The Worldwide Media’s Impact in Addressing the Ethnic Cleansing in Bhutan

The Worldwide Media’s Impact in Addressing the Ethnic Cleansing in Bhutan

in GNH

Ram Karki & Awatif Laouedj

Introduction 

On 30 April 2021, the Japanese government announced to award Dago Tshering with the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star to strengthen the relationship between Bhutan and Japan (Mishra, 2021). Dago Tshering, former Bhutanese Ambassador to Japan, was recognised for his services to enhancing the partnership and friendship between Japan and Bhutan. This was the first time the honour had been bestowed by the Japanese government to a Bhutanese citizen. From 1991 until 1998, he was both Minister of Home Affairs and Commissioner of Cultural Affairs (Mishra, 2021). During his tenure, human rights violations took place against the Lhotsampa community, who were victims of ethnic cleansing (Bhattacharyya, 2017). This announcement has dismayed the crime victims, who are now protesting the decision. In the wake of this, considerable attention has been paid to the human rights violations of 1990-1993 under Tshering’s tenure (Bhutan News Service, 2021).

Because of Drukpa’s cultural hegemony in Bhutan, the Lhotsampa, originating from Nepal, were made to follow Drukpa’s rules and standards. The Lhotsampa’s Hindu way of life was in stark contrast to these limitations (Bhattacharyya, 2017). In the late 1980s, Bhutanese elites perceived the growing ethnic Lhotsampa group as a demographic and cultural threat. The government enacted discriminatory citizenship laws that disproportionately affected the Lhotsampa community (Human Rights Watch, 2008). Lhotsampa’s were subjected to harrowing atrocities because they were Hindus in a mostly Buddhist society (Bhattacharyya, 2017) and this made them victims of a deliberate cultural and ethnic cleansing. Due to a new Act’s need for proof of residence, the Lhotsampas were labelled as illegal immigrants. From attacks on their dress code, language, and bank accounts to the most severe types of sexual molestation and torture, they were subjected to a barrage of assaults that forced the Lhotsampas to flee Bhutan (Pulla, 2016). About 108,000 Lhotsampas ejected from Bhutan by force were upset at the dismal state and lack of international action and sought asylum in Nepal (Hutt, 2017). A new rule was imposed in Bhutan, and individuals accused of anti-national behaviour who refused to comply with it were compelled to accept “voluntary” migration or imprisoned for their disobedience (Proctor, 1995). The Bhutanese government maintains that these regulations were not implemented via force, despite the use of threatening techniques. 

In 1995, Proctor drew attention to Bhutanese refugees who were denied access to the media owing to their exile. Fearful of the large Nepali-speaking community inside Bhutan’s borders and in northern India, they said the King had opted to restructure his nation’s ethnic identity by removing almost a sixth of the inhabitants. Proctor (1995) claims that few media covered Bhutanese refugees because the issue was eclipsed by crises in Bosnia, Somalia, and Rwanda. Accordant to him, a unified international condemnation of Bhutan’s conduct and a strong political solution were required to solve the human rights violations.

The rest of the world is mostly unaware of Lhotsampa’s human rights atrocities (Pulla, 2016). But now, more than 30 years later new attention has been brought to this past. Tshering has consistently denied public accountability by dismissing accusations of massacres and administrative abuses. He did this by minimising, distorting, or obstructing information, or by purposefully stirring up media reports. He disregarded or blocked international reporters from meeting and researching victims of state brutality (Bhutan News Service, 2021). We anticipate that this has resulted in less attention being paid to this problem in the past. However, we believe that there has been a change in attention since activism is more accessible and can be done in “safer” conditions, providing the Bhutanese Diaspora a louder voice via Facebook, Zoom, online signature campaigns, and other digital media. The news media constitute contemporary societies’ primary interpretive system (Schmidt et al., 2013), and are hence critical for social acceptance of topics such as human rights violations and refugee politics. They serve as focal points for awareness-raising and information dissemination (Schmidt et al., 2013). Human rights violations and awareness about them are being spread via public communication in the modern day to reach a larger audience and to mobilise action (Singh et al., 2016). Mass media are critical in this latter aspect due to their widespread distribution and reach (Schmidt et al. 2013). Especially for human rights advocacy, mass media serve as a key and independent medium for debate and contact with individuals, educating them about and advocating for particular human rights (Shaw, 2012). Mass media discussions are a critical component of political opinion formation since they bring together a diverse range of society players such as human rights NGOs, corporate groups, political parties, and government leaders (Schmidt, 2013). The media’s attention to human rights breaches may thereby urge governments to act, or at least make it impossible for them not to act (Newell, 2000). In this research, we will thus focus on the impact of online activism on bringing the issue of ethnical cleansing to attention. 

