University)
Let November 6 come and the world's media will be focused on Bhutan where the crown Prince Jigme Keshar Namgyal Wangchuk will put on the raven crown and replace his father on the golden throne.
The grand coronation and the felicitations to the new monarch will take place in the presence of hundreds of thousands of Bhutanese citizens and hundreds of invited VIP guests from abroad. The coronation of the fifth Druk Gyalpo (king of Bhutan) has other important implications too. The occasion coincides with the completion of a hundred years of rule by the monarchs from the Wangchuck dynasty.
Around the 1900s, Sir Ugyen Wangchuck, a feudal lord of central Bhutan was instrumental in mobilizing British support on his favor, through his skill of interpretation and mediation between the British (then in India) and the Tibetans to rise above his contemporary neighboring feudal lords.
He established an institution of monarchy conglomerating numerous feudal states and principalities through tacit understandings and military power. He was crowned on December 17, 1907 as the first monarch.
The dual festivity of the coronation and the centennial of monarchy will extend for around two months.
On the occasion, the new king is to be conferred with several titles: the Druk Gyalpo, the youngest monarch in the present world, the First monarch for the newest democracy in the world; numerous epaulettes, honors and medals. In return, he will vow to serve the people and possibly bring out a fresh motto for his reign to prove he has his vision un-succumbed to and above his father's populist philosophy of Gross National Happiness.
The new king has innumerable challenges to face, to establish his valor at par to his predecessors. He is warming up the golden throne at a time when the nation itself is traveling an unknown journey with a new system where the king, the government and the national institutions are held together by a constitution for the first time. Earlier kings had the freedom to use their logic and might. Unlike his father and grand fathers, the new king will sit and watch the members in the parliament elected by the people rule the country. The most bitter moment will be when they make rules and restrictions to chain him to a constitutional statuette. The citizens have immense respect and expectation from the monarchy and he has limitations to give back. The century of monarchial system has made the people believe that the king, country and state sovereignty go together as one.
He is expected to grant amnesty, if not to all, to a significant number of prisoners. Ironically, to magnify the statistics, many prisoners whose terms had expired as early as 2005 are being detained for the release on the auspicious occasion of the coronation. For mysterious reasons their release was not done when the country shifted from autocratic to constitutional monarchy.
The worst enemy to fight is on the economic front. The economic divide between the rich and poor is widening and extremism is growing. The precincts to topographic disadvantages have been a major hindrance to equitable and holistic development. He has, on one hand, to continue several tacit relationships established during his father's era with the mighty northern dragon and whimsical southern elephant; on the other hand, he must ensure that the country passes to his descendants as smoothly as it has reached into his hand.
Looking back to match previous monarchs' position numerically to their contribution to the nation; the monarchs in odd number turn are better remembered by historians and legendaries than the monarchs in even number turn. To keep up with this precedence, the fifth must do many great things. He has to complete and correct several misdeeds of his father's reign and make new success stories for himself.
In 1990, the former king channeled the military to brutally run over a mass protest that made one sixth of the population flee the country and seek refuge elsewhere. He proclaimed to solve the problem within three years (deadline set to 1993) or else abdicate from the throne. He was unable to solve the problem even after 15 years. He failed in his part but kept the promise and abdicated from the golden throne premature to his age, in favor of his son, the new king.
The new king is hardly exposed to the realities outside the palace wall and school fence. He must have been convinced by what he had learned from the immediate people most of whom were the members shielding the former king. Even if he can assume to be ignorant of the refugees from his country, he will face serious questions in international arenas. To repatriate the people and make a harmonious whole by joining the factions divided long before, will be a test of his ability. The option remains that either he chooses to solve it or follow his father's way to abdication.
The Year 1993 was the worst year for the former king. The country's monetary reserves were almost gone. Most of the money was spent to pay people who left the country, to sponsor the evictors and to maintain a large army and militia. A request to India for supplementary funds met with a bargain, a flush out of United Liberation front of Asom (ULFA) fugitives from their hideouts in Bhutan, in return.
The rout was completed at the cost of the king meeting an accident on the way and one of the princes injured during the operation. Keeping such stories under pleasant smiles, the new king has to maintain cordial relationship with the present government in India as well as with several groups fighting against their governments in the neighborhood. More than the mutual relation with the center government in New Delhi, the new king must institute intimacy with Gangtok, Calcutta, Gauhati and Itanagar and possibly Darjeeling too, if the people win a separate state, for which they are struggling.
The former king who ascended the throne as a teenager could never come out of the cordon of his ministers, most of whom were relatives, family members and others, to exhibit his real potential and exert his influence. Often, he was a puppet of his ministers and an implementer of their sinister designs. For 26 years he was confined to a mere implicit ceremonial throne. For the first time in 1998, he shuffled his earlier cabinet and made his own choice to form a new one. The most fortunate part for the young monarch is the presence of his wise and weathered father. With long and bitter experiences, he is be the best aid and a guiding deity to the young monarch.
When the two giant neighbors with growing economies and nuclear strength go competitive; when the people continue to expect more and more, everything that was not achieved in the past hundred or more years; the young monarch will need the wisdom learned from Luntenzampa, Darjeeling, London and Paro, and his inborn potential; to politically save Bhutan, diplomatically prevent incursion; to lead the nation to a self sufficient Shangri-La; to guide the people for a meaningful living; to establish and maintain peace, prosperity and harmonious coexistence of the living and the non living entities of the Earth.
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BHUTAN: JOURNEYS INTO THE VOID: NGA
(Source: in National Geographic Adventure)
Above all else, you must believe.
Tibetan horns taunted the air—ululating, oboe-like sounds meant to catch the sins of the crowd and send them heavenward. The people around me gaped at the giant spread of embroidered silk as it slowly lowered from the fortress roof, revealing a montage of Tibetan Buddhist deities. Avalokitesvara, the Buddha of Infinite Compassion. Maitreya, the Future Buddha, a Jesus-like savior prophesied to lead humanity from suffering. The tondrel, easily 40 feet high, laboriously hand-stitched, filled the entire end of the courtyard, its silk gleaming before the candlelit dais.
There was the sacred moment never to be repeated. In that single hour on that single day of that single year, a miracle was supposed to occur. The Bhutanese monks were calling on the most compassionate gods of the universe to take away our anguishes, our regrets and sins, and to purify us. Now, when we died, the Lord of Death’s judgment would be kinder. The next lifetime, easier. But only if we believed.
The feeble candlelight barely held back the night. I stood closer to the tondrel, the horns shrilling more earnestly.
I thought of why I’d come to Bhutan—the real reason, the reason I’d told no one about. I tried to clear my mind of all doubt and, like the rest of the crowd, made a wish. We waited. And watched. As the rising sun sent its first rays over the mountains, striking the top of the tondrel, the sounds of the horns stopped abruptly, almost belligerently.
“Examine carefully whatever terrifies you,” came a line to me from The Tibetan Book of the Dead, one of Buddhism’s most sacred texts, “and see the voidness.”
In the silence and heady stillness, the dawn calmly asserted itself. The sacred moment had passed.
*
I wandered through the dark streets of Bhutan’s capital, Thimphu. It was the middle of the night and I was lost, but it was of no consequence. I had thousands of dollars cash in my bag, but didn’t worry about being robbed. Bhutan is a blessed place. A country the size of Switzerland, with a population of only about 650,000, its people have such a strong belief in karma that robbery is virtually unthinkable. Imagine the consequences of such an act! Imagine the suffering that will inevitably return!
It was strange to encounter safety abroad. I’d spent most of my adult life experiencing the world’s most inhospitable places—malarial jungles, totalitarian societies, war zones. Places where you’re wise to carry a knife, to leave behind a will. But in charmed Bhutan at three in the morning, people just nodded warmly at me, the town drunks left me alone, and the only graffiti I saw were some hastily scrawled smiley faces.
I’d flown across the world to this modern day Shangri La to attempt what is widely considered one of the hardest treks in the world: the Snowman Trek. It lasts some 24 days, and only a few hundred foreigners have ever successfully completed it. Unlike most of the popular Himalayan treks, such as Nepal’s Annapurna Circuit, there isn’t just one high pass to get over—but eleven. You ascend several thousand feet, descend, ascend. Again. And again. Eleven times. Most of the passes are over 16,000 feet, with the highest at 17,600 feet. Then there is the weather, which is notoriously unpredictable and has led to a Snowman failure rate of nearly 50%. The location of the trek—following the spine of the Himalayas between Bhutan and Tibet—is among the most remote and inaccessible country in the world, easily trapping a person between high peaks, making emergency evacuation by Indian army choppers not only difficult but exorbitantly expensive. And then there are the personal risks—like getting dysentery between high passes, twisting an ankle, breaking a leg, succumbing to altitude sickness. There are so many concerns that it’s no surprise so few people ever attempt the trek, and so many fewer ever finish it.
I’d found that the dangerous, difficult trips asked certain questions that none others do. If there’s a higher chance of returning home sick, maimed—even killed—then the journey forces an examination of what matters in life. Specifically: Why such a trip? To what end?
I asked those questions a lot after my brother Marc died in Africa. It was as if I were trying to know the answer to everything. As if I were trying—however futilely—to control my own fate. In a way, my brother’s death was why I came to Bhutan. Two years earlier, Marc had disappeared in Africa, near Angola, in one of the most desolate places on earth. I’d flown halfway around the world to try to save him, only to bring back his body instead. But they say there are no coincidences: on the very day after I’d returned to the States with his ashes, my left leg strangely, unaccountably, froze up, and I couldn’t walk without tremendous pain. There were no medical explanations. Doctors could only offer theories: nerve problems, muscle damage, early arthritis. But nothing showed up on any tests. And no solutions helped. Normally very athletic, I had to completely stop most physical activity. If I traveled anywhere now, I went mostly by vehicle or rode on horseback. While I never accepted the pain, I learned to adjust to it, to hide it from people, to deal with it, convinced all the while that the cause—and thus the cure—lay, somehow, with my brother’s death. Perhaps I was trying to stop myself from going out into the world? Perhaps I just didn’t trust life anymore.
I saw a counselor, did prodigious grief work, but my leg pain didn’t improve. Then I decided I was going to do something that would seem patently insane: I was going to face the pain—and its mysterious cause—head on; God willing, I would beat it. I began looking for a trek. One of the hardest in the world, but in a country I knew I could love. And then I found out about the Snowman.
*
Our group stood in the rain, gazing at the modest mud track that would mark the start of our trek. But the Snowman is no mere recreational hiking route established for tourists; rather, for millennia, it has been the Himalayas’ main north-south highway over the mountains. Steeped in history, in the 17th century it brought down the Mongol hordes and their Tibetan allies, looking to sack the burgeoning kingdom of Bhutan. And so the fortress of Drugyel Dzong was built on the hilltop just above us. In 1648, on the very spot where our horsemen were loading our gear onto mules, Bhutanese warriors led the invaders through a false gate into the fortress and mass-slaughtered them—saving Bhutan the horrors of a Mongol victory.
These days, visits to Bhutan are notoriously restricted, the government forbidding independent travel and requiring all foreigners to book trips using a Bhutanese tour company. I was doing my trip through Canadian Himalayan Expeditions, which works in tandem with a Bhutanese partner. CHE’s owner, Joe Pilaar, 46, a wiry Canadian, was one of eight doing the trek with me. In addition, there was Rob, 52, my red-headed Aussie friend of 12 years, an itinerant carpenter and former Papua New Guinean traveling buddy who’d driven his Royal Enfield motorcycle across India and Nepal to join me for the trek. There was also Paul, 52, a Brit who owned his own landscaping company, and “Team America” as Rob called them: Larry, 66, a former army chemical engineer; Tom, 57, a retired social studies teacher, owner of a climbing gym; Pete, 36, a photographer; Kevin, 33, a West Coast real estate agent and aspiring screenplay writer; and Ryan, 30, an oil company engineer.
We were nine of a mere 120 foreigners allowed to attempt the Snowman in 2007. The Bhutanese government follows a strict tourism policy of “high value, low volume,” in which they invite only 6,000 foreigners into their country per year, charging each $200 a day—a fee they’ll be more than doubling in 2009. The exorbitant price not only favors tourists with thick wallets, but also prevents the sort of thrifty, independent backpacking travel seen in places like Kathmandu. Bhutan wants, above all else, to preserve its society, religion, and environment from any potentially harmful foreign influence. Notoriously aloof and insular, the only Himalayan kingdom never occupied or colonized by outside powers, Bhutan first opened its doors to tourists in 1972. Even Western media—TV, the internet—was banned until 1999, and now the government systematically removes any programs deemed damaging to society (goodbye pornography and the World Wrestling Federation).
Bhutan’s king, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, progressively rules his country on the Buddhist principles of compassion and harmony, and is the mastermind of a famously titled political strategy, “Gross Domestic Happiness,” which champions individual and environmental rights over policies of greed and materialism. He enjoys overwhelming approval from the citizenry, his picture proudly displayed in nearly every living room and business across the country. Protecting 60% of Bhutan’s forests by turning them into national parks, King Wangchuck has also banned smoking, mandated that all new construction follow traditional Bhutanese design, and required citizens to wear traditional dress: gho for men (similar to a toga) and kira for women (a kind of hand-woven sarong). In such a way, he’s painstakingly preserved Bhutanese culture for future generations, while keeping it largely unblemished by Western values and corruption. Still, in 2008, he’ll voluntarily relinquish rule, turning his absolute monarchy into a parliamentary democracy—a move that leads many critics to wonder if Bhutan’s unique society can survive such a monumental overhaul.
But for now, Bhutan still offers a rare chance for time-travel. As our group entered the mountains, the Himalayan valleys opened before us with their stone-and-wattle farmhouses and hand-threshed fields, offering medieval-like glimpses of a society barely initiated into the 21st century. We followed the Paro River, gradually ascending through fir forests and meadows of purple wildflowers. For the next few days, our route would double as the Jhomolhari Trek, Bhutan’s most popular among tourists, lasting eight days and giving trekkers a far easier dose of the Himalayas than the Snowman.
As I trudged along, I thought about all the Mahayana Buddhists who’d used the trail over the centuries as a pilgrimage route to Lhasa in Tibet. Lhasa is, to devotees of Tibetan-style Buddhism, what Mecca is to Muslims—not only the holiest site of their religion, but the place which all faithful are supposed to visit at least once in their lives. After the 1959 Chinese invasion of Tibet, the Bhutanese-Tibetan border closed and the Snowman became an escape route for refugees fleeing persecution at the hands of the Chinese. Bhutan, culturally and religiously tied to Tibet, and sympathetic to its plight, maintains no diplomatic relations with China, and has adopted a strict closed-border policy unlikely to change anytime soon. Now, the Snowman’s main function is as a smuggling route, numerous horse and yak trains passing us on the trail, sneaking their wares to and from China.
Our first day of travel was deceptively easy, and we hiked only five hours to a wooded campsite at 9,500 feet. It’d take me some time to get used to the group routine—or, more accurately, to its luxuries. Everyday, someone would set up our tents—often long before we arrived in camp. As the staff busily prepared our dinner, we’d be invited to “tea time” in the mess tent, assorted cookies laid out decoratively on paper doilies like Turkish delights. The staff would wake us with hot drinks, setting bowls of washing water outside our tents. We’d lunch at pre-designated spots along the trail, tables and chairs set up safari-style, heaping courses of food kept warm in giant thermoses, Bhutanese staff on hand to serve them.
I never did overcome my embarrassment of such treatment, though, as the trek started to earn its reputation, the extravagances would have a positive effect on group morale. Still, our Bhutanese staff—who would experience the same grueling days as us—didn’t get much of a chance to rest. Achula, 46, head cook and staff manager, woke each day at the frigid pre-dawn hour of 4:00a.m. to cook and pack our lunches and start breakfast. He told me, not without a degree of resignation, that he’d done the Snowman 11 times already.
“But this is my last time,” he asserted. Still, somehow, I didn’t believe him. He was like a Snowman junkie, knowing it wasn’t good for him but unable to quit. Yet, he must have known our trip would’ve been in chaos if he wasn’t along. He was the one who expertly taught the junior staff about food preparation and serving etiquette, who gave important advice to the assistant guides, who even tried to manage the unruly wranglers.
But horsemen must be the same the world over. The toughened nonchalance. The arrogant swagger which tells you—and accurately so—that you’d be nowhere without them, without their knowledge of the land, their control of the animals, their ability to get your big-town extravagances from place to place. Our men seemed to gaze on our group’s dining tent, on our “tea time” biscuits and brand-name sleeping bags, with barely concealed amusement. Give them a horse or two, and they could live off the land for months, could sleep through the night wrapped in scrappy wool blankets, could eat red rice every day and shit in the woods (no toilet tent for them), could catch whatever they needed to survive. Our biggest use to them seemed to be for entertainment; in our bumbling dependency we only validated the beauty of their own spare, free existences. I have always envied horsemen, and probably always will.
*
At last, we received our Snowman initiation: nine hours of pure uphill trekking in a day, to a final elevation of 11,800 feet. Rob and I might have been reliving our New Guinea bushwhacking days, sloshing mile after mile through deep mud, past slippery boulders, across raging streams. Jungle-like forests of rhododendron trees crowded around us, draped in Spanish moss and dripping from unrelenting rain.
Freezing, utterly exhausted, I arrived in camp seeming to hurt in every conceivable place—surely the result of two years of very limited physical activity. Stripping to a pair of shorts, I submerged myself in the icy waters of a nearby stream, hoping to reduce the sharp jolts of pain in my leg. I tried to imagine the 22 days of the Snowman still ahead of me—and stopped. Better not to think about anything.
