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9 J. Refugee Stud. 397 (1996)
Ethnic Nationalism, Refugees and Bhutan

handle is hein.journals/jrefst9 and id is 407 raw text is: Journal of Refugee Studies Vol. 9. No. 4 1996 Ethnic Nationalism, Refugees and Bhutan MICHAEL HUTT Department of Languages and Cultures of South Asia, School of Oriental and African Studies, London This article focuses in large part on the specificities of a comparatively obscure refugee situation-that of the approximately 100,000 people who have arrived in Nepal since 1990, claiming Bhutanese refugee status. It outlines the socio- historical background to the problem, describes the way in which it has unfolded, and evaluates the refugees' claims through a survey of documentary evidence and field visits to Nepal and Bhutan. By measuring the realities of the situation against a theoretical model proposed by Anthony D. Smith in 1994, it then considers the extent to which the problem has arisen as the result of a conflict between two differing modes of ethnic nationalism: the new style of nationalism promoted by the Bhutanese state since the late 1980s, and the demotic nationalism of the cross-border Nepali population of the broader region. Although the paper addresses this particular case in some detail, its discussion is relevant to other instances where refugee flows have been caused by the formulation of new, more exclusive models of the nation state. Introduction This account of the Bhutanese refugee crisis is informed primarily by visits made to Nepal and Bhutan in 1992, by a conference on Bhutan in London in 1993 (see Aris and Hutt 1994; Hutt 1994), and by a further visit to Nepal in 1995. Refugee camps in Southeast Nepal at the time of writing (March 1996) accommodate a total of 88,000 Nepali-speaking people, many of whom possess documentary evidence of long-term residence in southern districts of Bhutan. An estimated 15,000 other refugees from Bhutan are said by UNHCR to subsist elsewhere in Nepal, plus an unspecified number in Northeast India. To put these figures into perspective, it should be borne in mind that the official total population of Bhutan is very small. In 1988 it was estimated at 1,451,000; in July 1992 at 1,660,167 (Savada 1993:46); a revised figure of 600,000 was announced by the king of Bhutan in October 1990. This account will attempt to assess the extent to which the Bhutanese crisis resembles the situation described by Smith (1994), in which the rise of ethnic nationalism forces the flight of an excluded minority. Smith defines ethnic nationalism in the following terms: 0 Oxford University Press 1996

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