Our research question is formulated as follows: 

“Is there a difference in how the global media has addressed the ethnic cleansing in Bhutan since the activism started around the inappropriate rewarding of Dago Tshering, compared to before this online activism started?’’ 

We will first explain the theoretical framework, followed by a discussion of the method, and a presentation of the results. Furthermore, we present an answer to the research question as well as recommendations for further study in this field. The concluding remark is dedicated to a discussion of the research’s difficulties and limitations.

Theoretical framework 

Because headlines are intended to be brief and compelling, journalists often use them to promote their ideological views on news events, and the interpretation of articles might vary based on headlines (Gangula et al., 2019). Ifantidou (2009) contends that newspaper headlines serve the purpose of attracting readers’ attention. Headlines reach a far broader audience than articles do, since everyone who purchases newspapers, whether online or offline, will at least peek at the headlines (Infantidou, 2009). Furthermore, their influence is much greater than that of individuals who have access to (online) newspapers since headlines are often shown briefly as a taster before requesting payment to continue reading the content.

Mass communication’s ‘agenda-setting theory’ introduced by Shaw (1979) states that due to the media’s coverage of the public scene, people are aware or not, pay attention or not, play up or degrade certain elements. “Individuals have a tendency to include or exclude from their thought patterns what the media incorporates or excludes from its content. People also have a tendency to place a high value on what they include, which is similar to the high value placed on events, problems, and individuals by the news media” (Shaw, 1979). Shaw goes on to state that the mass media attempts to provide a full account of the problem or things that are already existent, as well as prescriptions on how to think or communicate about that specific topic.

Since the disaster???? in 1990 (HRW, 2008), refugee activists and their organisations have utilised various means to inform the public about ethnic cleansing in Bhutan. In accordance with the authoritarian theory of communication (Bajracharya, 2018) mass media should accept and implement the orders of governments, even if such governments do not have direct control over the mass media itself. In Bhutan, the King was the authoritarian figurehead, and the media was under the authority of the government; as a result, the only news that was supplied by the government could be published or transmitted.

Method 

Our research findings are mostly described through presenting data, and diagrams, thus the method in general can be called a quantitative method of research (Bryman, 2016, p.149).

We wanted to evaluate the effect of the recent activism in mobilising the attention and coverage of the issue of Bhutanese refugees and their human rights violations in the media, mostly renowned international media, before and after the Global Campaign launched by the refugee group in 2021. To do this, we sought to investigate the headlines of news articles and opinion pieces from 1990 to 2021 and from 2021 to the present. To determine if there are any changes in substance and volume of news coverage which in turn can help to bring this problem to the general public’s notice.

We first started to search the news articles using various free internet search engines for the purpose of finding web-based newspapers. Thereafter, we attempted to utilise the Google News Archive, but we had to abandon it as well due to its emphasis on print newspapers and the limited availability of articles we were trying to find. Our search was then redirected to elephind.com, a search engine for digitised newspapers with millions of articles from several publishers. Because many of these newspapers were unavailable through Google News Archive, utilising Elephind seemed to be a viable option until we discovered that web-based newspaper articles were not included in this collection. As a result, we discontinued using this search engine and looked for one that included web-based newspapers. Through the University Library – which university? we discovered the Nexis Uni Database. Through a random search of published articles relating to “Bhutanese Refugees” in the Nexis Uni Database, we discovered over 10,000 items in a variety of media chains in the world. Analysing all these papers would be impractical for our research paper due to the additional time and resources required. Additionally, we believed that all these media lacked credibility, so we narrowed our emphasis to articles published in major newspapers throughout a 32-year period, from 1990 to 2022. Since we are collecting the articles that are already published and can be found on the internet, we will be adopting the trawling method of data collection (Whiting and Pritchard, 2017). 