Rob found me after I returned to my tent. I didn’t tell him about my leg pain, my private despair, wanting to just bask in his joyfulness. There must be few people in the world like him. Perennially cheerful and optimistic, he greets everyone he meets as if they were dear departed friends. If you ask for an explanation, he’ll admit he’s been given a charmed life. Having never known depression or illness, having never felt alone or unloved, he’s always found the time and means to travel to the farthest corners of the earth. Rob would become the humor and light of our trip in the weeks to come. And my beacon.
“It’s a blokey group,” Rob whispered to me over dinner that night—his way of reminding me that I was the only female, and perhaps explaining why our meal conversations had a way of gravitating to such subjects as women, rugby, and the 155mm Howitzer. (I had already become an unwitting expert on Royal Enfields.)
But Ryan, 30, the youngest member of our group, an oil engineer who grew up in rural Illinois, decided to tell us about his brother who had recently died in an outdoor accident. Ryan knew firsthand, as I did, the anguish of searching desperately for a loved one, and the horror of discovering a body. And how unlikely that we two—complete strangers tossed together on a trek—would have such similar stories. I could only marvel at how little people ever actually know about each other. At how little they’ll ever actually see.
Ryan’s story prompted Paul to tell his own—one so extraordinary, so horrific, that we all sat in abject silence, listening. It’d happened some ten years ago, in the middle of the night. He was on a ferry, The Estonia, when it suddenly started to sink into the Baltic Sea. Everywhere, people were scrambling to escape the ship, to pull themselves into life rafts, to save themselves. And the forty-foot swells, the frigid water. Paul, clutching an overturned life raft, watching the survivors around him slowly defeated by the elements, freezing to death, slipping into the sea. For six unimaginable hours he clung to life, praying for rescue, forcing himself not to close his eyes and succumb to death. And the rescue choppers come at last! But botching the job, dropping some of the survivors—and how few there were, only 120 of 900 passengers—into the waves. People dead all around him. But Paul, saved, and on the Snowman Trek with us. A botany expert, he knew the genus and species of all the plants we saw, knew what we could touch, what we could eat. The quiet Brit with the most extraordinary story we’d ever heard, who never had any interest in being first to camp each day. Who kept stopping to take photos of plants, flowers, leaves. Who would tell us, with unabashed eagerness, to taste the fruit of the trees. The rose hips. The barberries. Who would remind us to notice the world and its gifts.
*
A few days later, I couldn’t see. I woke in the middle of the night from intense pain, my eyes completely sealed with pus and burning so badly that it was as if someone had lit a fire to them. I had to soak them for several minutes just to pry the eyelids apart, praying all the while that I wasn’t going blind.
We’d been camped beneath the snow-covered peak of Jhomolhari Mountain, enjoying a rest day of acclimatization, when the first eye symptoms arose. Swelling. Redness. My face bloated so badly that Rob started calling me “Rocky Balboa.” I’d begun using antibiotic drops—but now my eyes only seemed exponentially worse. I sought out Joe, the trip leader, to get his advice. He mentioned a doctor (conveniently, an orthopedic surgeon) in one of the neighboring trekking camps, and we went in search of him. Dr. Don, a middle-aged American with white hair and beard, took one look at me and knew it was bad.
“Probably started as an allergic reaction to something,” he said with a doctor’s matter-of-fact gravity. “And now it’s turned into quite an eye infection.” I showed him my antibiotic drops, but he told me to stop taking them and handed me some prescription antihistamine pills instead. “If you don’t see some kind of improvement in 24 hours, you’ll have to quit the trek.”
I nodded solemnly.
“Look—it’s not worth going blind,” he added.
His warning stayed with me as our group continued the Snowman later that morning, leaving behind the many hiking groups doing the shorter Jhomolhari Trek. We were on our own now, come what may. No more orthopedic surgeons arriving deus ex machina-style to save my ass with prescription Allegra-D. Freezing rain tore across the rocky steppes as we made our long climb to Nyile La at 16,100 feet. It was our official test pass for altitude sickness: if we all got there without any adverse symptoms, we’d probably be okay for the rest of the trek. Gratefully, everyone did make it without problems, and as we passed a large cairn, strings of prayer flags whipped in the wind, bidding us—along with all sentient beings—happiness and peace. The sun began showing itself at intervals, and all at once the clouds parted to reveal a great expanse of snow-topped peaks. I could only stop and stare. For a few blessed minutes, I forgot everything but the majesty of this world.
Before Buddhism made its way to Bhutan in the 7th century A.D., people practiced their own animistic religion called Bön, in which these mountains were worshipped as gods. The locals believed that their souls came from the Himalayas, and returned to them at death. The mountains’ myriad spirits, or yulha, protected their villages from malign forces, guarding flocks, ensuring rich harvests. These beliefs, still widely held by most Bhutanese, help explain why mountain climbing has been banned. In 1983, after several foreign expeditions attempted to climb 22,000-foot Jichu Drakye, locals complained that the irreverent outsiders had angered the mountain gods, bringing calamity upon their crops in the form of violent hail storms. A village delegation took their complaints to the king, who, perhaps in the interests of Gross Domestic Happiness, decreed an end to all mountain climbing in Bhutan.
After Nyile La, I started to notice that my eyes were getting better, the pain and swelling lessening. For the first time, I found myself dawdling, the beauty of Bhutan confronting me at every turn. Gaping beauty, that only seemed to get more transcendent the farther I went. I’d think I’d seen it all, couldn’t possibly take in any more, only to climb the next hilltop, turn round the next bend, and see something even more spectacular, more dizzying to the senses. My mind wanted to capture it all somehow. So the futile attempts to take pictures, to preserve it, to take it home. But I just ended up cursing my camera. A one dimensional photo could do no justice to the country, couldn’t make any of it last.
Then I saw the tiny fortress, Lingshi dzong, sitting on a hilltop before the great audience of the Himalayas. I stopped. And, for some reason I never quite understood, I sat down and wept. Maybe it had something to do with the starkness of the distances, with the dramatic vying of sunlight and storm. Or perhaps it was subtler, harder to explain. As if, in that ancient dzong—that speck of human proclamation sitting before the indifferent valleys and rise of the Himalayas—it was my own voice calling out into the void. I found myself making an appeal of grief about my brother, who’d had his own history, his stories, and what would happen to them now? Where do they—where do any of our stories—go?
Lingshi dzong—for centuries a way station for weary travelers and Buddhist pilgrims, a defense against Tibetan and Mongol hordes—just sat there fearlessly proclaiming its own story to the vast, empty indifference before us. A rainbow erupted from it, arching over the valley and reaching toward the mountains opposite. Such indescribable beauty. But no way to keep it.
A few days later, near Lingshi dzong, the Snowman would take its first casualty of the year: a 42-year-old American woman, trekking in the group just behind ours, succumbed to altitude sickness. Our guide would later say she shouldn’t have died. Someone should have seen the signs, known how to save her.
*
We finally reached Laya village at 12,500 feet, the halfway point of our trek. Before us lay a series of quaint, terraced fields dotted with stone farmhouses. Nearby, locals threshed barley with long wooden staffs, their whopping echoing across the valley. The women dressed traditionally in black wool kiras and unique bamboo hats decorated with strings of beads and topped with miniature Buddhist prayer staffs. The tiny hats served no functional purpose that I could tell; when I asked one of the women why they wore them, she said simply, “Because they’re precious.”
For the second—and last—rest day of our trek, we camped in someone’s front yard, the high peaks of the Himalayas rising on all sides of the village like great battlements. Our group had endured two weeks of canned mackerel, pickled pork, and rice, so Paul and Pete scrounged the village for any exotic foodstuffs. Soon, they had taken over a farmhouse kitchen to prepare us spaghetti with a ketchup-squash meat sauce and—Paul’s specialty—guava crumble with cream. But by far the most welcomed discovery was some Bhutanese brand Hit Beer and smuggled Pabst Blue Ribbon from China.
Better still, an enterprising woman rented us her wooden tub. One by one we took hot stone baths and did our laundry. Some of the men went in search of the village’s notoriously beautiful postmistress, and came back with news of a town internet service. Laya had acquired a satellite dish, laptop computer, and international dialing business in just a few years—remarkable, considering it saw its first tourists in 1987. So much for the Shangri La experience; I guiltily checked my email like everyone else.
A week ago, I didn’t even know if I’d make it to Laya. And now, with my eye infection cleared up, my bad leg had suddenly developed knee troubles that made walking more painful than ever. Perhaps it was a sign: we were only a week of easy downhill hiking to a road and civilization. If you wanted to quit the Snowman, Laya was the place to do it. Continuing the trek meant entering the Snowman’s roughest, remotest country, where evacuation was only possible by Indian Army chopper—and then, only at great difficulty and expense.
I had a decision to make about how much pain I was willing to endure. Originally, I’d hoped my leg would gradually improve, but now I was soaking it in cold water every day, taking ibuprofen religiously each night, and doing all manner of massage techniques to try to keep it from painfully freezing up on me. My plan had been to confront and beat this mysterious condition, but it was starting to seem like an abysmal failure.
And then I was starting to overhear staff members talking about getting Larry to quit. Sixty-six years old, supposedly without enough warm clothing and making slow ascents to the passes, he was usually last to arrive in camp each day—about an hour or two behind the rest of us. Though his Snowman experience had seemed—as mine did—like sheer masochism at times, I really admired him. Born the same years as my parents, he hadn’t let his age stop him from going out into the world, from taking on the hardest trek in the Himalayas. I knew Larry wasn’t going to quit, regardless of what anyone said. And if he could go on, then so could I.
But the next morning, my knee and hip pain felt even worse. I knew I had a big decision to make—and soon—about whether or not I was going to continue. Though I finally confided in Rob about the situation, and he pledged to support me no matter what, I hiked off alone to decide. I found myself wandering to the local Buddhist temple, a small, unassuming structure of mortared stone sitting at the edge of the village. A chestnut horse studied me from a nearby meadow, Layap children waving and smiling artlessly from their houses. I spun the temple’s succession of prayer wheels, my mind awash with worry and indecision. Hearing a bell ringing from a nearby doorway, I walked over and saw an ancient woman with tangled white hair and cataract eyes sitting on the ground, wearing a burlap sack for a skirt and spinning a gigantic prayer wheel. She stopped what she was doing and stared at me for a long moment, fingering her mala,or rosary, and beckoning to me.
I sat beside her in the cold little chamber, taking out my own mala. For a moment, I didn’t know what to do. From the nearby hills, I could hear the threshing of barley, the laughs of children. The sun alternately shone and fled behind the clouds. The woman set the wheel turning and began to sing. I had no idea what she was singing about. Prayers, maybe. Prayers to the world. To our hopes. Our fears. Our longings for rest or peace. As she kept the wheel going, I recited my own Buddhist mantras. Minutes passed. Hours. Outside, the same chestnut horse stood in the meadow, watching us.
Finally, I stopped. I’d made my decision, and it was getting late. I took out a solid gold Buddha amulet from my bag, the one I’d always carried for good luck on dangerous trips, and I lifted the woman’s hair to tie it around her neck. Her hand kept turning the giant prayer wheel. She wouldn’t stop singing.
*
I was going to continue the trek.
In Laya, we traded our mules and horses for yaks—a sure sign that the trip was going to get rough. Yaks are the horned marvels of the Himalayas. In appearance, they resemble stocky, hairy bulls, but are genetically much more hearty. Stronger than horses, they can carry at least twice the weight, and can survive in sub-zero temperatures that would otherwise kill their equine cousins. Being ruminants, yaks chew and re-chew their cud, precluding the need for feedbags, grain supplies, or frequent grazing pastures. Yaks are just flat-out tougher than horses—and it’s as if they know it. While you might be able to tame and ride a horse, Bhutanese yaks generally don’t put up with such antics. They carried our gear, but at a price: it took as many as four men at once just to restrain an animal for loading, and then we counted ourselves lucky if the gear even arrived at camp in its original state.
Our good weather karma continued as we left the simple pleasures of Laya for some of the steepest trail we’d had yet. I spent the whole time trying to ignore the pain in my leg, forcing my mind away from all thoughts of discomfort. We ascended for eight long hours through forests of rhododendron and fir, finally reaching the campsite of Rodophu near 16,100-foot Tsemo La Pass. During Joe’s last Snowman trip, his group attempted to cross the pass three times, only to finally quit because of blizzards. But for us there wasn’t even a trace of snow, and we climbed through high alpine meadows, easily crossing Tsemo La before lunch. We stayed at our highest campsite yet—frigid 16,200-foot Narethang—and were rewarded with the spectacular backdrop of Gangla Karchung Mountain, our tents covered with ice, the skin on my hands starting to split open from the cold.
Some may think the Snowman’s biggest challenge lies in its many ascents, but reaching the 17,100-foot pass of Karakachu La was nothing compared to its “killer-knee” descent of 4,000 feet. Ibuprofen pills and hiking sticks were a prerequisite, as was tremendous patience. For several hours, our group carefully picked its way down a steep, rocky trail. Gradually, our path became a muddy maze of boulders and tree roots that seemed destined to twist one of our ankles. It was our first introduction to the mysterious Lunana region, one of the world’s most untouched wildernesses full of pure glacial streams, dramatic waterfalls, and mountainsides covered with misty forests.
After hiking through the Lunana’s Tarina River Valley, we ascended to one of the Himalayas’ most isolated villages. If Shangri La is determined by remoteness, then perhaps it can be found in Thanza. A village of around 300 people, it sat at the frigid elevation of 13,700 feet—only 700 feet lower than the highest point in the continental U.S. Our group camped beside the village, near 22,950-foot Table Mountain. We had a surreal moment of first contact, the local people visiting en masse to inspect our gear, wearing their giant, Cossack-like yak wool hats. Before long, clothing was exchanged. Beads and wool hats purchased. As our group feverishly snapped photos, I had visions of the paparazzi at one of those Hollywood red-carpet galas. A local farmer, Bembey, told me he saw his first white person in the early 1980s when he was 15—a sight so terrifying that he’d run for his life. Now he eagerly joined the cultural show-and-tell, looking forward to the spectacle of more Snowman groups.
I looked around the village, itself. Few places exist in the world without some modicum of modernity: stores, running water, roads, telecommunications. In Thanza there was none of that. Though Western clothing had made its way to many of the children, most adults wore clothes they’d made by hand, weaving and dyeing their own material, fashioning their own unique hats, boots, and jewelry. Their homes were built from the offerings of the countryside: stone walls, hand-hewn wood shingles, clay mortar. Subsistence farmers, they survived on their high altitude crops, as well as on the occasional yak meat and cheese.
It seemed a hard life, as evidenced by a man who approached us in our mess tent during the friendly pandemonium outside. He had a mother, he told us, who was gravely ill. She had a swollen stomach. Couldn’t eat or drink without throwing up. Couldn’t sleep or be moved for the pain. Did we have some Western medicine? Could we help her?
With no medical doctors in our group, and the nearest Bhutanese hospital some two weeks’ hard trekking over the mountains, we could only hazard unqualified guesses about the cause of the woman’s condition—which felt like an intellectual exercise in futility. Had we been time travelers visiting the virtually untouched, medieval-like society of Thanza, all our modern knowledge and expertise would still have left us helpless before the vagaries of human suffering. We couldn’t offer the young man any definitive information about his mother. We couldn’t come up with any reasonable way to help. I passed him my prescription anti-nausea capsules so his mother could try to keep some food down. But it was agony: I knew it wouldn’t be enough.
*
After leaving Thanza, all signs of human presence had completely vanished from the world. Even our trail started disappearing from underfoot, blurring into the barren, rocky horizon, losing us in the emptiness—it gave a disconcerting feeling. Our group ascended for two and a half hours to Jaze La Pass at 17,200 feet, descended, ate lunch, and continued up another high pass at 16,600 feet, expecting to find the yak men and our tents set up on the other side. But they were nowhere to be found. Kevin, Pete, and I joined forces against the vastness and made yet another ascent—this time to 16,900 feet—but no campsite awaited us on the other side. For me, it had become The Day That Would Never End. I’d trekked nearly nine hours, over three passes higher than 5,000 meters, all my water bottles empty and my energy nearly expired. But finally, as if sighting the Holy Grail, I could make out the shape of a distant tent.
Paul, Tom, and Ryan had already made it to camp, tempers flaring after the unnecessarily grueling day. Through some lack of communication, our yak men—always well ahead of our group, and with all our gear and provisions—didn’t stop where they were supposed to, but kept going and going. Though the day had thoroughly exhausted us, and left my leg in severe pain, it had wiped out Larry, who arrived out-of-breath, ragged, and totally spent. We wouldn’t be able to do a full day’s hike tomorrow as planned; Larry needed a recovery day if he were to make it to the end of the Snowman.
Our group made good use of the unexpected rest day, washing, doing laundry, reading. The sun shone warmly overhead, and the clouds stayed mercifully away. I felt a certain playful delight at the thought of our long journey ending soon. We had only one serious obstacle left: 17,600-foot Rinchen Joe La, the highest pass of the Snowman. We were camped just below it, an estimated hour and a half needed for the ascent. Some ten minutes ahead on the trail was a group of German Snowman trekkers—the mythical “Hauser Group” we’d heard so much about during our trip. Always a day behind us, they’d finally managed to catch up and would be neck-and-neck with us until the end. Among them was the delectable Ingrid, young, blond-haired, blue-eyed, whom the men of our group had taken a special fancy to. In particular Kevin, who found excuses to make frequent visits to the German camp.
