Half an hour outside of the small dusty town of Damak in eastern Nepal is a tiny bamboo village. This town is almost thirty years old, yet does not exist on Nepali maps. Its name has a number at the end, it has no mayor, its local government is not paid, and most of its operations are run by the United Nations. This small hamlet, known as Beldangi II, is the last remaining refugee camp populated by the Lhotshampa people of southern Bhutan. They were forcefully exiled between 1989 and 1991, and although a vast majority of these refugees have resettled in countries across the world, thousands are still living in Beldangi II. These few thousand Lhotshampa faced unimaginable hardships at the hands of the government of a country in which a majority can trace their bloodlines back centuries, and though many have been given new homes, as many as 6,500 have been left behind in a bamboo town forgotten by the 21st century.
Beginning as simple laborers as early as the 17th century, the Lhotshampa inhabited the tropical lowlands of Bhutan, bringing over a unique culture from their homeland of Nepal. Initially, the Bhutanese monarchy did not concern itself with this mass immigration, as Bhutan had too few unskilled laborers to fulfill the aspiration of the head of state, the Druk Gyalpo, and this inflow of potential working hands was believed to only be beneficial to the state.
In fact, beginning in the 20th century, the Bhutanese monarchy even encouraged large families to settle in the southern lowlands, since the larger the overlooked illegal population was, the more tax money the government could collect, while at the same time denying basic care and rights to the Lhotshampan immigrants. As the Lhotshampa flowed in from Nepal, their population in the south ballooned, eclipsing the population of native Bhutanese, which came to be a concern to the Bhutanese monarchy in the early 20th century.
While under British rule, the Druk Gyalpo expressed this concern to the local British office, which confirmed large numbers of Nepali immigrants in the southern lowlands. Over time, concerns grew, and finally erupted in the 1990’s. Nepali culture was eradicated entirely. Dress, food, language, and holidays related to Nepali culture or Hinduism were made illegal, and anyone caught practicing any kind of Lhotshampan tradition was imprisoned. This oppressive program began under the dystopian slogan “One Nation, One People,” and was a result of a fear of a similar coup to that in Sikkim by a Nepali majority that led to the ousting of the state monarchy and subsequent absorption of the state into India.
This interethnic conflict soon grew violent in the 1990’s, with government convoys being bombed and conflicts between Nepali resistance groups and government security forces, as well as civilians on both sides being abused and brutalized. By 1996, over 100,000 Lhotshampan refugees had left Bhutan for Nepal, due to an oppressive government and great threat of violence and settled in one of six camps. After a long period of stagnation and chaos, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner of Refugees (UNHCR), finally began to verify refugees in the camps in 2001, and in 2007 announced plans for large-scale third-party repatriation programs.
Though over 70,000 refugees were and continue to be repatriated, the program has begun to stagnate. Repatriation rates have dropped since the late 2000s, and fewer and fewer leave the camp each month for Australia, the last country to remain open for repatriation. Since the beginning of the camps, the refugees have essentially been left idle in the green but dusty Nepali lowlands until they eventually disappear. Over the years, the population of the camps began to shrink, with more and more disappearing from the map, until only Beldangi II remained.
This camp, now nearly three decades old, is only a shadow of what it once was. Where once stood United Nations housing, painted a brilliant white and adorned with sky blue insignia, is now a small, concentrated knot of roadside shacks, selling everything from bags of chips to tiny packets of Lakshmi chewing tobacco. The only remaining trace of state intervention is the Nepali Armed Police barracks, hemmed in by barbed wire and a warped and bent iron gate. Without an understanding of the atrocities that the Lhotshampa faced, Beldangi II looks like any other small Nepali farming village.
The houses are made of woven bamboo and concrete supports, both manufactured on the camp premises. Three main groups make up the 6,500 remaining residents: the elders, who have steadfastly refused resettlement in any country but Bhutan, their rightful home; the middle-aged adults, who now must find work illegally outside of the camp perimeters to provide for their families; and the children, the young ones who still attend the camp’s two schools in hope of a better future. These are the ones who have known nothing but the limbo of Beldangi: they are neither citizens of Nepal, the country they have been forced into, nor Bhutan, from where their parents, only a few years old at the time, were forced out of the country at gunpoint.
Though hardly supervised, legal entry into Beldangi II is difficult. A meeting with the United Nations sub-office in Damak gets me almost nowhere—redirections to, from, around, and through a dozen different local offices yield the same answer every time—you should call a different office. We aren’t the ones responsible. Finally, after days of exasperating phone calls and visits to the local cell store to refill on minutes, I manage to schedule a meeting for the following morning with Tika Ram Raisaly, the Camp Secretary, and his brother, Moti lal Therpa, through a contact in New Hampshire. Around 10:30pm that same night, I receive an unexpected knock on the door of my hotel room, and open it to find the two brothers waiting to come in. Although related, the two look nothing alike: Tika Ram is shorter, with longer unkempt hair and a dark moustache that extends just below the corners of his mouth. He carries himself with confidence and lives in his own world, of which he is king.