Using keywords to search internet databases of articles is critical for all types of reviews (Bryman, 2016). The goal of our assessment was to measure if there is a difference in substance and volume relating to attention seeking to the issue of ethnical cleansing in Bhutan. According to Bryman, defining the review’s aim and scope enables consistent decision-making about critical topics such as the types of research that should be sought and the types of samples to which the study should pertain (2016). This allowed us to concentrate on keywords linked to expected important subjects in our subject area and analyse possibly relevant online content while we built the iterative model of the data collection (Whiting and Pritchard, 2017). Initially, neither of us anticipated that the key term “Bhutanese Refugee” would work as our search term since we discovered that the Bhutanese government refers to these evicted individuals as anti-national terrorists and illegal immigrants. In this instance, if we enter the search term “Bhutanese Refugee”, we do not get any news articles expressing the Bhutan government’s position or perspective on the subject, but rather acquire news from the perspective of refugees, which might be characterised as biased and unreliable by readers. In this respect, we attempted the term “Lhotshampa ”, the term used by the Bhutanese government to refer to southern Bhutanese but found it unsuitable for our study since articles searched using this term as our search keyword returned inadequate news items for analysis in our research. Additionally, the refugee population dislikes this name since they see it as a racial slur introduced by the government to refer to Nepali-speaking Hindus residing in southern Bhutan (Salas, 2019). At one point, we tried searching for articles using the keyword Bhutan, but the number of results was too enormous, and most of them were unrelated to our research, despite our efforts to filter them.

After many stipulations, we decided to use “Bhutanese Refugee” to search for articles published between January 1, 1990, and January 15, 2022. The Nexis Uni Database gave us the opportunity to filter out irrelevant publications for our research. We reviewed 1,116 articles. Because of the revisions, our findings were reset to January 1, 1992, instead of January 1, 1990.  








Results

From 01 January 1992 till 15 January 2022, we found on our trawling search of Bhutanese Refugee and Lhotsampa a total amount of 1,116 articles during the span of 30 years and 14 days which would equate to an average of 38 articles per year. In the meantime, we searched the articles on the same issue with effect from 30 April 2021 till 15 January 2022. During an 8-month and 16-day period, we only found 13 publications on our research topic. There were 1103 articles published between January 1, 1992, and the day of the award announcement on April 30, 2021. That means there were 3.1 articles per month from January 1, 1992, to April 30, 2021, and 1.6 articles per month from April 30, 2021, to January 15, 2022. 

Our initial assumption was that by triggering the issue with Japan’s decision to award Dago Tshering, the media would become more sensitive, and more media attention would be received, but our hypothesis has not proven to be correct. In this line we talked of focusing our attention towards making some headline analysis in order to find if language patterns of some news coverage changed due to the decision of Japan award-giving because the “headlines are regarded as the important element of news since their jobs are to attract the readers and frame the ideologies of the readers as well as the media themselves” (Isti’anah, 2019, p.127). Critical study of the text can help in finding hidden plans that are not known to the people (Fairclough, 2013). Ultimately, we opted out of this plan as we realised that such studies require a lot of time and resources.

Figure 1 above illustrates news organisations were engaged in disseminating information about this crisis. Figure 1 demonstrates which news organisations contributed to the dissemination of information and to what degree they contributed in terms of a number of articles. It was interesting that most of the attention came from Asia. The most extensive circulation of news came from the Chinese news agency Xinhua General News Service or Xinhua News Agency. Maybe the situation in Bhutan could be of interest to China due to international relations. The second figure above illustrates how newspapers were disseminated. This was done to see if there was a difference in the number of newspapers against other types of news items. Perhaps in the outset of the specific topic under consideration in this study, there would have been a greater distribution of traditional newspapers. When Fig 1 & Fig 2 are compared, we observed that some news companies have ceased to exist entirely. For example, Xinhua General News Service, which once dominated news delivery, is no longer included in the graph with newspapers. On the other hand, Ekantipur.com and MyRepublica are substantially more involved in the dissemination of news through newspapers. MyRepublica is Nepal’s largest English-language news source, whereas Ekantipur.com is the online version of daily Nepali newspaper – Kantipur. This is also an unusual outcome since we explicitly selected English-language items, yet articles published in other languages were included. The issue then becomes whether the Nexis Database automatically translates some publications or if Ekantipur.com was published in English at one point. 