I was feeling feisty, alive. For the first time, I felt as if I could make it to the end of the Snowman, that I could actually do it regardless of the pain in my body. It was time for a little fun. For a challenge. I wanted to beat the Germans to the Snowman’s highest pass tomorrow. But I would need to assemble a team, construct a battle plan. We already had a name for the mission (courtesy of Paul): “Operation Squash Bratwurst.”
“We mustn’t let the Germans beat us to the pass tomorrow,” I announced to the men that night before dinner. “Remember World War II.”
“This is a side of you I haven’t seen before,” Rob whispered into my ear, becoming my first volunteer. “Were you a bloke in a previous life, Kira?”
“A Phoenician naval captain,” I told him.
Tom and Ryan, true athletes who, almost invariably, were the first of our group to reach camp every day, were my next volunteers—it was like getting Michael Jordan and Shakeel O’Neil to be on my dream team.
“This is a grave responsibility,” I told the others with mock gravitas. “We’re facing the highest pass of the trek, and the Germans—already with a ten-minute lead on us—are poised to beat us to the pass. We can’t allow that to happen. Who else is in?”
Kevin, perhaps experiencing dual loyalties, made no commitment. Neither did Joe or Paul. Larry, of course, would need to climb at his own pace. But I already had a strong team ready to accept the challenge. We were all willing to make some sacrifices. Carbo-loading tonight, we’d wake up an hour earlier tomorrow. Rob, literally wasting away from the high altitude, would fill himself with handfuls of my Tutti-Fruitti jelly beans for extra energy. Ryan and Tom would cut their breakfast short so they could leave first thing. Me, I’d consume my last, not-to-be-eaten-under-any-circumstances Protein Power Bar—the one I’d sequestered in the deepest bowels of my pack, and which had remained off-limits for weeks. It was settled. The race was on.
Early the next morning, in the post-dawn grayness of our frigid 16,600-foot camp, I was surprised to see everyone up and mobilized for the day’s challenge, gear already packed and breakfast begun in earnest. The night before, Kevin had returned from the Hauser Group with new, disturbing intelligence: the Germans were planning on eating breakfast a half hour earlier than normal, and might very well give us a run for our money.
Achula, the definitive sage among us, who was soon to complete his twelfth Snowman Trek, walked into our mess tent to offer a warning: “The Germans, they are very fast.”
“I don’t think I need to remind you of what’s at stake today,” I told the men. “The success of our mission depends on one of you getting there first. We can’t accept anything short of victory.”
We ate an abbreviated breakfast. I handed Rob his baggie of Tutti-Fruitti jelly beans, and we all strapped on our daypacks. Trekking poles out, Tom and Ryan immediately took the lead, with Rob close behind. Their speed and determination was unprecedented. Their fitness at full form. I followed close behind, and we soon overtook the Hauser Group’s camp, catching the Germans off-guard in the middle of breakfast. It would have been to our great advantage, had not the beautiful siren, Ingrid, managed to tempt Rob and some of our other men from their duty. But Tom, Ryan, and I continued on. Looking back, I could see the German men finishing their meals and getting up to follow us.
A few minutes later, to my great surprise, Rob suddenly caught up with me.
“The Germans are coming!” I warned him.
“No worries,” he said. “Leave it to Team Australia.”
I’d never seen him moving so quickly. Though I was nearly jogging, I couldn’t keep up. Slowing down to conserve my energy, I checked my altimeter: we were already higher than 17,000 feet. Ironically, Rinchen Zoe La, though the highest pass of the trek, was also one of the easiest to summit. There weren’t any killer steep parts—it was just a comfortable, gradual rise, the blessed cairn with its prayer flags soon appearing in the distance.
Suddenly, I heard a “Ha-gi-lo!!!” resounding across the mountaintops—the Bhutanese call meaning, “Praise to God!” Someone had made it to the pass, someone from our group. I wondered who it was—it could only be Ryan, Rob, or Tom, the other men still behind me. Then I saw someone standing on the high peak above the pass, waving his arms: Rob!
I soon made it to the pass, an hour after leaving our campsite. Rob had done it in an extraordinary 45 minutes—surely some kind of record. I ran up to give him a hug.
“You’ve made the Allies proud!” I cheered.
We sat side by side in the warm sunlight, reveling in our victory. Snowcapped peaks rose on all sides. There was only the slightest hint of a breeze. It was, I realized, one of those moments I would always remember, that would tell me what life was all about. None of it would last, but it didn’t matter. There was the stillness. The joy. The arm of a beloved friend wrapped around my own. Somehow, it was enough.
*
The last pass of the Snowman Trek, Tempe La, was only a piddling 15,370 feet high—such was my Snowman snobbery now. Anything under 16,000 feet seemed like very small potatoes.
But Tempe La, covered with snow, marked the end of our good weather karma. Our coldest pass so far, the wind chill remained well below freezing. Still, our group easily made it there after less than an hour and a half of ascending, shivering around the cairn and prayer flags, yelling “Ha-gi-lo!” and snapping each other’s picture to mark the symbolic end of the trek. Our yaks arrived shortly after us, crossing the pass without so much as a glance, the melodies of their bells following them down the mountainside.
I sat to ponder the miracle of that moment for me. We had several thousand feet of downhill left to go, yet there was little doubt now: I would finish the trek. There was nothing left to fear.
In the distance, I saw Larry’s fluorescent orange coat coming up the pass, and I realized we hadn’t all made it yet. The rest of our group started walking back down Tempe La pass, back toward those 23 long days of effort and exertion, and we all got behind Larry. He was climbing slowly yet steadily toward the pass, puffing hard, and we followed him up, encouraging, congratulating. Soon, he was there. We all were, not a one of us failing. It defied the statistics, most Snowman groups losing at least one person along the way—nearly 50% of the groups never even finished.
We all congratulated each other before beginning our descent. Exuberant, Rob started running down the mountainside, becoming a mere flicker of color as the distances absorbed him. My knee and hip hurting me, I made my way slowly down the boulder-strewn track. Down below, I could see periwinkle-colored glacial lakes resting in the valley, and, beyond them, the first greenery of the foothills.
Almost home.
*
This part will sound unbelievable, but it is the truth: my last day of the Snowman Trek, I woke up with all the pain gone from my leg. Completely gone. It had seemed so extraordinary, so unaccountable, that I needed a way to explain it. I would tell myself—and others—that my massage work had finally hit its mark, unknotted the right muscles, fixed the tracking. But the truth was that I hadn’t done anything out of the ordinary. The truth was that there was no logical explanation.
The last day of our trek was the longest in terms of distance; 14 miles to complete 4,000 feet of descent, with some of the worst trail conditions of the trip. That final day from Maurotang to Nikka Chuu was renowned for being a killer-knee day, yet I behaved like Rob would have, running through the rhododendron forest—through deep mud pools and streams, over slippery boulders and tree roots—inviting the pain to return, taking no precautions to prevent it. But it didn’t come back. (And wouldn’t. To this day, it’s still gone, and I do all those activities I did before my brother’s death.)
I reached our lunch spot nearly an hour and a half before the rest of the group, and sat down to wait for them. The forest cover had officially ended, and the bucolic town of Sephu spread out before me, with its sun-dappled pastures and farmhouses. In the hazy distance, I could see the asphalt road of Nikka Chuu marking the end of our trek. Just another hour or two of walking. That was it. I lay down on the green hill, and slept.
A few hours later, our entire group stood on the road in Nikka Chuu village, done with the Snowman Trek. To celebrate, Joe and our Bhutanese guides brought out “Marquis de Pompadour” champagne from India and a lemon cake that read in large, earnest letters, “Congratula—“ and on the next line, “—tion.” Soon after, we headed by bus to our hotel in the town of Trongsa, where our first hot showers awaited us after nearly a month without.
Over one of our last meals, we’d started cataloguing our firsts for the Snowman:
Larry: “Crossing three passes over 5,000 meters in one day.”
Kevin: “The highest I’ve ever been.”
Me: “The longest trek.”
Paul: “Twenty-six days of putting up with everyone’s bad jokes.”
Tom, using his pedometer, had calculated that we’d each taken half a million steps during the trip, having walked at least 216 miles. Since the Snowman first opened to foreigners in 1982, approximately 2,000 people have attempted it, with about half that many successfully completing it. More people have made it to the top of Everest than have reached the end of the Snowman. It remains one of the hardest, and least experienced, treks in the world. And surely one of the most spectacular.
Before we all went home, our group stopped at Bhutan’s most spectacular sight: Punakha dzong, the great 17th century fortress built by the Bhutanese king Shabdrung in celebration of the defeat of the Mongols. I went instead to a tiny temple nearby, Chung dzong, to pay my respects to the caretaker monk. Before the Snowman had started, I’d gone there to pray for help with the trek. The caretaker, seeing me, gave me a special blessing and offered to pray for me each day while I was gone. Now I wanted to find him, tell him I did it, give him an offering of money in gratitude.
Chung temple, small, unprepossessing, never attracting many tourists, is one of Bhutan’s holiest sites. A couple of years ago, when a glacial lake burst and nearby Mo River overran its banks, all of the temple was washed away—except for a piece of foundation on which sat the ancient bronze Buddha Shakyamuni statue. This seeming miracle quickly turned the temple into a major pilgrimage site. The Bhutanese insist that all prayers spoken in Chung temple will be answered—but of course you must believe.
It turned out that the caretaker was away. His nephew, a teenaged monk, let me in, and I sat for over an hour before the ancient statue, giving thanks. I’d been given my body back. And my physical health. I tried to imagine what else was possible, what other things might be true. Maybe the dead—people like my brother, or Ryan’s—never really die. Not exactly. Not like we think. Maybe they never really go anywhere.
There must be so little I actually know about anything.
Above all else, you must believe.
Tibetan horns taunted the air—ululating, oboe-like sounds meant to catch the sins of the crowd and send them heavenward. The people around me gaped at the giant spread of embroidered silk as it slowly lowered from the fortress roof, revealing a montage of Tibetan Buddhist deities. Avalokitesvara, the Buddha of Infinite Compassion. Maitreya, the Future Buddha, a Jesus-like savior prophesied to lead humanity from suffering. The tondrel, easily 40 feet high, laboriously hand-stitched, filled the entire end of the courtyard, its silk gleaming before the candlelit dais.
There was the sacred moment never to be repeated. In that single hour on that single day of that single year, a miracle was supposed to occur. The Bhutanese monks were calling on the most compassionate gods of the universe to take away our anguishes, our regrets and sins, and to purify us. Now, when we died, the Lord of Death’s judgment would be kinder. The next lifetime, easier. But only if we believed.
The feeble candlelight barely held back the night. I stood closer to the tondrel, the horns shrilling more earnestly.
I thought of why I’d come to Bhutan—the real reason, the reason I’d told no one about. I tried to clear my mind of all doubt and, like the rest of the crowd, made a wish. We waited. And watched. As the rising sun sent its first rays over the mountains, striking the top of the tondrel, the sounds of the horns stopped abruptly, almost belligerently.
“Examine carefully whatever terrifies you,” came a line to me from The Tibetan Book of the Dead, one of Buddhism’s most sacred texts, “and see the voidness.”
In the silence and heady stillness, the dawn calmly asserted itself. The sacred moment had passed.
*
I wandered through the dark streets of Bhutan’s capital, Thimphu. It was the middle of the night and I was lost, but it was of no consequence. I had thousands of dollars cash in my bag, but didn’t worry about being robbed. Bhutan is a blessed place. A country the size of Switzerland, with a population of only about 650,000, its people have such a strong belief in karma that robbery is virtually unthinkable. Imagine the consequences of such an act! Imagine the suffering that will inevitably return!
It was strange to encounter safety abroad. I’d spent most of my adult life experiencing the world’s most inhospitable places—malarial jungles, totalitarian societies, war zones. Places where you’re wise to carry a knife, to leave behind a will. But in charmed Bhutan at three in the morning, people just nodded warmly at me, the town drunks left me alone, and the only graffiti I saw were some hastily scrawled smiley faces.
I’d flown across the world to this modern day Shangri La to attempt what is widely considered one of the hardest treks in the world: the Snowman Trek. It lasts some 24 days, and only a few hundred foreigners have ever successfully completed it. Unlike most of the popular Himalayan treks, such as Nepal’s Annapurna Circuit, there isn’t just one high pass to get over—but eleven. You ascend several thousand feet, descend, ascend. Again. And again. Eleven times. Most of the passes are over 16,000 feet, with the highest at 17,600 feet. Then there is the weather, which is notoriously unpredictable and has led to a Snowman failure rate of nearly 50%. The location of the trek—following the spine of the Himalayas between Bhutan and Tibet—is among the most remote and inaccessible country in the world, easily trapping a person between high peaks, making emergency evacuation by Indian army choppers not only difficult but exorbitantly expensive. And then there are the personal risks—like getting dysentery between high passes, twisting an ankle, breaking a leg, succumbing to altitude sickness. There are so many concerns that it’s no surprise so few people ever attempt the trek, and so many fewer ever finish it.
I’d found that the dangerous, difficult trips asked certain questions that none others do. If there’s a higher chance of returning home sick, maimed—even killed—then the journey forces an examination of what matters in life. Specifically: Why such a trip? To what end?
I asked those questions a lot after my brother Marc died in Africa. It was as if I were trying to know the answer to everything. As if I were trying—however futilely—to control my own fate. In a way, my brother’s death was why I came to Bhutan. Two years earlier, Marc had disappeared in Africa, near Angola, in one of the most desolate places on earth. I’d flown halfway around the world to try to save him, only to bring back his body instead. But they say there are no coincidences: on the very day after I’d returned to the States with his ashes, my left leg strangely, unaccountably, froze up, and I couldn’t walk without tremendous pain. There were no medical explanations. Doctors could only offer theories: nerve problems, muscle damage, early arthritis. But nothing showed up on any tests. And no solutions helped. Normally very athletic, I had to completely stop most physical activity. If I traveled anywhere now, I went mostly by vehicle or rode on horseback. While I never accepted the pain, I learned to adjust to it, to hide it from people, to deal with it, convinced all the while that the cause—and thus the cure—lay, somehow, with my brother’s death. Perhaps I was trying to stop myself from going out into the world? Perhaps I just didn’t trust life anymore.
I saw a counselor, did prodigious grief work, but my leg pain didn’t improve. Then I decided I was going to do something that would seem patently insane: I was going to face the pain—and its mysterious cause—head on; God willing, I would beat it. I began looking for a trek. One of the hardest in the world, but in a country I knew I could love. And then I found out about the Snowman.
*
Our group stood in the rain, gazing at the modest mud track that would mark the start of our trek. But the Snowman is no mere recreational hiking route established for tourists; rather, for millennia, it has been the Himalayas’ main north-south highway over the mountains. Steeped in history, in the 17th century it brought down the Mongol hordes and their Tibetan allies, looking to sack the burgeoning kingdom of Bhutan. And so the fortress of Drugyel Dzong was built on the hilltop just above us. In 1648, on the very spot where our horsemen were loading our gear onto mules, Bhutanese warriors led the invaders through a false gate into the fortress and mass-slaughtered them—saving Bhutan the horrors of a Mongol victory.
These days, visits to Bhutan are notoriously restricted, the government forbidding independent travel and requiring all foreigners to book trips using a Bhutanese tour company. I was doing my trip through Canadian Himalayan Expeditions, which works in tandem with a Bhutanese partner. CHE’s owner, Joe Pilaar, 46, a wiry Canadian, was one of eight doing the trek with me. In addition, there was Rob, 52, my red-headed Aussie friend of 12 years, an itinerant carpenter and former Papua New Guinean traveling buddy who’d driven his Royal Enfield motorcycle across India and Nepal to join me for the trek. There was also Paul, 52, a Brit who owned his own landscaping company, and “Team America” as Rob called them: Larry, 66, a former army chemical engineer; Tom, 57, a retired social studies teacher, owner of a climbing gym; Pete, 36, a photographer; Kevin, 33, a West Coast real estate agent and aspiring screenplay writer; and Ryan, 30, an oil company engineer.
We were nine of a mere 120 foreigners allowed to attempt the Snowman in 2007. The Bhutanese government follows a strict tourism policy of “high value, low volume,” in which they invite only 6,000 foreigners into their country per year, charging each $200 a day—a fee they’ll be more than doubling in 2009. The exorbitant price not only favors tourists with thick wallets, but also prevents the sort of thrifty, independent backpacking travel seen in places like Kathmandu. Bhutan wants, above all else, to preserve its society, religion, and environment from any potentially harmful foreign influence. Notoriously aloof and insular, the only Himalayan kingdom never occupied or colonized by outside powers, Bhutan first opened its doors to tourists in 1972. Even Western media—TV, the internet—was banned until 1999, and now the government systematically removes any programs deemed damaging to society (goodbye pornography and the World Wrestling Federation).
Bhutan’s king, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, progressively rules his country on the Buddhist principles of compassion and harmony, and is the mastermind of a famously titled political strategy, “Gross Domestic Happiness,” which champions individual and environmental rights over policies of greed and materialism. He enjoys overwhelming approval from the citizenry, his picture proudly displayed in nearly every living room and business across the country. Protecting 60% of Bhutan’s forests by turning them into national parks, King Wangchuck has also banned smoking, mandated that all new construction follow traditional Bhutanese design, and required citizens to wear traditional dress: gho for men (similar to a toga) and kira for women (a kind of hand-woven sarong). In such a way, he’s painstakingly preserved Bhutanese culture for future generations, while keeping it largely unblemished by Western values and corruption. Still, in 2008, he’ll voluntarily relinquish rule, turning his absolute monarchy into a parliamentary democracy—a move that leads many critics to wonder if Bhutan’s unique society can survive such a monumental overhaul.