He is a man of the people, as I soon learn, and stops often on the dirt roadways of the camp to shout a hello or wave to a neighbor. Moti lal is a full head taller than his brother and more reserved. He does not speak as often, but when he does, there is a long train of thought behind the words. He lives deep in thought, his physical actions coming second to those of his mind. While he drives me around the camp, he does not stop as often to incite conversation, but does not hesitate to share a laugh or a grin with whoever accosts him. The brothers work out a system so I can visit the camp the next morning and leave a half hour later.
I wake up at 8am and grab a quick breakfast at the hotel before Moti lal comes to pick me up. Previous knowledge informs me that the drive from Damak to the Beldangi camp is about a half hour or so out of town, off of well-maintained roads and reliable pavement. I dress lightly, carrying a backpack with notebooks, camera, and lenses, and am surprised and apprehensive to see Moti lal pull into the hotel parking lot on a Suzuki sports bike. He arrives without a helmet, which means I don’t have one either, and wastes little time waiting around before making sure I’m securely on the bike behind him and speeding off. We slam over speed bumps, my palms damp as I desperately struggle to maintain a grip of the rear handles of the motorcycle. Eventually, we leave Damak’s limits, and Moti lal increases his speed. My eyes water, and his denim jacket snaps against my sides as we fly through rice paddies and small bamboo villages.
Finally, after the most heart-wrenching ride of my life (it is my first time on a motorcycle), we reach a stretch of potholed road surrounded by corrugated tin shacks and woven bamboo huts selling sodas, snacks, tobacco, and shoes. Moti lal pulls a hard left onto a dirt road, and soon we reach the Beldangi camp. The homes of these few thousand refugees must be built only with materials available in the camp and are designed to be largely impermanent, and therefore they are constructed largely of woven bamboo, a few dozen concrete supports, and whatever material is left over from the previous camps, now disbanded.
Moti lal stops at a small wooden fence, leading into a small collection of huts, a clothesline loaded with wet clothes strung in between. This is his brother’s home, the home of the Camp Secretary, and I am to meet him to discuss plans for the day. I hope to visit the camp’s grammar school, which teaches grades 3 through 8, and to ask the headmaster and some of the teachers a few questions. Tika Ram seems to be quite happy with this, and sends me off again with Moti lal, who leads me into the school and gives me tidbits of information between interviews. After speaking with the Headmaster, Purna Gurung, who laughs at my pronunciation of his name, I am invited into the school’s main courtyard for a morning assembly.
As I stand to the side of the assembly of the school’s 889 students, Moti lal educates me on the school system of the camp, which, according to the Headmaster, is so successful the UN has adopted it as a model for other refugee camps across the world. In the middle of this conversation, the Headmaster (without warning) calls me up to the main stage to give the students some inspirational words on the importance of education. I manage to stutter my way through a few lines, step down off the stage, and quickly discover that Moti lal is a talented photographer (possibly more than myself). While laughing at my awkward situation, he shows me photos he took of me on the stage and tells me that the students probably couldn’t understand my accent anyways, a reassurance given the rambling and incoherent speech I just gave.
I return to the Headmaster’s office, where his secretary serves us sweet Nepali tea in small tin cups. He tells me more about the education system in Nepal, and how the community within the camp gave rise to a local school superior to those around it. After lamenting the absence of Bhutanese language in the camps (the children sing the Bhutanese national anthem every morning, but there are no teachers to teach the language), Mr. Gurung tells me that the success of the camp’s schools are due to the fact that the Lhotshampa here recognize the importance of their children as their future. “The education is of the refugees, by the refugees, and for the refugees,” he tells me, and there is not a hint of doubt in his voice.
Moti lal and I climb onto his Suzuki again and he drives off to return to Tika Ram’s home. He brings me inside and sits me down on the couch, and tells me we are waiting for his brother, who we must take to church. Tika Ram, as I learn, is one of very few Christian preachers in the area. He travels to half a dozen churches across the region every week, and his motorcycle’s small hand painted tin license plate bears a cross scratched into the red paint. A little while later, Tika Ram returns, and the three of us get back on the bike to drive him to church. Unfortunately, I must turn down his invitation to join him for mass, which he does not seem to mind, as Moti lal has plenty planned for the afternoon.
We cruise down the little dirt roads of the camp, driving slow and careful to avoid the the drainage ditches choked with trash on the sides of the roads. He shows me a new house under construction, the open-air courtyard in which the concrete pillars for the bamboo houses are built, and the temples and churches scattered throughout the camp grounds. He is very insistent that I take photos of what truly represents the Lhotshampa living here: the construction of a home for a disabled Lhotshampa, a woman weaving by the side of the road, fluttering prayer flags and brightly painted walls of a Buddhist temple. It is evident that I am not the only photographer of the two of us.