Additionally, the findings demonstrated that filtering for newspapers does not automatically imply that everything published online is removed, leaving just digitised traditional newspapers; rather, the exact opposite is true. Ekantipur.com and the Border Mail (Fairfax Media in Australia) seem to have a broader range of distribution channels for their material, including newspapers and other types of news. It is crucial to note that “other news items” might include news wires, national and regional reports, press releases, and web-based publications; however, we did not analyse which of these subcategories each news agency uses.

There is a rise of new coverage between 2006 and 2008. This might be because the problem of Bhutanese refugee resettlement was a topic of hot debate at the time. Per United Nations Bhutanese Refugee resettlement was one of the world’s largest resettlement efforts UNHCR has ever undertaken (CNN, 2008). Thus, the problem of resettlement was of more importance than the recent awarding of Tshering. Fig 5 depicts the distribution of newspaper articles from 1998 till 2022. When we limited our search to newspapers and omitted all other sorts of news pieces, we discovered that our results dated only as far back as 1998. 

Headlines

As stated above, we sought to see how recent activity affected media coverage of Bhutanese refugees and human rights violations. To accomplish this, we wanted to look at headlines. Focusing on headlines helps us understand how news organisations approach publicising a topic. We’ve listed a few headlines that have been used to address this subject in Table 1 (below). What is important to note is that further research is required to get accurate findings, although this was a brief attempt to assess the headlines as well. 

Bhutanese refugees cause problems in Nepal (Xinhua General News Service, 1993)

This headline (1) is critical of refugees who may be causing problems inside and around refugee camps. In 1993, a massive refugee inflow occurred in eastern Nepal’s improvised refugee camps. Refugees posed a significant law and order issue for the Nepali local government, as hundreds of refugees began venturing into the forest in search of fuel to cook their meals, and traffic came to a halt because of the movement of refugees.

Pro-democracy front slams Bhutanese king on ‘’reforms’’ (dpa international, 1998)

The outlet uses this headline (2) to emphasise the pro-democracy refugee groups’ feelings towards Bhutan’s political reforms. The headline supports refugees. Bhutanese pro-democracy parties in exile stated the 1998 democratic advances were cosmetic and not actual democracy. They further claim that because one-sixth of the population is a refugee, the country cannot have real democracy until these people are allowed to participate in the democratic process. This headline is from dpa international, a German news agency, which might explain the bolder tone of the headline in which they also mention the king and appear to cast doubt on the term “reform” by placing it in quotation marks, as international relationships or consequences may be less of a concern from their perspective. 

Bhutanese refugees seek UN help (Xinhua General News Service, 2005)

Here, headline (3) emphasises the refugees’ need for UN assistance. Refugees repeatedly organised peaceful protests in and around refugee camps to pressure the international community, particularly the United Nations, to assist them in resolving their long-pending repatriation problem. This story, issued by Xinhua General News Service, is more impartial in tone than the 1993 item.

UN commits to refugee solution (EKantipur.com, 2014)

This headline (4) advocates for the repatriation of Bhutanese refugees. According to this report, the UN is committed to resolving the Bhutanese refugee crisis and is willing to engage on that front. It states that people remaining in Nepalese camps must be repatriated to Bhutan, assimilated into Nepal, or resettled elsewhere.

Bhutanese refugees deserve to go home (Xinhua General News Service, 2018)

The headline (5) in this case is in support of refugees’ right to return to Bhutan. It is provided by MyRepublica, a Nepali newspaper, which supports refugees. This news article says that those refugees who are not willing to resettle in the third-world countries and are still living in the refugee camps in Nepal deserve to be repatriated back to their original home in Bhutan. 