But for now, Bhutan still offers a rare chance for time-travel. As our group entered the mountains, the Himalayan valleys opened before us with their stone-and-wattle farmhouses and hand-threshed fields, offering medieval-like glimpses of a society barely initiated into the 21st century. We followed the Paro River, gradually ascending through fir forests and meadows of purple wildflowers. For the next few days, our route would double as the Jhomolhari Trek, Bhutan’s most popular among tourists, lasting eight days and giving trekkers a far easier dose of the Himalayas than the Snowman.
As I trudged along, I thought about all the Mahayana Buddhists who’d used the trail over the centuries as a pilgrimage route to Lhasa in Tibet. Lhasa is, to devotees of Tibetan-style Buddhism, what Mecca is to Muslims—not only the holiest site of their religion, but the place which all faithful are supposed to visit at least once in their lives. After the 1959 Chinese invasion of Tibet, the Bhutanese-Tibetan border closed and the Snowman became an escape route for refugees fleeing persecution at the hands of the Chinese. Bhutan, culturally and religiously tied to Tibet, and sympathetic to its plight, maintains no diplomatic relations with China, and has adopted a strict closed-border policy unlikely to change anytime soon. Now, the Snowman’s main function is as a smuggling route, numerous horse and yak trains passing us on the trail, sneaking their wares to and from China.
Our first day of travel was deceptively easy, and we hiked only five hours to a wooded campsite at 9,500 feet. It’d take me some time to get used to the group routine—or, more accurately, to its luxuries. Everyday, someone would set up our tents—often long before we arrived in camp. As the staff busily prepared our dinner, we’d be invited to “tea time” in the mess tent, assorted cookies laid out decoratively on paper doilies like Turkish delights. The staff would wake us with hot drinks, setting bowls of washing water outside our tents. We’d lunch at pre-designated spots along the trail, tables and chairs set up safari-style, heaping courses of food kept warm in giant thermoses, Bhutanese staff on hand to serve them.
I never did overcome my embarrassment of such treatment, though, as the trek started to earn its reputation, the extravagances would have a positive effect on group morale. Still, our Bhutanese staff—who would experience the same grueling days as us—didn’t get much of a chance to rest. Achula, 46, head cook and staff manager, woke each day at the frigid pre-dawn hour of 4:00a.m. to cook and pack our lunches and start breakfast. He told me, not without a degree of resignation, that he’d done the Snowman 11 times already.
“But this is my last time,” he asserted. Still, somehow, I didn’t believe him. He was like a Snowman junkie, knowing it wasn’t good for him but unable to quit. Yet, he must have known our trip would’ve been in chaos if he wasn’t along. He was the one who expertly taught the junior staff about food preparation and serving etiquette, who gave important advice to the assistant guides, who even tried to manage the unruly wranglers.
But horsemen must be the same the world over. The toughened nonchalance. The arrogant swagger which tells you—and accurately so—that you’d be nowhere without them, without their knowledge of the land, their control of the animals, their ability to get your big-town extravagances from place to place. Our men seemed to gaze on our group’s dining tent, on our “tea time” biscuits and brand-name sleeping bags, with barely concealed amusement. Give them a horse or two, and they could live off the land for months, could sleep through the night wrapped in scrappy wool blankets, could eat red rice every day and shit in the woods (no toilet tent for them), could catch whatever they needed to survive. Our biggest use to them seemed to be for entertainment; in our bumbling dependency we only validated the beauty of their own spare, free existences. I have always envied horsemen, and probably always will.
*
At last, we received our Snowman initiation: nine hours of pure uphill trekking in a day, to a final elevation of 11,800 feet. Rob and I might have been reliving our New Guinea bushwhacking days, sloshing mile after mile through deep mud, past slippery boulders, across raging streams. Jungle-like forests of rhododendron trees crowded around us, draped in Spanish moss and dripping from unrelenting rain.
Freezing, utterly exhausted, I arrived in camp seeming to hurt in every conceivable place—surely the result of two years of very limited physical activity. Stripping to a pair of shorts, I submerged myself in the icy waters of a nearby stream, hoping to reduce the sharp jolts of pain in my leg. I tried to imagine the 22 days of the Snowman still ahead of me—and stopped. Better not to think about anything.
Rob found me after I returned to my tent. I didn’t tell him about my leg pain, my private despair, wanting to just bask in his joyfulness. There must be few people in the world like him. Perennially cheerful and optimistic, he greets everyone he meets as if they were dear departed friends. If you ask for an explanation, he’ll admit he’s been given a charmed life. Having never known depression or illness, having never felt alone or unloved, he’s always found the time and means to travel to the farthest corners of the earth. Rob would become the humor and light of our trip in the weeks to come. And my beacon.
“It’s a blokey group,” Rob whispered to me over dinner that night—his way of reminding me that I was the only female, and perhaps explaining why our meal conversations had a way of gravitating to such subjects as women, rugby, and the 155mm Howitzer. (I had already become an unwitting expert on Royal Enfields.)
But Ryan, 30, the youngest member of our group, an oil engineer who grew up in rural Illinois, decided to tell us about his brother who had recently died in an outdoor accident. Ryan knew firsthand, as I did, the anguish of searching desperately for a loved one, and the horror of discovering a body. And how unlikely that we two—complete strangers tossed together on a trek—would have such similar stories. I could only marvel at how little people ever actually know about each other. At how little they’ll ever actually see.
Ryan’s story prompted Paul to tell his own—one so extraordinary, so horrific, that we all sat in abject silence, listening. It’d happened some ten years ago, in the middle of the night. He was on a ferry, The Estonia, when it suddenly started to sink into the Baltic Sea. Everywhere, people were scrambling to escape the ship, to pull themselves into life rafts, to save themselves. And the forty-foot swells, the frigid water. Paul, clutching an overturned life raft, watching the survivors around him slowly defeated by the elements, freezing to death, slipping into the sea. For six unimaginable hours he clung to life, praying for rescue, forcing himself not to close his eyes and succumb to death. And the rescue choppers come at last! But botching the job, dropping some of the survivors—and how few there were, only 120 of 900 passengers—into the waves. People dead all around him. But Paul, saved, and on the Snowman Trek with us. A botany expert, he knew the genus and species of all the plants we saw, knew what we could touch, what we could eat. The quiet Brit with the most extraordinary story we’d ever heard, who never had any interest in being first to camp each day. Who kept stopping to take photos of plants, flowers, leaves. Who would tell us, with unabashed eagerness, to taste the fruit of the trees. The rose hips. The barberries. Who would remind us to notice the world and its gifts.
*
A few days later, I couldn’t see. I woke in the middle of the night from intense pain, my eyes completely sealed with pus and burning so badly that it was as if someone had lit a fire to them. I had to soak them for several minutes just to pry the eyelids apart, praying all the while that I wasn’t going blind.
We’d been camped beneath the snow-covered peak of Jhomolhari Mountain, enjoying a rest day of acclimatization, when the first eye symptoms arose. Swelling. Redness. My face bloated so badly that Rob started calling me “Rocky Balboa.” I’d begun using antibiotic drops—but now my eyes only seemed exponentially worse. I sought out Joe, the trip leader, to get his advice. He mentioned a doctor (conveniently, an orthopedic surgeon) in one of the neighboring trekking camps, and we went in search of him. Dr. Don, a middle-aged American with white hair and beard, took one look at me and knew it was bad.
“Probably started as an allergic reaction to something,” he said with a doctor’s matter-of-fact gravity. “And now it’s turned into quite an eye infection.” I showed him my antibiotic drops, but he told me to stop taking them and handed me some prescription antihistamine pills instead. “If you don’t see some kind of improvement in 24 hours, you’ll have to quit the trek.”
I nodded solemnly.
“Look—it’s not worth going blind,” he added.
His warning stayed with me as our group continued the Snowman later that morning, leaving behind the many hiking groups doing the shorter Jhomolhari Trek. We were on our own now, come what may. No more orthopedic surgeons arriving deus ex machina-style to save my ass with prescription Allegra-D. Freezing rain tore across the rocky steppes as we made our long climb to Nyile La at 16,100 feet. It was our official test pass for altitude sickness: if we all got there without any adverse symptoms, we’d probably be okay for the rest of the trek. Gratefully, everyone did make it without problems, and as we passed a large cairn, strings of prayer flags whipped in the wind, bidding us—along with all sentient beings—happiness and peace. The sun began showing itself at intervals, and all at once the clouds parted to reveal a great expanse of snow-topped peaks. I could only stop and stare. For a few blessed minutes, I forgot everything but the majesty of this world.
Before Buddhism made its way to Bhutan in the 7th century A.D., people practiced their own animistic religion called Bön, in which these mountains were worshipped as gods. The locals believed that their souls came from the Himalayas, and returned to them at death. The mountains’ myriad spirits, or yulha, protected their villages from malign forces, guarding flocks, ensuring rich harvests. These beliefs, still widely held by most Bhutanese, help explain why mountain climbing has been banned. In 1983, after several foreign expeditions attempted to climb 22,000-foot Jichu Drakye, locals complained that the irreverent outsiders had angered the mountain gods, bringing calamity upon their crops in the form of violent hail storms. A village delegation took their complaints to the king, who, perhaps in the interests of Gross Domestic Happiness, decreed an end to all mountain climbing in Bhutan.
After Nyile La, I started to notice that my eyes were getting better, the pain and swelling lessening. For the first time, I found myself dawdling, the beauty of Bhutan confronting me at every turn. Gaping beauty, that only seemed to get more transcendent the farther I went. I’d think I’d seen it all, couldn’t possibly take in any more, only to climb the next hilltop, turn round the next bend, and see something even more spectacular, more dizzying to the senses. My mind wanted to capture it all somehow. So the futile attempts to take pictures, to preserve it, to take it home. But I just ended up cursing my camera. A one dimensional photo could do no justice to the country, couldn’t make any of it last.
Then I saw the tiny fortress, Lingshi dzong, sitting on a hilltop before the great audience of the Himalayas. I stopped. And, for some reason I never quite understood, I sat down and wept. Maybe it had something to do with the starkness of the distances, with the dramatic vying of sunlight and storm. Or perhaps it was subtler, harder to explain. As if, in that ancient dzong—that speck of human proclamation sitting before the indifferent valleys and rise of the Himalayas—it was my own voice calling out into the void. I found myself making an appeal of grief about my brother, who’d had his own history, his stories, and what would happen to them now? Where do they—where do any of our stories—go?
Lingshi dzong—for centuries a way station for weary travelers and Buddhist pilgrims, a defense against Tibetan and Mongol hordes—just sat there fearlessly proclaiming its own story to the vast, empty indifference before us. A rainbow erupted from it, arching over the valley and reaching toward the mountains opposite. Such indescribable beauty. But no way to keep it.
A few days later, near Lingshi dzong, the Snowman would take its first casualty of the year: a 42-year-old American woman, trekking in the group just behind ours, succumbed to altitude sickness. Our guide would later say she shouldn’t have died. Someone should have seen the signs, known how to save her.
*
We finally reached Laya village at 12,500 feet, the halfway point of our trek. Before us lay a series of quaint, terraced fields dotted with stone farmhouses. Nearby, locals threshed barley with long wooden staffs, their whopping echoing across the valley. The women dressed traditionally in black wool kiras and unique bamboo hats decorated with strings of beads and topped with miniature Buddhist prayer staffs. The tiny hats served no functional purpose that I could tell; when I asked one of the women why they wore them, she said simply, “Because they’re precious.”
For the second—and last—rest day of our trek, we camped in someone’s front yard, the high peaks of the Himalayas rising on all sides of the village like great battlements. Our group had endured two weeks of canned mackerel, pickled pork, and rice, so Paul and Pete scrounged the village for any exotic foodstuffs. Soon, they had taken over a farmhouse kitchen to prepare us spaghetti with a ketchup-squash meat sauce and—Paul’s specialty—guava crumble with cream. But by far the most welcomed discovery was some Bhutanese brand Hit Beer and smuggled Pabst Blue Ribbon from China.
Better still, an enterprising woman rented us her wooden tub. One by one we took hot stone baths and did our laundry. Some of the men went in search of the village’s notoriously beautiful postmistress, and came back with news of a town internet service. Laya had acquired a satellite dish, laptop computer, and international dialing business in just a few years—remarkable, considering it saw its first tourists in 1987. So much for the Shangri La experience; I guiltily checked my email like everyone else.
A week ago, I didn’t even know if I’d make it to Laya. And now, with my eye infection cleared up, my bad leg had suddenly developed knee troubles that made walking more painful than ever. Perhaps it was a sign: we were only a week of easy downhill hiking to a road and civilization. If you wanted to quit the Snowman, Laya was the place to do it. Continuing the trek meant entering the Snowman’s roughest, remotest country, where evacuation was only possible by Indian Army chopper—and then, only at great difficulty and expense.
I had a decision to make about how much pain I was willing to endure. Originally, I’d hoped my leg would gradually improve, but now I was soaking it in cold water every day, taking ibuprofen religiously each night, and doing all manner of massage techniques to try to keep it from painfully freezing up on me. My plan had been to confront and beat this mysterious condition, but it was starting to seem like an abysmal failure.
And then I was starting to overhear staff members talking about getting Larry to quit. Sixty-six years old, supposedly without enough warm clothing and making slow ascents to the passes, he was usually last to arrive in camp each day—about an hour or two behind the rest of us. Though his Snowman experience had seemed—as mine did—like sheer masochism at times, I really admired him. Born the same years as my parents, he hadn’t let his age stop him from going out into the world, from taking on the hardest trek in the Himalayas. I knew Larry wasn’t going to quit, regardless of what anyone said. And if he could go on, then so could I.
But the next morning, my knee and hip pain felt even worse. I knew I had a big decision to make—and soon—about whether or not I was going to continue. Though I finally confided in Rob about the situation, and he pledged to support me no matter what, I hiked off alone to decide. I found myself wandering to the local Buddhist temple, a small, unassuming structure of mortared stone sitting at the edge of the village. A chestnut horse studied me from a nearby meadow, Layap children waving and smiling artlessly from their houses. I spun the temple’s succession of prayer wheels, my mind awash with worry and indecision. Hearing a bell ringing from a nearby doorway, I walked over and saw an ancient woman with tangled white hair and cataract eyes sitting on the ground, wearing a burlap sack for a skirt and spinning a gigantic prayer wheel. She stopped what she was doing and stared at me for a long moment, fingering her mala,or rosary, and beckoning to me.
I sat beside her in the cold little chamber, taking out my own mala. For a moment, I didn’t know what to do. From the nearby hills, I could hear the threshing of barley, the laughs of children. The sun alternately shone and fled behind the clouds. The woman set the wheel turning and began to sing. I had no idea what she was singing about. Prayers, maybe. Prayers to the world. To our hopes. Our fears. Our longings for rest or peace. As she kept the wheel going, I recited my own Buddhist mantras. Minutes passed. Hours. Outside, the same chestnut horse stood in the meadow, watching us.
Finally, I stopped. I’d made my decision, and it was getting late. I took out a solid gold Buddha amulet from my bag, the one I’d always carried for good luck on dangerous trips, and I lifted the woman’s hair to tie it around her neck. Her hand kept turning the giant prayer wheel. She wouldn’t stop singing.
*
I was going to continue the trek.
In Laya, we traded our mules and horses for yaks—a sure sign that the trip was going to get rough. Yaks are the horned marvels of the Himalayas. In appearance, they resemble stocky, hairy bulls, but are genetically much more hearty. Stronger than horses, they can carry at least twice the weight, and can survive in sub-zero temperatures that would otherwise kill their equine cousins. Being ruminants, yaks chew and re-chew their cud, precluding the need for feedbags, grain supplies, or frequent grazing pastures. Yaks are just flat-out tougher than horses—and it’s as if they know it. While you might be able to tame and ride a horse, Bhutanese yaks generally don’t put up with such antics. They carried our gear, but at a price: it took as many as four men at once just to restrain an animal for loading, and then we counted ourselves lucky if the gear even arrived at camp in its original state.
Our good weather karma continued as we left the simple pleasures of Laya for some of the steepest trail we’d had yet. I spent the whole time trying to ignore the pain in my leg, forcing my mind away from all thoughts of discomfort. We ascended for eight long hours through forests of rhododendron and fir, finally reaching the campsite of Rodophu near 16,100-foot Tsemo La Pass. During Joe’s last Snowman trip, his group attempted to cross the pass three times, only to finally quit because of blizzards. But for us there wasn’t even a trace of snow, and we climbed through high alpine meadows, easily crossing Tsemo La before lunch. We stayed at our highest campsite yet—frigid 16,200-foot Narethang—and were rewarded with the spectacular backdrop of Gangla Karchung Mountain, our tents covered with ice, the skin on my hands starting to split open from the cold.
Some may think the Snowman’s biggest challenge lies in its many ascents, but reaching the 17,100-foot pass of Karakachu La was nothing compared to its “killer-knee” descent of 4,000 feet. Ibuprofen pills and hiking sticks were a prerequisite, as was tremendous patience. For several hours, our group carefully picked its way down a steep, rocky trail. Gradually, our path became a muddy maze of boulders and tree roots that seemed destined to twist one of our ankles. It was our first introduction to the mysterious Lunana region, one of the world’s most untouched wildernesses full of pure glacial streams, dramatic waterfalls, and mountainsides covered with misty forests.