After driving to pick up Tika Ram, we return to his home again, where his wife, to whom I am unfortunately not introduced, serves me rice, chicken curry, and a side dish of soy beans and potatoes. The lunch is delicious and well-earned, as by now I’ve spent 4 hours in the smothering heat of the Nepali lowlands. Moti lal invites me to see the remnants of the first camp and the school that was abandoned in it. We go by foot, and his niece, Tika Ram’s daughter, comes along with us, stopping to chat and giggle with her schoolmates as we pass the small huts along the dirt pathway. Moti lal shows me the primary school, grades 1 through 3, and the flat clearings of where the Beldangi I camp used to remain, now abandoned after the inhabitants resettled. “Last night, we left in a hurry because we heard there was a problem at the camp,” he tells me. “We came back and there was an elephant right here in this place.”
We stand at the edge of a wide open grassy plain, which used to house thousands of refugees. He points to the very edge of the last remaining Beldangi camp, where the elephant tried to break through the camp perimeter. According to him, intrusions by elephants happen fairly often, and it’s the exact reason I’ve been seeing CDs strung up along fences on the edges of the camp. Moti lal tells me the reflections from the CDs often spook the elephants and keep them away from the small fragile bamboo homes of the camp’s remaining inhabitants. We begin our walk back to his brother’s home.
Towards the end of the day, Tika Ram pulls me aside to speak to me. He tells me he is interested in the story I’m writing and wants the world to understand how him and his people live. He tells me I am welcome to stay with him, which I do not believe to be genuine, until my last day in the camp, when he calls me his family. Even for a pastor, his heart is big, and his capacity for caring is unmatched. Moti lal and I drive back to Damak, my guide tired and waiting to go home, myself excited for day two.
Over the days, the brothers pull back more and more of the curtain around Beldangi II. I am taken to the Beldangi Refugee Association for the Disabled (BRAD), where Tika Ram shows me a small group of women, sitting in silence, weaving away at beautifully intricate patterns in striking colors. They are deaf and mute, he explains to me, and their patterns are taken out of the camp to be sold quasi-illegally at the market in Damak. Walking out of the BRAD complex, Tika Ram reveals his plan to me: he wants to show me Beldangi the way it is now. A community, tightly knit, of people who all face the same struggle: an uncertain future, a temporary home, a wavering faith. It becomes more and more clear how true this vision of Beldangi II is as the days go on. Tika Ram often stops during my extended tour to chat up another refugee, and every conversation ends in laughter and a friendly departure.
Though comfortable and chatty around him, many others are wary of me: they have seen their fair share of reporters cut through this hot, dusty refuge. Very few of those reporters ever returned, and even fewer managed to make any kind of impression. These are people who do not see any reason for hope anymore. For three decades, they have lived in this camp. They have seen a new generation come and an old generation pass. They have been forsaken by their home and rejected by that of their ancestors. Politicians all over the world have promised them a new home, a new place to raise their children, an attempt to set things right, but still thousands of them remain here, tending to goats in small ramshackle bamboo huts and spitting bright red tobacco into the same dust their families left behind centuries ago. Things have not changed here. In fact, they have only gotten worse. Australia is the only country still open to these forgotten refugees. In October of 2018, only 8 families were resettled. Schoolchildren sing the national anthem of a country they’ve never seen in a language they don’t speak.
Even now, so many years later, Tika Ram’s desk in the government offices in the camp is adorned with the Bhutanese flag. His family was forced by the military to sign voluntary emigration papers when he was only a year old. Most of the refugees who do find a new home still find themselves drawn to their homeland. They falsify documents, take backroads, do anything they can just to get back in. They revisit their old homes, see their old towns, relive memories over thirty years old. Even after over 100,000 people were subjected to this new life, we let ourselves slip. We did not learn from the annals of history and we let it happen again. We did not heed history’s teaching.
The lesson that the forgotten villagers of Beldangi provide is simple: don’t forget about us. Pay attention next time. Look out. Tyrannical, xenophobic governments intent on national purity are never to be overlooked. The United States would never be allowed to evict its entire Asian population centuries after they provided the labor to stitch the nation together with railroads; the United Kingdom would never expel their Indian population after the service they provided in two world wars and countless conflicts before and after. Why should any nation, no matter how insignificant, be permitted to brutalize, oppress, and forcefully remove an entire group of people based solely on their language, dress, and culture? How could Bhutan be allowed to murder civilians, oppress an entire culture, and deny countless generations of a better future? Even worse, how could we forget?
The recent Rohingya crisis in Myanmar began in a very similar manner to the Lhotshampa crisis in Bhutan: the oppression of an ethnical group, violence towards innocents, and a scorched-earth policy against those who do not fit the state’s cultural code. As a global community, we forgot our lesson, and allowed the tragedies and errors of the last few decades to come to pass again, unchecked and unwarranted, and the Lhotshampa saw themselves in the mirror of history.