The forgotten tale of Bhutanese refugees (MyRepublica, 2018)

This headline (6) intended to emphasise that the problem of Bhutanese refugees has been overlooked and needs to be brought to light. As a result, the tone is likewise in their favour. In comparison to other nations’ refugee crises, the Bhutanese refugee crisis has received little international attention. The media saw it as a forgotten story. This headline conveys more emotion owing to the imagery and usage of the word forgotten tale, which may draw the reader’s attention and have more influence (Ifantidou, 2009).

Bhutanese refugees must not ‘blunder’ into Non-Residential Nepali status (Bhutan News Service, 2021)

This headline (7) aimed to direct the displaced Bhutanese Refugees’ future actions. Bhutanese resettling in Nepal should never consider themselves Nepalis, but Bhutanese, according to this news website. This is from Bhutan News Service, a news agency created in 2004 by Bhutanese refugee journalists, which may also explain the tone with which action and awareness from Bhutanese refugees is urged.





Conclusion & Discussion 

Our research did not show that the issue of ethnic cleansing in Bhutan received more media coverage post-award activism from the Bhutanese human rights activists. It might be because the activists focused their activities mostly on social media like Facebook, Twitter, hashtags, YouTube, and others. During our search, we encountered numerous news and video clips related to that activism on social media but due to the limitation posed by the ethical concerns we were forced to ignore all such coverages and instead focused only on public news coverages. Another explanation for the lack of major media attention this time around might be because the topic of ethnic cleansing has become outdated and the public and media have lost interest. Additionally, we were unable to draw meaningful conclusions from our brief headline analysis since additional material was not included. A preliminary conclusion may be that headlines on Bhutanese and Nepalese news channels are more expressive, although most news organisations are impartial. Except for a few brave news outlets that get away with audacious headlines. There is ample scope for future researchers interested in this issue to fill this gap.

The primary concept for this study was to explore the sentiments of Bhutanese Diaspora members via the use of Facebook messenger text messages. We opted out of this concept since the internet provides areas that its users may perceive as private, even though they are publicly available (Whiting & Pritchard, 2017). Further, there were ethical problems at stake, including the need to secure the identity of participants and maintain the confidentiality of their data (Whiting & Pritchard, 2017). We made the decision to get our study data from a different source to reduce the risk of real or prospective damage while assuring the greatest value of the research (Whiting & Pritchard, 2017, p.36). Newspapers are freely available to the public, and the information contained within them may be utilized without the need to get permission from the person who published it. Due to one of the researchers’ greater interests in this subject, we continuously discussed which decisions were the best to make and why we made certain decisions through the process of developing our method strategy. By not including any personal information, we assured that no harm was done to individuals, that no informed consent was lacking, that no privacy was violated, and that no deceit was involved (Bryman, 2016). We had intended to confine our emphasis to three major newspapers in our previous study concept suggestion, but this proved to be impractical. It is necessary to pay to access certain news archives, and data archives on the websites of news organisations may not go back far enough in time. For example, Al Jazeera was founded in 1996, therefore we knew we couldn’t get news on the issue before 1996. Because of these explorations, we had to change our search technique several times.

Additional time is required to thoroughly study how to ensure that you get all relevant newspapers for investigation. Keywords are critical in this instance (Bryman, 2016; p. 113). While doing a systematic review, Bryman (2016) recommends that the researcher and his or her team assemble a panel to advise them on the precise phrasing of the research topics to be examined as well as to assist them with keyword suggestions. This may have been valuable for us, since we were having difficulty locating appropriate search words. This would be a reasonable move for the sake of further research or enhanced research. It will take more time to completely study how to ensure that you get all relevant newspapers for your investigation. Furthermore, with additional time, a more detailed comparison of numerous publications and their respective origin locations would be achievable. We chose “International” for our publishing location with the hope that this news source would be available to the whole world, but on reflection, we question whether this was a sensible choice. Utilising the Nexis Database may be beneficial. The numerous filtering options are also a useful feature if you’re willing to explore a little more to determine what kind of news items you get. In this situation, filtering by “International” will return only items that are available to everyone in the world. This would imply that it should be made available through a website. And this also implies that scanned newspapers, for example, are not included in the search results. However, more work and time are required to ensure that you utilize the filtering choices correctly and that you get the most out of these essential tools. 

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