After hiking through the Lunana’s Tarina River Valley, we ascended to one of the Himalayas’ most isolated villages. If Shangri La is determined by remoteness, then perhaps it can be found in Thanza. A village of around 300 people, it sat at the frigid elevation of 13,700 feet—only 700 feet lower than the highest point in the continental U.S. Our group camped beside the village, near 22,950-foot Table Mountain. We had a surreal moment of first contact, the local people visiting en masse to inspect our gear, wearing their giant, Cossack-like yak wool hats. Before long, clothing was exchanged. Beads and wool hats purchased. As our group feverishly snapped photos, I had visions of the paparazzi at one of those Hollywood red-carpet galas. A local farmer, Bembey, told me he saw his first white person in the early 1980s when he was 15—a sight so terrifying that he’d run for his life. Now he eagerly joined the cultural show-and-tell, looking forward to the spectacle of more Snowman groups.
I looked around the village, itself. Few places exist in the world without some modicum of modernity: stores, running water, roads, telecommunications. In Thanza there was none of that. Though Western clothing had made its way to many of the children, most adults wore clothes they’d made by hand, weaving and dyeing their own material, fashioning their own unique hats, boots, and jewelry. Their homes were built from the offerings of the countryside: stone walls, hand-hewn wood shingles, clay mortar. Subsistence farmers, they survived on their high altitude crops, as well as on the occasional yak meat and cheese.
It seemed a hard life, as evidenced by a man who approached us in our mess tent during the friendly pandemonium outside. He had a mother, he told us, who was gravely ill. She had a swollen stomach. Couldn’t eat or drink without throwing up. Couldn’t sleep or be moved for the pain. Did we have some Western medicine? Could we help her?
With no medical doctors in our group, and the nearest Bhutanese hospital some two weeks’ hard trekking over the mountains, we could only hazard unqualified guesses about the cause of the woman’s condition—which felt like an intellectual exercise in futility. Had we been time travelers visiting the virtually untouched, medieval-like society of Thanza, all our modern knowledge and expertise would still have left us helpless before the vagaries of human suffering. We couldn’t offer the young man any definitive information about his mother. We couldn’t come up with any reasonable way to help. I passed him my prescription anti-nausea capsules so his mother could try to keep some food down. But it was agony: I knew it wouldn’t be enough.
*
After leaving Thanza, all signs of human presence had completely vanished from the world. Even our trail started disappearing from underfoot, blurring into the barren, rocky horizon, losing us in the emptiness—it gave a disconcerting feeling. Our group ascended for two and a half hours to Jaze La Pass at 17,200 feet, descended, ate lunch, and continued up another high pass at 16,600 feet, expecting to find the yak men and our tents set up on the other side. But they were nowhere to be found. Kevin, Pete, and I joined forces against the vastness and made yet another ascent—this time to 16,900 feet—but no campsite awaited us on the other side. For me, it had become The Day That Would Never End. I’d trekked nearly nine hours, over three passes higher than 5,000 meters, all my water bottles empty and my energy nearly expired. But finally, as if sighting the Holy Grail, I could make out the shape of a distant tent.
Paul, Tom, and Ryan had already made it to camp, tempers flaring after the unnecessarily grueling day. Through some lack of communication, our yak men—always well ahead of our group, and with all our gear and provisions—didn’t stop where they were supposed to, but kept going and going. Though the day had thoroughly exhausted us, and left my leg in severe pain, it had wiped out Larry, who arrived out-of-breath, ragged, and totally spent. We wouldn’t be able to do a full day’s hike tomorrow as planned; Larry needed a recovery day if he were to make it to the end of the Snowman.
Our group made good use of the unexpected rest day, washing, doing laundry, reading. The sun shone warmly overhead, and the clouds stayed mercifully away. I felt a certain playful delight at the thought of our long journey ending soon. We had only one serious obstacle left: 17,600-foot Rinchen Joe La, the highest pass of the Snowman. We were camped just below it, an estimated hour and a half needed for the ascent. Some ten minutes ahead on the trail was a group of German Snowman trekkers—the mythical “Hauser Group” we’d heard so much about during our trip. Always a day behind us, they’d finally managed to catch up and would be neck-and-neck with us until the end. Among them was the delectable Ingrid, young, blond-haired, blue-eyed, whom the men of our group had taken a special fancy to. In particular Kevin, who found excuses to make frequent visits to the German camp.
I was feeling feisty, alive. For the first time, I felt as if I could make it to the end of the Snowman, that I could actually do it regardless of the pain in my body. It was time for a little fun. For a challenge. I wanted to beat the Germans to the Snowman’s highest pass tomorrow. But I would need to assemble a team, construct a battle plan. We already had a name for the mission (courtesy of Paul): “Operation Squash Bratwurst.”
“We mustn’t let the Germans beat us to the pass tomorrow,” I announced to the men that night before dinner. “Remember World War II.”
“This is a side of you I haven’t seen before,” Rob whispered into my ear, becoming my first volunteer. “Were you a bloke in a previous life, Kira?”
“A Phoenician naval captain,” I told him.
Tom and Ryan, true athletes who, almost invariably, were the first of our group to reach camp every day, were my next volunteers—it was like getting Michael Jordan and Shakeel O’Neil to be on my dream team.
“This is a grave responsibility,” I told the others with mock gravitas. “We’re facing the highest pass of the trek, and the Germans—already with a ten-minute lead on us—are poised to beat us to the pass. We can’t allow that to happen. Who else is in?”
Kevin, perhaps experiencing dual loyalties, made no commitment. Neither did Joe or Paul. Larry, of course, would need to climb at his own pace. But I already had a strong team ready to accept the challenge. We were all willing to make some sacrifices. Carbo-loading tonight, we’d wake up an hour earlier tomorrow. Rob, literally wasting away from the high altitude, would fill himself with handfuls of my Tutti-Fruitti jelly beans for extra energy. Ryan and Tom would cut their breakfast short so they could leave first thing. Me, I’d consume my last, not-to-be-eaten-under-any-circumstances Protein Power Bar—the one I’d sequestered in the deepest bowels of my pack, and which had remained off-limits for weeks. It was settled. The race was on.
Early the next morning, in the post-dawn grayness of our frigid 16,600-foot camp, I was surprised to see everyone up and mobilized for the day’s challenge, gear already packed and breakfast begun in earnest. The night before, Kevin had returned from the Hauser Group with new, disturbing intelligence: the Germans were planning on eating breakfast a half hour earlier than normal, and might very well give us a run for our money.
Achula, the definitive sage among us, who was soon to complete his twelfth Snowman Trek, walked into our mess tent to offer a warning: “The Germans, they are very fast.”
“I don’t think I need to remind you of what’s at stake today,” I told the men. “The success of our mission depends on one of you getting there first. We can’t accept anything short of victory.”
We ate an abbreviated breakfast. I handed Rob his baggie of Tutti-Fruitti jelly beans, and we all strapped on our daypacks. Trekking poles out, Tom and Ryan immediately took the lead, with Rob close behind. Their speed and determination was unprecedented. Their fitness at full form. I followed close behind, and we soon overtook the Hauser Group’s camp, catching the Germans off-guard in the middle of breakfast. It would have been to our great advantage, had not the beautiful siren, Ingrid, managed to tempt Rob and some of our other men from their duty. But Tom, Ryan, and I continued on. Looking back, I could see the German men finishing their meals and getting up to follow us.
A few minutes later, to my great surprise, Rob suddenly caught up with me.
“The Germans are coming!” I warned him.
“No worries,” he said. “Leave it to Team Australia.”
I’d never seen him moving so quickly. Though I was nearly jogging, I couldn’t keep up. Slowing down to conserve my energy, I checked my altimeter: we were already higher than 17,000 feet. Ironically, Rinchen Zoe La, though the highest pass of the trek, was also one of the easiest to summit. There weren’t any killer steep parts—it was just a comfortable, gradual rise, the blessed cairn with its prayer flags soon appearing in the distance.
Suddenly, I heard a “Ha-gi-lo!!!” resounding across the mountaintops—the Bhutanese call meaning, “Praise to God!” Someone had made it to the pass, someone from our group. I wondered who it was—it could only be Ryan, Rob, or Tom, the other men still behind me. Then I saw someone standing on the high peak above the pass, waving his arms: Rob!
I soon made it to the pass, an hour after leaving our campsite. Rob had done it in an extraordinary 45 minutes—surely some kind of record. I ran up to give him a hug.
“You’ve made the Allies proud!” I cheered.
We sat side by side in the warm sunlight, reveling in our victory. Snowcapped peaks rose on all sides. There was only the slightest hint of a breeze. It was, I realized, one of those moments I would always remember, that would tell me what life was all about. None of it would last, but it didn’t matter. There was the stillness. The joy. The arm of a beloved friend wrapped around my own. Somehow, it was enough.
*
The last pass of the Snowman Trek, Tempe La, was only a piddling 15,370 feet high—such was my Snowman snobbery now. Anything under 16,000 feet seemed like very small potatoes.
But Tempe La, covered with snow, marked the end of our good weather karma. Our coldest pass so far, the wind chill remained well below freezing. Still, our group easily made it there after less than an hour and a half of ascending, shivering around the cairn and prayer flags, yelling “Ha-gi-lo!” and snapping each other’s picture to mark the symbolic end of the trek. Our yaks arrived shortly after us, crossing the pass without so much as a glance, the melodies of their bells following them down the mountainside.
I sat to ponder the miracle of that moment for me. We had several thousand feet of downhill left to go, yet there was little doubt now: I would finish the trek. There was nothing left to fear.
In the distance, I saw Larry’s fluorescent orange coat coming up the pass, and I realized we hadn’t all made it yet. The rest of our group started walking back down Tempe La pass, back toward those 23 long days of effort and exertion, and we all got behind Larry. He was climbing slowly yet steadily toward the pass, puffing hard, and we followed him up, encouraging, congratulating. Soon, he was there. We all were, not a one of us failing. It defied the statistics, most Snowman groups losing at least one person along the way—nearly 50% of the groups never even finished.
We all congratulated each other before beginning our descent. Exuberant, Rob started running down the mountainside, becoming a mere flicker of color as the distances absorbed him. My knee and hip hurting me, I made my way slowly down the boulder-strewn track. Down below, I could see periwinkle-colored glacial lakes resting in the valley, and, beyond them, the first greenery of the foothills.
Almost home.
*
This part will sound unbelievable, but it is the truth: my last day of the Snowman Trek, I woke up with all the pain gone from my leg. Completely gone. It had seemed so extraordinary, so unaccountable, that I needed a way to explain it. I would tell myself—and others—that my massage work had finally hit its mark, unknotted the right muscles, fixed the tracking. But the truth was that I hadn’t done anything out of the ordinary. The truth was that there was no logical explanation.
The last day of our trek was the longest in terms of distance; 14 miles to complete 4,000 feet of descent, with some of the worst trail conditions of the trip. That final day from Maurotang to Nikka Chuu was renowned for being a killer-knee day, yet I behaved like Rob would have, running through the rhododendron forest—through deep mud pools and streams, over slippery boulders and tree roots—inviting the pain to return, taking no precautions to prevent it. But it didn’t come back. (And wouldn’t. To this day, it’s still gone, and I do all those activities I did before my brother’s death.)
I reached our lunch spot nearly an hour and a half before the rest of the group, and sat down to wait for them. The forest cover had officially ended, and the bucolic town of Sephu spread out before me, with its sun-dappled pastures and farmhouses. In the hazy distance, I could see the asphalt road of Nikka Chuu marking the end of our trek. Just another hour or two of walking. That was it. I lay down on the green hill, and slept.
A few hours later, our entire group stood on the road in Nikka Chuu village, done with the Snowman Trek. To celebrate, Joe and our Bhutanese guides brought out “Marquis de Pompadour” champagne from India and a lemon cake that read in large, earnest letters, “Congratula—“ and on the next line, “—tion.” Soon after, we headed by bus to our hotel in the town of Trongsa, where our first hot showers awaited us after nearly a month without.
Over one of our last meals, we’d started cataloguing our firsts for the Snowman:
Larry: “Crossing three passes over 5,000 meters in one day.”
Kevin: “The highest I’ve ever been.”
Me: “The longest trek.”
Paul: “Twenty-six days of putting up with everyone’s bad jokes.”
Tom, using his pedometer, had calculated that we’d each taken half a million steps during the trip, having walked at least 216 miles. Since the Snowman first opened to foreigners in 1982, approximately 2,000 people have attempted it, with about half that many successfully completing it. More people have made it to the top of Everest than have reached the end of the Snowman. It remains one of the hardest, and least experienced, treks in the world. And surely one of the most spectacular.
Before we all went home, our group stopped at Bhutan’s most spectacular sight: Punakha dzong, the great 17th century fortress built by the Bhutanese king Shabdrung in celebration of the defeat of the Mongols. I went instead to a tiny temple nearby, Chung dzong, to pay my respects to the caretaker monk. Before the Snowman had started, I’d gone there to pray for help with the trek. The caretaker, seeing me, gave me a special blessing and offered to pray for me each day while I was gone. Now I wanted to find him, tell him I did it, give him an offering of money in gratitude.
Chung temple, small, unprepossessing, never attracting many tourists, is one of Bhutan’s holiest sites. A couple of years ago, when a glacial lake burst and nearby Mo River overran its banks, all of the temple was washed away—except for a piece of foundation on which sat the ancient bronze Buddha Shakyamuni statue. This seeming miracle quickly turned the temple into a major pilgrimage site. The Bhutanese insist that all prayers spoken in Chung temple will be answered—but of course you must believe.
It turned out that the caretaker was away. His nephew, a teenaged monk, let me in, and I sat for over an hour before the ancient statue, giving thanks. I’d been given my body back. And my physical health. I tried to imagine what else was possible, what other things might be true. Maybe the dead—people like my brother, or Ryan’s—never really die. Not exactly. Not like we think. Maybe they never really go anywhere.
There must be so little I actually know about anything.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Prisoners of the dragon kingdom T. P. MISHRA
How does it sound when we hear that political prisoners inside jails are mentally tortured with the help of mind control devices? But this is a fact-based saga in the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. Senior human rights leader Tek Nath Rizal is one among the many unknown political prisoners who have suffered brutal torture inflicted by this banned device. From a medical point of view, mind control devices have a direct and bad impact on the brain. Rizal says that one who has been subjected to this gadget will at once become nervous. Other kinds of physical torture will not be felt until consciousness is regained.
The book entitled Bhutan: Hijo Ra Aaja by Balaram Poudel, president of the Bhutan People's Party (BPP), also provides a good illustration of how cruel Bhutanese jails are. It is stated in Poudel's book that before 1992, the Bhutanese authorities stressed inflicting physical punishment on prisoners. According to this book, Dharma Raj Gurung and Padam Dhakal from Dagana district died in jail due to excessive physical torture in 1991. It adds that the whereabouts of Dhakal’s dead body is still unknown.
Not only this, the accurate figure of those who died in jail due to extreme physical torture before and after 1991 has never been made public. In comparison to the early 1990s, the Bhutanese authorities now opt for giving mental instead of physical punishment to political prisoners. This is an attention-grabbing concern as mental punishment has a long-term impact on the sufferer.
We can take yet another example of the saga of a political prisoner in a Bhutanese jail. On Nov. 1, the Druk authorities released Dhan Kumar Rai, 45, founding general secretary of the BPP and an outstanding Bhutanese personality, after 17 years of rigorous imprisonment. Rai says he was kept in solitary confinement for one year.
Rai, generally referred to as the Bhutanese Mandela, is now in Kathmandu for medical treatment for the excessive mental torture he suffered. Rai claims he was mentally tortured in jail for more than a decade. Arrested at Todey in Darjeeling, India on Nov. 17, 1991, he was later handed over to Bhutanese police on the fake charge of being involved in anti-national campaigns. He now suffers from a psychiatric problem due to extreme mental torture.
Many Druk prisoners who have been released say that the most painful physical punishment they faced was having the tips of the fingers pricked with needles.
They also had stones suspended by strings to their private parts. This kind of physical torture is very common in Bhutanese jails.
Hundreds of political prisoners are still believed to be languishing in Bhutanese jails, and their latest status has never been made public. Here arise some significant questions. Where are the international human rights bodies? What is the international community doing to protect the rights of prisoners in Bhutanese jails? Where are the so-called international advocacy groups? How long will India, the world's biggest democracy, remain a mute spectator to the ongoing atrocities in Bhutan? What are those countries that hailed the so-called democratic practice in Bhutan doing? Have the jails in Bhutan ever been visited by any international rights group? These questions still remain unanswered.
However, the role of the International Red Cross Society (ICRC) is worth mentioning here. The ICRC has been actively campaigning for the release of political prisoners in Bhutanese jails. Rai admits that he was released thanks to the heavy and constant pressure the ICRC put on the Druk authorities. But the endeavours of the ICRC alone is not enough to discourage the atrocities being committed in Bhutanese jails.
Bhutan's repeated claims that it has already embarked on a democratic path are nothing but a ploy to hoodwink the international community. There is no independent judiciary in the country, and a fair trial is always doubtful. The fact that Rai was imprisoned for almost 17 years without any justifiable reason serves as a good example.
“Silent state terrorism” still prevails in this tiny kingdom. Freedom of speech is completely restricted. People cannot speak against the government or the monarchy, the so-called supreme institution. The international community should not be duped by Bhutan's illogical concept of having Gross National Happiness in the country. It should always read between the lines of Bhutan's tricky statements.
(The author is editor of the Bhutan News Service and head of the Bhutan Chapter of Dhaka-based Third World Media Network.)
mishratp@gmail.com
The book entitled Bhutan: Hijo Ra Aaja by Balaram Poudel, president of the Bhutan People's Party (BPP), also provides a good illustration of how cruel Bhutanese jails are. It is stated in Poudel's book that before 1992, the Bhutanese authorities stressed inflicting physical punishment on prisoners. According to this book, Dharma Raj Gurung and Padam Dhakal from Dagana district died in jail due to excessive physical torture in 1991. It adds that the whereabouts of Dhakal’s dead body is still unknown.
Not only this, the accurate figure of those who died in jail due to extreme physical torture before and after 1991 has never been made public. In comparison to the early 1990s, the Bhutanese authorities now opt for giving mental instead of physical punishment to political prisoners. This is an attention-grabbing concern as mental punishment has a long-term impact on the sufferer.
We can take yet another example of the saga of a political prisoner in a Bhutanese jail. On Nov. 1, the Druk authorities released Dhan Kumar Rai, 45, founding general secretary of the BPP and an outstanding Bhutanese personality, after 17 years of rigorous imprisonment. Rai says he was kept in solitary confinement for one year.
Rai, generally referred to as the Bhutanese Mandela, is now in Kathmandu for medical treatment for the excessive mental torture he suffered. Rai claims he was mentally tortured in jail for more than a decade. Arrested at Todey in Darjeeling, India on Nov. 17, 1991, he was later handed over to Bhutanese police on the fake charge of being involved in anti-national campaigns. He now suffers from a psychiatric problem due to extreme mental torture.
Many Druk prisoners who have been released say that the most painful physical punishment they faced was having the tips of the fingers pricked with needles.
They also had stones suspended by strings to their private parts. This kind of physical torture is very common in Bhutanese jails.
Hundreds of political prisoners are still believed to be languishing in Bhutanese jails, and their latest status has never been made public. Here arise some significant questions. Where are the international human rights bodies? What is the international community doing to protect the rights of prisoners in Bhutanese jails? Where are the so-called international advocacy groups? How long will India, the world's biggest democracy, remain a mute spectator to the ongoing atrocities in Bhutan? What are those countries that hailed the so-called democratic practice in Bhutan doing? Have the jails in Bhutan ever been visited by any international rights group? These questions still remain unanswered.
However, the role of the International Red Cross Society (ICRC) is worth mentioning here. The ICRC has been actively campaigning for the release of political prisoners in Bhutanese jails. Rai admits that he was released thanks to the heavy and constant pressure the ICRC put on the Druk authorities. But the endeavours of the ICRC alone is not enough to discourage the atrocities being committed in Bhutanese jails.
Bhutan's repeated claims that it has already embarked on a democratic path are nothing but a ploy to hoodwink the international community. There is no independent judiciary in the country, and a fair trial is always doubtful. The fact that Rai was imprisoned for almost 17 years without any justifiable reason serves as a good example.
“Silent state terrorism” still prevails in this tiny kingdom. Freedom of speech is completely restricted. People cannot speak against the government or the monarchy, the so-called supreme institution. The international community should not be duped by Bhutan's illogical concept of having Gross National Happiness in the country. It should always read between the lines of Bhutan's tricky statements.
(The author is editor of the Bhutan News Service and head of the Bhutan Chapter of Dhaka-based Third World Media Network.)
mishratp@gmail.com
All In The Family P. Kharel
in the eve of King Jigme Kheshar Namgyal’s coronation earlier this month, the French news agency, AFP, put out a story datelined Thimpu: "The isolated Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan is to crown its new ruler, with an Oxford-educated bachelor ascending as head of state of the world’s newest democracy." Home to 600,000 people and wedged in remote hills between India and China, Bhutan held its first "democratic" elections for a new parliament and prime minister in March.
Jigme Singhe Wangchuck abdicated two years ago to pave the way for the crowning of the eldest of his five sons and five daughters born to the four sisters he had married over the years. In 1989, he announced his nine-year old son, Keshar, as crown prince, much to the surprise of the rest of the world, including the international media that had been describing the absolute monarch as a bachelor. Such background of Thimpu’s royalty causes some sections to exercise caution in mentioning the marital status of the 28-year-old Keshar.
Systematic suppression
The Bhutanese people were aware of Jigme’s wives and children but so terrified were they of incurring the royal wrath that they maintained an absolute silence. Eventually, the palace, through its embassy in New Delhi, announced to the world that Jigme, till then projected as a highly eligible bachelor, had declared Keshar as his crown prince. The media quoted official sources that the much-married monarch and father of several children had only followed "Bhutan’s way" of announcing marriage and crown prince.
Jigme wielded absolute power. So does his son, except for cosmetic changes in the political structure. The country did not have a formal constitution till recently. Some in the media are dubbing the mere drafting of a constitution and the subsequent elections for parliament democratic exercises. In reality, power is concentrated in the Wangchuck family. Tens of thousands of ethnic Nepalese were delisted or not included at all in the voters’ list for the so-called democratic exercise in March. The majority of members in the legislature have direct ties to the Wangchuck family and its relatives.
Nepalese till the 1980s constituted the largest ethnic grouping representing more than 40 per cent of the country’s population. Nepali language was the lingua franca for Bhutanese in general. But Bhutan’s royals threw out 100,000 Nepalese in the early 1990s during a state-sponsored campaign to impose compulsory national dress and ban the Nepalese language.
The remaining members of this community have been relentless victims of systematic suppression ever since. They are held in high suspicion and deprived of opportunities in government service and other positions of power or lucrative salaries. Obtaining licences for setting up an industry or a major business establishment is an extremely uphill task. Palace nod is required for anything involving financial transaction. Little wonder that the BPP leader Rizal recently described governance in his country as "a family affair".
Driglam Namzha, a royal edict, makes it mandatory for all residents in Bhutan to wear the Druk dress for both men and women. Those not complying are fined, arrested and even tortured. Dashain and Tihar, the two major festivals of Hindus, are not allowed to be celebrated openly. Tens of thousands of ethnic Nepalese have been systematically denied citizenship certificates. Human rights leader Dhan Bahadur Rai, founding general secretary of Bhutan People’s Party (BPP), has been in jail since the last 17 years.
Tek Nath Rizal, now in exile in Nepal, was abducted from Nepal in 1989 and jailed in Bhutan. On November 16, 1989, a Druk aircraft landed at Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan International Airport. The next day Rizal was abducted from Biratnagar and brought to Kathmandu to be dumped into the awaiting Druk aircraft. He was immediately kicked and thrashed by Bhutan’s three senior officials - Vechho Namgey, ADC to King Jigme; Khando Wangcu, a deputy director and son-in-law of the then Bhutanese Tourism Minister; and Gop Wangchhe, royal advisor. The three who abused Rizal were all promoted for the "fine job" they rendered. In a judicial farce, the Bhutanese court declared him guilty of sedition. So absurd was the verdict that the resultant embarrassment compelled the royal regime to eventually give an early release.
Nothing can be said or written against the absolute monarch and his family. The very international media that expressed great concern over the reported killings of a couple of hundred Chinese in Beijing during the Tiananmen Square crisis chose to ignore the fact that the Druk regime killed over 500 people in the autumn of 1990. The ferocity with which Bhutan’s main thoroughfares were turned into killing fields and the manner in which the media largely ignored the gruesome act became conspicuous when they gave wide coverage to Bangladesh as President H.M. Ershad was compelled to pull back the army after 70 persons participating in demonstration against his rule were killed, and he resigned not long after in 1990.
Secretive
The secretive nature of the Druk regime is underscored by its earlier stand that the country’s population stood at 1.3 million. The opposition claimed it to be less than half of that. The cat was out during the protest campaign in 1990, and today the population is placed officially at 600,000. But there are fears that at least 100,000 ethnic Nepalese are not included as Bhutanese nationals. Another 100,000 in the refugee camps in Nepal are also delisted.
In a country where only the state-run newspaper is in circulation, the royal regime arrests people for reading foreign newspapers, especially those originating in Nepal. Ethnic Nepalese are frequently termed "foreigners", "anti-nationals", "terrorists" or "economic refugees". Nepalese began settling in the area in the seventh century and in large numbers since the 17th century as against the fact that the Wangchuk dynasty was established only five generations ago.
The Oxford-educated Keshar would do well to realise before it is too late that serious trouble might be brewing against his regime, what with reports of rebel groups in India training some Bhutanese youths for an armed movement in Bhutan.
Jigme Singhe Wangchuck abdicated two years ago to pave the way for the crowning of the eldest of his five sons and five daughters born to the four sisters he had married over the years. In 1989, he announced his nine-year old son, Keshar, as crown prince, much to the surprise of the rest of the world, including the international media that had been describing the absolute monarch as a bachelor. Such background of Thimpu’s royalty causes some sections to exercise caution in mentioning the marital status of the 28-year-old Keshar.
Systematic suppression
The Bhutanese people were aware of Jigme’s wives and children but so terrified were they of incurring the royal wrath that they maintained an absolute silence. Eventually, the palace, through its embassy in New Delhi, announced to the world that Jigme, till then projected as a highly eligible bachelor, had declared Keshar as his crown prince. The media quoted official sources that the much-married monarch and father of several children had only followed "Bhutan’s way" of announcing marriage and crown prince.
Jigme wielded absolute power. So does his son, except for cosmetic changes in the political structure. The country did not have a formal constitution till recently. Some in the media are dubbing the mere drafting of a constitution and the subsequent elections for parliament democratic exercises. In reality, power is concentrated in the Wangchuck family. Tens of thousands of ethnic Nepalese were delisted or not included at all in the voters’ list for the so-called democratic exercise in March. The majority of members in the legislature have direct ties to the Wangchuck family and its relatives.
Nepalese till the 1980s constituted the largest ethnic grouping representing more than 40 per cent of the country’s population. Nepali language was the lingua franca for Bhutanese in general. But Bhutan’s royals threw out 100,000 Nepalese in the early 1990s during a state-sponsored campaign to impose compulsory national dress and ban the Nepalese language.
The remaining members of this community have been relentless victims of systematic suppression ever since. They are held in high suspicion and deprived of opportunities in government service and other positions of power or lucrative salaries. Obtaining licences for setting up an industry or a major business establishment is an extremely uphill task. Palace nod is required for anything involving financial transaction. Little wonder that the BPP leader Rizal recently described governance in his country as "a family affair".
Driglam Namzha, a royal edict, makes it mandatory for all residents in Bhutan to wear the Druk dress for both men and women. Those not complying are fined, arrested and even tortured. Dashain and Tihar, the two major festivals of Hindus, are not allowed to be celebrated openly. Tens of thousands of ethnic Nepalese have been systematically denied citizenship certificates. Human rights leader Dhan Bahadur Rai, founding general secretary of Bhutan People’s Party (BPP), has been in jail since the last 17 years.
Tek Nath Rizal, now in exile in Nepal, was abducted from Nepal in 1989 and jailed in Bhutan. On November 16, 1989, a Druk aircraft landed at Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan International Airport. The next day Rizal was abducted from Biratnagar and brought to Kathmandu to be dumped into the awaiting Druk aircraft. He was immediately kicked and thrashed by Bhutan’s three senior officials - Vechho Namgey, ADC to King Jigme; Khando Wangcu, a deputy director and son-in-law of the then Bhutanese Tourism Minister; and Gop Wangchhe, royal advisor. The three who abused Rizal were all promoted for the "fine job" they rendered. In a judicial farce, the Bhutanese court declared him guilty of sedition. So absurd was the verdict that the resultant embarrassment compelled the royal regime to eventually give an early release.
Nothing can be said or written against the absolute monarch and his family. The very international media that expressed great concern over the reported killings of a couple of hundred Chinese in Beijing during the Tiananmen Square crisis chose to ignore the fact that the Druk regime killed over 500 people in the autumn of 1990. The ferocity with which Bhutan’s main thoroughfares were turned into killing fields and the manner in which the media largely ignored the gruesome act became conspicuous when they gave wide coverage to Bangladesh as President H.M. Ershad was compelled to pull back the army after 70 persons participating in demonstration against his rule were killed, and he resigned not long after in 1990.
Secretive
The secretive nature of the Druk regime is underscored by its earlier stand that the country’s population stood at 1.3 million. The opposition claimed it to be less than half of that. The cat was out during the protest campaign in 1990, and today the population is placed officially at 600,000. But there are fears that at least 100,000 ethnic Nepalese are not included as Bhutanese nationals. Another 100,000 in the refugee camps in Nepal are also delisted.
In a country where only the state-run newspaper is in circulation, the royal regime arrests people for reading foreign newspapers, especially those originating in Nepal. Ethnic Nepalese are frequently termed "foreigners", "anti-nationals", "terrorists" or "economic refugees". Nepalese began settling in the area in the seventh century and in large numbers since the 17th century as against the fact that the Wangchuk dynasty was established only five generations ago.
The Oxford-educated Keshar would do well to realise before it is too late that serious trouble might be brewing against his regime, what with reports of rebel groups in India training some Bhutanese youths for an armed movement in Bhutan.
To crown it all HARI PRASAD ADHIKARI
Jigme Kheshar Namgyal Wangchuk (JKNW) was declared king of Bhutan on Dec. 14, 2007. Although an official coronation has not been held, he has taken full charge of the kingship, and begun taking action like revising the so-called Indo-Bhutan friendship treaty of February 2007. He then approved Bhutan's constitution written by his father and company that discriminates against Bhutanese on the basis of ethnicity, language, class, political beliefs and loyalty to the king. He also constituted a government under the leadership of Jigme Y. Thinley who became president of the DPT through a controlled election. The present government is only a mouthpiece of the king that legitimizes autocracy in the name of democracy.
Interestingly, he also succeeded in constituting an “opposition party”, which, to quote an idiom, is like a monkey's tail which is neither useful as a stick nor as a weapon. The president of this party, Sange Nidup, and 44 other candidates were scapegoats who were sent to lose in the so-called impartial election to the parliament. After accomplishing the above groundwork to ruin democracy, JKNW is all set for his official coronation scheduled to be celebrated in the Bhutanese capital from Dec. 6-12, 2008.
Representing the Government of India, President Prativa Patil, along with Foreign Minister Pranav Mukharjee, will be present to witness the crowning. All the ambassadors of countries with which Bhutan has diplomatic relations have been invited to attend the ceremony. They include the U.S. ambassador who resides in New Delhi, envoys of the European Parliament and the representative of the United Nations Development Program.
This lavish coronation of the fifth king rests on a pile of government atrocities and looted properties of the citizens. The preceding government carried out the heinous act of evicting about 150,000 Bhutanese citizens between 1988 and 1992, mainly from southern and eastern Bhutan. The government of JKNW is trying to feign ignorance of the expulsion of such a large number of people. And it has not made any attempts to express remorse by giving an assurance of guaranteeing justice to the exiles. Neither is it showing any signs of vacating the properties of evicted Bhutanese which have been given to the king's supporters to occupy.
The ambassadors who are attending the coronation are obviously aware of the above facts, as their governments have been donating money to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugee to feed the refugees who have been living in camps in Nepal. They have also been helping to relocate these refugees to the U.S.A. and other countries. These foreign envoys who will be attending the coronation to observe the pomp and pageantry could have insisted that they will attend on the condition that the Bhutanese government agree to take back the refugees and establish real democracy and human rights in Bhutan.
Trillions of ngultrums (equivalent to Indian rupees) have been expended for the great success of the coronation and recognition of the fifth monarch of the Wangchuk dynasty. Most people in Bhutan, except for the selected clans close to Wangchuk, are not happy with this expensive fanfare.
In conclusion, the people of Bhutan are under constant surveillance by commandos. Their movement is controlled by regulations that require people to possess a travel document and a new citizenship identity card. This has made travel almost impossible for children below the age of 16 years because they are not eligible to get a citizenship identity card according to the government's existing laws. The upcoming coronation, therefore, will not be a happy occasion for a majority of the Bhutanese people and the world at large as it makes a mockery of the agony of the population that has been forced out of the country.
(The writer is a former National Assembly member of Bhutan.)
Interestingly, he also succeeded in constituting an “opposition party”, which, to quote an idiom, is like a monkey's tail which is neither useful as a stick nor as a weapon. The president of this party, Sange Nidup, and 44 other candidates were scapegoats who were sent to lose in the so-called impartial election to the parliament. After accomplishing the above groundwork to ruin democracy, JKNW is all set for his official coronation scheduled to be celebrated in the Bhutanese capital from Dec. 6-12, 2008.
Representing the Government of India, President Prativa Patil, along with Foreign Minister Pranav Mukharjee, will be present to witness the crowning. All the ambassadors of countries with which Bhutan has diplomatic relations have been invited to attend the ceremony. They include the U.S. ambassador who resides in New Delhi, envoys of the European Parliament and the representative of the United Nations Development Program.
This lavish coronation of the fifth king rests on a pile of government atrocities and looted properties of the citizens. The preceding government carried out the heinous act of evicting about 150,000 Bhutanese citizens between 1988 and 1992, mainly from southern and eastern Bhutan. The government of JKNW is trying to feign ignorance of the expulsion of such a large number of people. And it has not made any attempts to express remorse by giving an assurance of guaranteeing justice to the exiles. Neither is it showing any signs of vacating the properties of evicted Bhutanese which have been given to the king's supporters to occupy.
The ambassadors who are attending the coronation are obviously aware of the above facts, as their governments have been donating money to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugee to feed the refugees who have been living in camps in Nepal. They have also been helping to relocate these refugees to the U.S.A. and other countries. These foreign envoys who will be attending the coronation to observe the pomp and pageantry could have insisted that they will attend on the condition that the Bhutanese government agree to take back the refugees and establish real democracy and human rights in Bhutan.
Trillions of ngultrums (equivalent to Indian rupees) have been expended for the great success of the coronation and recognition of the fifth monarch of the Wangchuk dynasty. Most people in Bhutan, except for the selected clans close to Wangchuk, are not happy with this expensive fanfare.
In conclusion, the people of Bhutan are under constant surveillance by commandos. Their movement is controlled by regulations that require people to possess a travel document and a new citizenship identity card. This has made travel almost impossible for children below the age of 16 years because they are not eligible to get a citizenship identity card according to the government's existing laws. The upcoming coronation, therefore, will not be a happy occasion for a majority of the Bhutanese people and the world at large as it makes a mockery of the agony of the population that has been forced out of the country.
(The writer is a former National Assembly member of Bhutan.)
Dealing With The Dragon Hari Prasad Adhikari
Today King Jigme Singye Wangchuk and his son’s government are busy concealing the despotic regime under the veil of professed democracy in Bhutan. King Jigme and his son’s government have triumphed in the first step by constituting a so-called democratic government of Bhutan with a 95% majority, backed fully by the Chief Election Commissioner Kunzang Wangdi. Along with this, it has constituted a National Council (upper house) and National Assembly (lower house). Surprisingly, Sangye Nidup’s political party, the People’s Democratic Party of Bhutan (PDP), has been made a scapegoat in this election drama.
Ethnic cleansing
In the upper house, King Jigme and his son’s government appointed so-called neutral persons for contesting the election individually from the respective districts, although it is clear that there received abundant blessing from the government to become winners in the Parliament by an absolute majority. All were erstwhile portfolio holders who were also instrumental in implementing the "Drukpa" (sub sect of the Kayukpa, a branch of Mahayana Buddhism) nationalism from 1985-2008, paving the way for ethnic cleansing in Bhutan.
The king and the government are tirelessly working to mask the ethnic cleansing in Bhutan. And in this endeavour, Home Minister and Prime Minister Jigme Y. Thinley has been elected for a second term to lead the newly elected government. Thinley has a history of serving the king’s government as zonal administrator of eastern Bhutan in 1990, Home Secretary, Foreign Minister and Ambassador to the UN. Other ministers in his team all were then ministers and bureaucrats who implemented the official ethnic cleansing policy. Among them, one was responsible for masterminding the kidnap of Tek Nath Rizal from his residence in exile at Birtamode, Nepal.
According to the present work division, Thinley’s team succeeded in getting the king’s written constitution approved and eye washed the people of Bhutan and the international community. This way, the king’s right has been restored all in all in the constitution as the three main elements of the kingdom, i.e., King, Constitution and Parliament (KCP). Interestingly, the life of this document and its legislative body is extremely vulnerable since the king can make it null and void by a simple letter. Therefore, the king and his coterie of relatives can easily obstruct issues of national interest whenever they feel like it.
Thinley’s team has accomplished the first phase of introducing veiled democracy and is now carrying out the second phase by campaigning it as a unique and the purest form of democracy. Thinley chose the Colombo SAARC summit as the first platform to disseminate this propaganda. Thereafter, he attended the 63rd session of the United Nations General Assembly to misguide the world. In the general assembly, he shamelessly said, "There was no voice for democracy from the public side in Bhutan, rather the king himself voluntarily surrendered his power in favour of his subjects." As if the UN is unaware of the Bhutanese’s refugee crisis!
Also, he contradicted the reports of the sub office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva, the International Red Cross Society (ICRC), Amnesty International, State Department of the United States of America and many other human rights groups that have a record of the violation of democratic rights, citizen rights, ethnic rights and religious right.
Thinley is having a hard time proving his claim though, as recommendation of third country settlement of Bhutanese refugees is a strong evidence. Another one is the restriction of the UNHCR to enter Bhutan for monitoring the settlement programme (in case of repatriation after joint verification by a team of Bhutan and Nepal).
Thanks to the UN and American laws, both were unable to punish Thinley at the forum of this apex world assembly. Actually, Thinley was representing the government of Bhutan that evicted 100,000 people who are now compelled to relocate to places in the USA, Europe, Canada and Australia under the arrangement of the UNHCR. The recorded speech given by Thinley as head of the government of Bhutan to the 63rd general assembly of the UN is available. This evidence must be made the basis for enquiry of real democracy in Bhutan and for verification of the looted properties of its own citizens and the existence of racial discriminatory laws in the country. An enquiry must be made into the claim of the so-called democracy of Bhutan, and the king and his government must be held accountable if there have been violation of human and other rights in Bhutan.
Restrictions
It is now particularly easy for the governments of the United States, Australia and Canada to collect proof of the crimes committed by the government of Bhutan from the more than 4,000 victims who have already been relocated in these countries from the Bhutanese refugee camps in Nepal. Officials of the Bhutanese government must, therefore, be restricted from visiting the United States and other Western nations for private and official purposes.
(The author is a former National Assembly member of Bhutan)
Ethnic cleansing
In the upper house, King Jigme and his son’s government appointed so-called neutral persons for contesting the election individually from the respective districts, although it is clear that there received abundant blessing from the government to become winners in the Parliament by an absolute majority. All were erstwhile portfolio holders who were also instrumental in implementing the "Drukpa" (sub sect of the Kayukpa, a branch of Mahayana Buddhism) nationalism from 1985-2008, paving the way for ethnic cleansing in Bhutan.
The king and the government are tirelessly working to mask the ethnic cleansing in Bhutan. And in this endeavour, Home Minister and Prime Minister Jigme Y. Thinley has been elected for a second term to lead the newly elected government. Thinley has a history of serving the king’s government as zonal administrator of eastern Bhutan in 1990, Home Secretary, Foreign Minister and Ambassador to the UN. Other ministers in his team all were then ministers and bureaucrats who implemented the official ethnic cleansing policy. Among them, one was responsible for masterminding the kidnap of Tek Nath Rizal from his residence in exile at Birtamode, Nepal.
According to the present work division, Thinley’s team succeeded in getting the king’s written constitution approved and eye washed the people of Bhutan and the international community. This way, the king’s right has been restored all in all in the constitution as the three main elements of the kingdom, i.e., King, Constitution and Parliament (KCP). Interestingly, the life of this document and its legislative body is extremely vulnerable since the king can make it null and void by a simple letter. Therefore, the king and his coterie of relatives can easily obstruct issues of national interest whenever they feel like it.
Thinley’s team has accomplished the first phase of introducing veiled democracy and is now carrying out the second phase by campaigning it as a unique and the purest form of democracy. Thinley chose the Colombo SAARC summit as the first platform to disseminate this propaganda. Thereafter, he attended the 63rd session of the United Nations General Assembly to misguide the world. In the general assembly, he shamelessly said, "There was no voice for democracy from the public side in Bhutan, rather the king himself voluntarily surrendered his power in favour of his subjects." As if the UN is unaware of the Bhutanese’s refugee crisis!
Also, he contradicted the reports of the sub office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva, the International Red Cross Society (ICRC), Amnesty International, State Department of the United States of America and many other human rights groups that have a record of the violation of democratic rights, citizen rights, ethnic rights and religious right.
Thinley is having a hard time proving his claim though, as recommendation of third country settlement of Bhutanese refugees is a strong evidence. Another one is the restriction of the UNHCR to enter Bhutan for monitoring the settlement programme (in case of repatriation after joint verification by a team of Bhutan and Nepal).
Thanks to the UN and American laws, both were unable to punish Thinley at the forum of this apex world assembly. Actually, Thinley was representing the government of Bhutan that evicted 100,000 people who are now compelled to relocate to places in the USA, Europe, Canada and Australia under the arrangement of the UNHCR. The recorded speech given by Thinley as head of the government of Bhutan to the 63rd general assembly of the UN is available. This evidence must be made the basis for enquiry of real democracy in Bhutan and for verification of the looted properties of its own citizens and the existence of racial discriminatory laws in the country. An enquiry must be made into the claim of the so-called democracy of Bhutan, and the king and his government must be held accountable if there have been violation of human and other rights in Bhutan.
Restrictions
It is now particularly easy for the governments of the United States, Australia and Canada to collect proof of the crimes committed by the government of Bhutan from the more than 4,000 victims who have already been relocated in these countries from the Bhutanese refugee camps in Nepal. Officials of the Bhutanese government must, therefore, be restricted from visiting the United States and other Western nations for private and official purposes.
(The author is a former National Assembly member of Bhutan)
We shall return to Bhutan BY HARI PRASAD ADHIKARI
The Bhutanese of Nepali and Sarchop origins did not come to Nepal to savour camp cuisine or to ask the international community to donate clothes and huts as the royal government of Bhutan has been accusing them of doing. They would not have been forced to live on handouts had they been permitted to live in peace in Bhutan. They had houses to reside in and enough land to till. They had jobs. They were making a good living in Bhutan. But they were evicted from their own houses and their jobs taken away by the royal government at the behest of King Jigme Singye Wangchuk (KJSW). The royal government confiscated everything they possessed including their Bhutanese citizenship. The harsh and racially discriminatory laws of 1985 superseded the 1958 citizenship law. The reason for such punishment being meted out to the Bhutanese of Nepali and Sarchop origins was their call for democracy in Bhutan.
Initially, the evicted Bhutanese obtained refuge in Assam and West Bengal for about two years. From there, the Bhutan People's Party (BPP) organized peaceful demonstrations in various sub-divisions and district headquarters. Between 1990 and 1992, tens of thousands of Bhutanese participated in the demonstrations to demand their political rights.
The BPP guided and provided logistic support for the demonstrations from Garganda, its headquarters in exile. The office was kept under constant surveillance by the West Bengal Police and intelligence agents of both the state and the central governments. On several occasions, the superintendent of police and the deputy commissioner of the district met the top leadership of the BPP and submitted its political demands to the king through the central government. The deputy commissioner of Jalpaiguri often participated in the meetings called by Bhutan's Home Ministry regarding the Bhutanese refugee crisis.
After having received asylum in India for two years, the Bhutanese were rounded up by the same Indian police force, packed into trucks and transported to the Nepal border where they were dumped at the Mechi Bridge in Jhapa. Suddenly finding itself confronted by thousands of Bhutanese refugees who were dying daily of diarrhoea and starvation at its doorstep, Nepal had no choice but to act to save them. Finally, Nepal invited the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to intervene.
Since then, the Bhutanese refugees have been fighting for democracy in Bhutan. They have been trying to reach a political solution as the humanitarian assistance being provided in the UNHCR-administered camps cannot be taken as a permanent solution. The refugees held a bicycle rally to Phuentsoling Gate which marks the entry point into Bhutan. They also marched to Thimphu and staged a satyagraha. During these peaceful movements, thousands of refugees were jailed and many injured. A number of them died on the way to Bhutan. One was shot dead by West Bengal police at the Mechi Bridge.
Along with the public demonstrations, bilateral talks were held to allow the refugees to be repatriated with dignity and honour, but they got nowhere. Bhutan did not budge an inch. One of the reasons for not permitting the refugees to return to Bhutan was India's opposition to the process of repatriation and its tacit support of Bhutan's policy of ethnic cleansing.
The root cause of the Bhutanese refugee crisis was the plan crafted by King Jigme Singe Wangchuk and his henchmen to completely rid Bhutan of Nepali Bhutanese. Accordingly, the king imposed Drukpa dress and language code on the Nepali-speaking people. (Drukpa is a sub-sect of Kargyukpa of Mahayana Buddhism.) Subsequently, he asked them to produce documents to prove their nationality. Land tax receipts of 1958 were one of the documents demanded. Many could not produce this paperwork because they were born after 1958. A newly recruited militia under the direct command of the king was detailed to detain the disqualified people. The militia tortured them and raped the women. Men were murdered and their property looted. Many Bhutanese left for safer places to escape the terror. The leaders sought asylum in India and Nepal.
We had hoped that the Nepal government would mobilise support to speed up the repatriation process. But our hopes were shattered when Nepal accepted Bhutan's proposal to categorize the refugees. This was the original concept of KJSW. We thought there was a fresh chance when Nepal and Bhutan signed an agreement at the time Dr. Bhesh Bahadur Thapa was foreign minister. It was agreed that the refugees categorised as one, two and four were eligible for repatriation. Unfortunately, this plan too fell apart when the third country settlement plan was brought forward to crush the two-decade-long democratic movement. This brought disunity among the refugees who were divided into those supporting third country settlement and those advocating repatriation
Whatever be the situation now, we still hope that the Maoist-led government will push for the repatriation of Bhutanese refugees. Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal should meet Jigme Y. Thinley and press the case for repatriation. If Bhutan continues to insist on third country resettlement, Nepal should hold frank talks with India, China and the United States. India cannot side with the dictator and prevent thousands of people from returning to their country. The tyrant who has committed crimes should be tried in court. The fast changing political situations in Nepal and North Bengal, where Nepalis are demanding a separate state to be called Gorkhaland, have given some hope for the refugees. The Maoist-led government should make itself clear that it backs repatriation. Let India and Bhutan know that they cannot block the process of repatriation. Nepal must guarantee the right of return of every Bhutanese.
(The writer is a former National Assembly member of Bhutan.)
Initially, the evicted Bhutanese obtained refuge in Assam and West Bengal for about two years. From there, the Bhutan People's Party (BPP) organized peaceful demonstrations in various sub-divisions and district headquarters. Between 1990 and 1992, tens of thousands of Bhutanese participated in the demonstrations to demand their political rights.
The BPP guided and provided logistic support for the demonstrations from Garganda, its headquarters in exile. The office was kept under constant surveillance by the West Bengal Police and intelligence agents of both the state and the central governments. On several occasions, the superintendent of police and the deputy commissioner of the district met the top leadership of the BPP and submitted its political demands to the king through the central government. The deputy commissioner of Jalpaiguri often participated in the meetings called by Bhutan's Home Ministry regarding the Bhutanese refugee crisis.
After having received asylum in India for two years, the Bhutanese were rounded up by the same Indian police force, packed into trucks and transported to the Nepal border where they were dumped at the Mechi Bridge in Jhapa. Suddenly finding itself confronted by thousands of Bhutanese refugees who were dying daily of diarrhoea and starvation at its doorstep, Nepal had no choice but to act to save them. Finally, Nepal invited the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to intervene.
Since then, the Bhutanese refugees have been fighting for democracy in Bhutan. They have been trying to reach a political solution as the humanitarian assistance being provided in the UNHCR-administered camps cannot be taken as a permanent solution. The refugees held a bicycle rally to Phuentsoling Gate which marks the entry point into Bhutan. They also marched to Thimphu and staged a satyagraha. During these peaceful movements, thousands of refugees were jailed and many injured. A number of them died on the way to Bhutan. One was shot dead by West Bengal police at the Mechi Bridge.
Along with the public demonstrations, bilateral talks were held to allow the refugees to be repatriated with dignity and honour, but they got nowhere. Bhutan did not budge an inch. One of the reasons for not permitting the refugees to return to Bhutan was India's opposition to the process of repatriation and its tacit support of Bhutan's policy of ethnic cleansing.
The root cause of the Bhutanese refugee crisis was the plan crafted by King Jigme Singe Wangchuk and his henchmen to completely rid Bhutan of Nepali Bhutanese. Accordingly, the king imposed Drukpa dress and language code on the Nepali-speaking people. (Drukpa is a sub-sect of Kargyukpa of Mahayana Buddhism.) Subsequently, he asked them to produce documents to prove their nationality. Land tax receipts of 1958 were one of the documents demanded. Many could not produce this paperwork because they were born after 1958. A newly recruited militia under the direct command of the king was detailed to detain the disqualified people. The militia tortured them and raped the women. Men were murdered and their property looted. Many Bhutanese left for safer places to escape the terror. The leaders sought asylum in India and Nepal.
We had hoped that the Nepal government would mobilise support to speed up the repatriation process. But our hopes were shattered when Nepal accepted Bhutan's proposal to categorize the refugees. This was the original concept of KJSW. We thought there was a fresh chance when Nepal and Bhutan signed an agreement at the time Dr. Bhesh Bahadur Thapa was foreign minister. It was agreed that the refugees categorised as one, two and four were eligible for repatriation. Unfortunately, this plan too fell apart when the third country settlement plan was brought forward to crush the two-decade-long democratic movement. This brought disunity among the refugees who were divided into those supporting third country settlement and those advocating repatriation
Whatever be the situation now, we still hope that the Maoist-led government will push for the repatriation of Bhutanese refugees. Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal should meet Jigme Y. Thinley and press the case for repatriation. If Bhutan continues to insist on third country resettlement, Nepal should hold frank talks with India, China and the United States. India cannot side with the dictator and prevent thousands of people from returning to their country. The tyrant who has committed crimes should be tried in court. The fast changing political situations in Nepal and North Bengal, where Nepalis are demanding a separate state to be called Gorkhaland, have given some hope for the refugees. The Maoist-led government should make itself clear that it backs repatriation. Let India and Bhutan know that they cannot block the process of repatriation. Nepal must guarantee the right of return of every Bhutanese.
(The writer is a former National Assembly member of Bhutan.)
Not Thrilled By New Treaty Hari Prasad Adhikari
The fifth king of Bhutan, Jigme Kheshar Namgyal Wangchuk (KJKNW), is at the threshold of getting an official coronation. In all probability, on November 6 this year, he will be crowned, though he has been king of Bhutan since December 14, 2007. Before taking up the king’s charge, he clandestinely visited New Delhi to get the blessing from Delhi Durbar. He was accompanied by his maternal uncle Sangye Nidup, the then Agriculture Minister of Bhutan.
Self-reliance
Within a span of a few months, he again visited India officially to sign the so-called revised India-Bhutan Friendship Treaty of 2007. The Bhutanese people had been waiting since the third king’s tenure to replace the old treaty. In order to put pressure on the Indian government to revise the treaty of 1949, the Bhutanese people adopted a self-reliance policy to reduce Bhutan’s dependence on India.
On the other hand, they suggested mobilising international aid, in place of major Indian aid, in key development projects. But King Jigme Singye Wangchuk could not keep this policy for long. He slipped and got trapped into the marsh of Indian diplomacy. Prematurely, he signed several hydro projects at lesser market cost. He sold about half a dozen power projects to India at dirt cheap rates, the brunt of this loss being born by the innocent population of Bhutan. On top of this, he adopted the Drukpa (sub sect of Kayukpa of Mahayana Buddhism) nationalism, ignoring the majority Nyigmapa (other section of Mahayana Buddhism) and Hinduism.
Hydro electrical projects became the influential instrument to keep the absolute monarchy intact and a means to review the friendship treaty with India. Unfortunately it failed to achieve the goal as desired by the people of Bhutan. To elaborate on this point, the following key paragraphs of the 1949 treaty are reproduced along with the new treaty.
(1) "The government of India undertakes to exercise no interference in the internal administration of Bhutan. On its part, the government of Bhutan agrees to be guided by the advice of the government of India in regard to external relations." ( 6) "The government of India agrees that the government of Bhutan shall be free to import, with the assistance and approval of the government of India from or through India into Bhutan, whatever arms, ammunition, machinery, warlike materials or store may be require or desired for the strength and welfare of Bhutan, and that this arrangement shall hold good for all time as long as the government of India is satisfied that the intentions of the government of Bhutan are friendly and that there is no danger to India from such importation." (This article has remained almost as it is in the new one, too).
(7) "The government of India and government of Bhutan agree that the Bhutanese subjects residing in Indian territories shall have equal justice with Indian subjects and the Indian subjects residing in Bhutan shall have equal justice with the subjects of the government of Bhutan." (9) "Any differences and disputes arising in the application or interpretation of this treaty shall in the first instance be settled by negotiation. If within three months of the start of the negotiation no settlement is arrived at, then the matter shall be referred to arbitration of three arbitrators, who shall be nationals of either India or Bhutan chosen in the following manner: (1) One person nominated by government of India; (2) one person nominated by government of Bhutan; (3) A judge of the federal court, or of a high court in India to be chosen by the government of Bhutan, who shall be chairman. The judgment of this tribunal shall be final and executed without delay by either party.
All the above objectionable clauses, sentences and paragraphs are veiled and have been made even stronger than before by the new treaty. The new treaty has added and replaced the following key paragraphs in the so-called Indo-Bhutan Treaty of 2007 signed by King Jigme Kheshar Namgyal Wangchuk himself for his coronation in which he needed India’s support.
For instance, (from paragraph 3-6 in the Preamble of the 2007 treaty) "Recalling the historical relations that have existed between the two countries; Recognising with deep satisfaction the manner in which these relations have evolved, matured over the years into a model of good neighbourly relation; Being fully committed to further strengthening this enduring and mutually beneficial relationship based on genuine good will and friendship, shared interest, and close understanding and cooperation; Desiring to clearly reflect this exemplary relationship as it stands today; and having decided, through mutual consent, to update the 1949 treaty relating to the promotion of, fostering the relation of friendship and neighbourliness between India and Bhutan; Have agreed as follows ( Article 1) There shall be perpetual peace and friendship between India and Bhutan . (2) In keeping with the abiding ties, the close friendship and cooperation between Bhutan and India, the government of the Kingdom of Bhutan and Republican India shall cooperate closely with each other on issues relating to their national interest. Neither government shall allow the use of territory for activities harmful to the national security and interest of the other.
(9)Any difference and dispute arising in the interpretation and application of this treaty shall be settled bilaterally by negotiation in a spirit of trust and understanding in consonance with the historically close ties of friendship and mutually beneficial cooperation from the bedrock of Bhutan-India relation."
People’s confidence
If all these tactics were not for the reward, the people of Bhutan would have been taken into confidence, instead of the kings, while signing the treaties.
(Adhikari is a former National Assembly member of Bhutan)
Self-reliance
Within a span of a few months, he again visited India officially to sign the so-called revised India-Bhutan Friendship Treaty of 2007. The Bhutanese people had been waiting since the third king’s tenure to replace the old treaty. In order to put pressure on the Indian government to revise the treaty of 1949, the Bhutanese people adopted a self-reliance policy to reduce Bhutan’s dependence on India.
On the other hand, they suggested mobilising international aid, in place of major Indian aid, in key development projects. But King Jigme Singye Wangchuk could not keep this policy for long. He slipped and got trapped into the marsh of Indian diplomacy. Prematurely, he signed several hydro projects at lesser market cost. He sold about half a dozen power projects to India at dirt cheap rates, the brunt of this loss being born by the innocent population of Bhutan. On top of this, he adopted the Drukpa (sub sect of Kayukpa of Mahayana Buddhism) nationalism, ignoring the majority Nyigmapa (other section of Mahayana Buddhism) and Hinduism.
Hydro electrical projects became the influential instrument to keep the absolute monarchy intact and a means to review the friendship treaty with India. Unfortunately it failed to achieve the goal as desired by the people of Bhutan. To elaborate on this point, the following key paragraphs of the 1949 treaty are reproduced along with the new treaty.
(1) "The government of India undertakes to exercise no interference in the internal administration of Bhutan. On its part, the government of Bhutan agrees to be guided by the advice of the government of India in regard to external relations." ( 6) "The government of India agrees that the government of Bhutan shall be free to import, with the assistance and approval of the government of India from or through India into Bhutan, whatever arms, ammunition, machinery, warlike materials or store may be require or desired for the strength and welfare of Bhutan, and that this arrangement shall hold good for all time as long as the government of India is satisfied that the intentions of the government of Bhutan are friendly and that there is no danger to India from such importation." (This article has remained almost as it is in the new one, too).
(7) "The government of India and government of Bhutan agree that the Bhutanese subjects residing in Indian territories shall have equal justice with Indian subjects and the Indian subjects residing in Bhutan shall have equal justice with the subjects of the government of Bhutan." (9) "Any differences and disputes arising in the application or interpretation of this treaty shall in the first instance be settled by negotiation. If within three months of the start of the negotiation no settlement is arrived at, then the matter shall be referred to arbitration of three arbitrators, who shall be nationals of either India or Bhutan chosen in the following manner: (1) One person nominated by government of India; (2) one person nominated by government of Bhutan; (3) A judge of the federal court, or of a high court in India to be chosen by the government of Bhutan, who shall be chairman. The judgment of this tribunal shall be final and executed without delay by either party.
All the above objectionable clauses, sentences and paragraphs are veiled and have been made even stronger than before by the new treaty. The new treaty has added and replaced the following key paragraphs in the so-called Indo-Bhutan Treaty of 2007 signed by King Jigme Kheshar Namgyal Wangchuk himself for his coronation in which he needed India’s support.
For instance, (from paragraph 3-6 in the Preamble of the 2007 treaty) "Recalling the historical relations that have existed between the two countries; Recognising with deep satisfaction the manner in which these relations have evolved, matured over the years into a model of good neighbourly relation; Being fully committed to further strengthening this enduring and mutually beneficial relationship based on genuine good will and friendship, shared interest, and close understanding and cooperation; Desiring to clearly reflect this exemplary relationship as it stands today; and having decided, through mutual consent, to update the 1949 treaty relating to the promotion of, fostering the relation of friendship and neighbourliness between India and Bhutan; Have agreed as follows ( Article 1) There shall be perpetual peace and friendship between India and Bhutan . (2) In keeping with the abiding ties, the close friendship and cooperation between Bhutan and India, the government of the Kingdom of Bhutan and Republican India shall cooperate closely with each other on issues relating to their national interest. Neither government shall allow the use of territory for activities harmful to the national security and interest of the other.
(9)Any difference and dispute arising in the interpretation and application of this treaty shall be settled bilaterally by negotiation in a spirit of trust and understanding in consonance with the historically close ties of friendship and mutually beneficial cooperation from the bedrock of Bhutan-India relation."
People’s confidence
If all these tactics were not for the reward, the people of Bhutan would have been taken into confidence, instead of the kings, while signing the treaties.
(Adhikari is a former National Assembly member of Bhutan)
Nepal-Bhutan talks By Narayan Sharma
Bhutanese prime minister Jigme Y Thinlay has reportedly expressed Bhutan's desire to resume the derailed bilateral consultation with Nepal over the refugee issue. Bhutan has over the years, strategically, procrastinated the solution-seeking process and shifted the onus on Nepal. It has floated the propaganda that its seriousness over the refugee issue notwithstanding, Nepal's political instability and vacillation in its refugee diplomacy pre-empted a solution. With a new government in place in Kathmandu with a secure numerical strength, Thimphu will have no immediate alibi to further forestall bilateralism. Should Nepal opt to evade the alleged culpability, it must resume bilateral exercise at the earliest.
Here are a few significant issues for Nepal to be cognizant of while engaging Bhutan in the future bilateral exercise.
Human classification: A series of Nepal-Bhutan bilateral talks held over a number of years were based on a wrong premise of human classification. This was in turn based on Bhutan's maneuvering that there were non-Bhutanese in the camps. Bhutan's intention has been loud and clear: To minimize the southern Bhutanese population to fit its sectarian nationalist agenda that warrants minimizing the southern Bhutanese strength. Refugee classification is an effort to preempt return of as many Bhutanese as possible. Classification as malafide per se is unambiguous, given its result that criminalizes scores of infants classifying them in the criminal category!
Any future engagement needs to undo these wrongs perpetrated previously.
Conditions imposed upon possible returnees: The post-classification Agreed Position on the Four Categories (APFC) unnerved the refugees as never before. The APFC required the perpetrator government to repatriate just the first category accounting to a paltry 2.5 percent of the total verified. Having thus diminished its responsibility through diplomatic haggling, the Bhutanese government imposed a series of conditions upon possible returnees to be considered worthy of citizenship, a status that was robbed of them years ago. The process lacked transparency.
While the Bhutanese government claims that the conditions were integral to bilateral diplomatic process, the Nepali side maintains that Bhutan imposed them without its acquiescence and contrary to the terms and conditions as agreed in the Ministerial Joint Committee.
The conditions include a compulsory probation period of two years wherein the repatriates' "patriotism" would be tested. Other tenets of this weird examination are that one "must not be engaged in activities that contravene Bhutan's laws, should be able to speak Dzongkha, must have good knowledge of the culture, customs, traditions and history of Bhutan, shall not be associated with activities of any anti-national organization/individuals, must have no record of having spoken or acted against the king, country and people of Bhutan in any manner whatsoever".
Finally, the government reserves the prerogative of whether or not awarding citizenship status to the repatriates upon its subjective satisfaction of having fulfilled the criteria imposed. Any enquiring mind can fathom the mala-fide intention inherent in these set of conditions. Acquiescence to return under such constraints would leave the returnees at the virtual mercy of a very hostile government which precisely was the author of their misery.
And therefore, Bhutanese refugees cannot return under the terms of such draconian conditions. Any future engagement of Nepal with Bhutan must obviate such and other contingencies aimed to defeat the core reason and sanctity of the exercise. Repatriation must be undertaken with honor and dignity, not obviously under the government's whims and fancies.
Simultaneous repatriation: Upon voluntary determination by refugees to return, the two governments must undertake instantaneous repatriation without delaying for the completion of their diplomatic vagrancies. That was one of fallibilities of the past bilateral exercise. Despite determination of their status, refugees' return was delayed to eventually abort the process upon discovering a frail excuse. Bhutan is expected to continue its ingenious tactics of prevaricating the bilateral exercise and repatriation.
Reintegration in the original homesteads: The Bhutanese refugee situation is an expression of Bhutan's homogenizing agenda in perusal of its meta-objective of cultural nationalism. It has not only excluded southern Bhutanese by physical eviction, but has simultaneously unleashed a cultural onslaught on their distinct culture, tradition, customs, religion and language. Even if it were to agree to repatriation, its design is to assimilate them within the Drukpa ethos and to obliterate their distinct identity. This remains a clarion call of the Bhutanese brand of "unique nationalism" propagated in the name of "One Nation, One People." Nepal must raise this concern in any future engagement with Bhutan in right earnest.
Nepal's stake: Nepal must remain cognizant of its stake in the Bhutanese refugee situation. If a durable solution is not found for all the refugees, the responsibility lies with Nepal as the host country. That does not, however, justify any action in haste. Nepal needs to approach cautiously and consistently until the last human being in the camp is integrated either by repatriation or third country settlement. Reintegration is considered the anchor of repatriation, which entails the inclusion of the repatriates in all fronts of the country's mainstream. If that is not achieved, repatriation fails ensuring a holistic solution and remains a shift of venue.
Concerning Bhutanese refugees, repatriation sans Bhutan's serious commitment might usher another influx given Bhutan's ethno-politicking and India's approach. In that event, Nepal may need to face a second brunt. That calls for a conscious approach in its refugee diplomacy. It should work to forge a composite agreement with Bhutan and the core countries that have begun resettling refugees in their national territories. That would bind Bhutan to honor its commitment and also address Nepal's concerns for all the times to come.
(The writer is Assistant Professor, Kathmandu School of Law)
Posted on: 2008-08-27 20:35:48 (Server Time)
Here are a few significant issues for Nepal to be cognizant of while engaging Bhutan in the future bilateral exercise.
Human classification: A series of Nepal-Bhutan bilateral talks held over a number of years were based on a wrong premise of human classification. This was in turn based on Bhutan's maneuvering that there were non-Bhutanese in the camps. Bhutan's intention has been loud and clear: To minimize the southern Bhutanese population to fit its sectarian nationalist agenda that warrants minimizing the southern Bhutanese strength. Refugee classification is an effort to preempt return of as many Bhutanese as possible. Classification as malafide per se is unambiguous, given its result that criminalizes scores of infants classifying them in the criminal category!
Any future engagement needs to undo these wrongs perpetrated previously.
Conditions imposed upon possible returnees: The post-classification Agreed Position on the Four Categories (APFC) unnerved the refugees as never before. The APFC required the perpetrator government to repatriate just the first category accounting to a paltry 2.5 percent of the total verified. Having thus diminished its responsibility through diplomatic haggling, the Bhutanese government imposed a series of conditions upon possible returnees to be considered worthy of citizenship, a status that was robbed of them years ago. The process lacked transparency.
While the Bhutanese government claims that the conditions were integral to bilateral diplomatic process, the Nepali side maintains that Bhutan imposed them without its acquiescence and contrary to the terms and conditions as agreed in the Ministerial Joint Committee.
The conditions include a compulsory probation period of two years wherein the repatriates' "patriotism" would be tested. Other tenets of this weird examination are that one "must not be engaged in activities that contravene Bhutan's laws, should be able to speak Dzongkha, must have good knowledge of the culture, customs, traditions and history of Bhutan, shall not be associated with activities of any anti-national organization/individuals, must have no record of having spoken or acted against the king, country and people of Bhutan in any manner whatsoever".
Finally, the government reserves the prerogative of whether or not awarding citizenship status to the repatriates upon its subjective satisfaction of having fulfilled the criteria imposed. Any enquiring mind can fathom the mala-fide intention inherent in these set of conditions. Acquiescence to return under such constraints would leave the returnees at the virtual mercy of a very hostile government which precisely was the author of their misery.
And therefore, Bhutanese refugees cannot return under the terms of such draconian conditions. Any future engagement of Nepal with Bhutan must obviate such and other contingencies aimed to defeat the core reason and sanctity of the exercise. Repatriation must be undertaken with honor and dignity, not obviously under the government's whims and fancies.
Simultaneous repatriation: Upon voluntary determination by refugees to return, the two governments must undertake instantaneous repatriation without delaying for the completion of their diplomatic vagrancies. That was one of fallibilities of the past bilateral exercise. Despite determination of their status, refugees' return was delayed to eventually abort the process upon discovering a frail excuse. Bhutan is expected to continue its ingenious tactics of prevaricating the bilateral exercise and repatriation.
Reintegration in the original homesteads: The Bhutanese refugee situation is an expression of Bhutan's homogenizing agenda in perusal of its meta-objective of cultural nationalism. It has not only excluded southern Bhutanese by physical eviction, but has simultaneously unleashed a cultural onslaught on their distinct culture, tradition, customs, religion and language. Even if it were to agree to repatriation, its design is to assimilate them within the Drukpa ethos and to obliterate their distinct identity. This remains a clarion call of the Bhutanese brand of "unique nationalism" propagated in the name of "One Nation, One People." Nepal must raise this concern in any future engagement with Bhutan in right earnest.
Nepal's stake: Nepal must remain cognizant of its stake in the Bhutanese refugee situation. If a durable solution is not found for all the refugees, the responsibility lies with Nepal as the host country. That does not, however, justify any action in haste. Nepal needs to approach cautiously and consistently until the last human being in the camp is integrated either by repatriation or third country settlement. Reintegration is considered the anchor of repatriation, which entails the inclusion of the repatriates in all fronts of the country's mainstream. If that is not achieved, repatriation fails ensuring a holistic solution and remains a shift of venue.
Concerning Bhutanese refugees, repatriation sans Bhutan's serious commitment might usher another influx given Bhutan's ethno-politicking and India's approach. In that event, Nepal may need to face a second brunt. That calls for a conscious approach in its refugee diplomacy. It should work to forge a composite agreement with Bhutan and the core countries that have begun resettling refugees in their national territories. That would bind Bhutan to honor its commitment and also address Nepal's concerns for all the times to come.
(The writer is Assistant Professor, Kathmandu School of Law)
Posted on: 2008-08-27 20:35:48 (Server Time)
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