Ratan Gazmere

Ratan Gazmere is a Lhotshampa human rights activist, former prisoner of conscience, and one of the longest-serving advocates for the rights of Bhutanese refugees. Arrested in November 1989 for helping distribute pamphlets critical of the Royal Government of Bhutan's cultural assimilation policies, he was detained without trial at Wangdi Phodrang prison, adopted by Amnesty International as a prisoner of conscience in 1990, and released in December 1991. He settled in the refugee camps in eastern Nepal the following year, where he became Chief Coordinator of the Association of Human Rights Activists, Bhutan (AHURA-Bhutan), one of the principal exile documentation bodies to emerge from the camps.^[1]

Gazmere's arrest pre-dated the National Security Act of 1992, under which many later political prisoners were prosecuted, and he has been identified by Amnesty International and other researchers as one of the earliest Lhotshampa intellectuals imprisoned in connection with the political crisis in southern Bhutan. After eighteen years in the camps in Jhapa district, he was resettled to Australia under the UNHCR-facilitated third-country resettlement programme. He has continued to engage with international human rights mechanisms from exile and has written and co-authored advocacy materials for publications including the Oxford-based Forced Migration Review.^[2]

Arrest and Imprisonment

Gazmere was arrested in November 1989 together with Vishwanath Chhetri, Bakti Prasad Sharma, and three other men, on charges of treason. According to documentation by Amnesty International, the group had helped to write and distribute pamphlets criticising the Royal Government of Bhutan's "One Nation, One People" cultural integration policy, which required southern Bhutanese to adopt Driglam Namzha dress codes and customs associated with the northern Ngalop community. The pamphlets circulated shortly before the southern protests of 1990 that precipitated the mass expulsion of Lhotshampa from southern Bhutan.^[1]

Gazmere and his co-accused were held in solitary confinement at Wangdi Phodrang prison. Amnesty International, which adopted him as a prisoner of conscience in 1990, reported that the men were told to expect to spend the rest of their lives in prison. They were not brought to trial during the period of their detention. Gazmere was designated Amnesty International's "prisoner of the month" in 1991 — one of the earliest international campaigns on behalf of a Bhutanese detainee — generating letter-writing actions and government-level representations that, according to Amnesty, contributed to his eventual release in December 1991. He was forced into exile the following year.^[1]

Exile and AHURA-Bhutan

After leaving Bhutan, Gazmere joined the expanding refugee population in the camps administered by UNHCR in Jhapa and Morang districts of eastern Nepal. By the mid-1990s, approximately 100,000 Lhotshampa had been displaced to these camps following the census, denationalisation, and coerced emigration episodes of 1990–92. Gazmere became associated with AHURA-Bhutan, a non-governmental human rights body formed in 1992 by Bhutanese refugees in exile. He served as the organisation's Chief Coordinator, a position he has held in various periods since the mid-1990s.^[2]

AHURA-Bhutan's most sustained initiative under Gazmere's coordination was the "Documentation of Bhutanese Refugees" project, a database intended to collate citizenship records, land documents, census receipts, and identity documents for refugee households in order to rebut the Bhutanese government's claim that camp residents were not Bhutanese citizens. The project fed material into submissions to Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the UN treaty bodies, and became one of the few systematic attempts by exiles to compile the documentary evidence that the bilateral verification process between Nepal and Bhutan had been unable to resolve.^[2]

The Bhutanese exile landscape in the 1990s and 2000s included several overlapping bodies: AHURA-Bhutan; the People's Forum for Human Rights, Bhutan (PFHRB), based in Jhapa; the Bhutan Human Rights Organisation; the Druk National Congress; and the Bhutan People's Party. The task brief for this article noted that Gazmere is sometimes described as a founder of PFHRB; published sources available to this article associate him primarily with AHURA-Bhutan and identify D.P. Kafley as PFHRB's general secretary. This article accordingly attributes the PFHRB founding claim with caution and describes his confirmed role as AHURA-Bhutan's Chief Coordinator.^[3]

Advocacy and Writing

Gazmere's advocacy has concentrated on three themes: the right of return for refugees in the camps, the citizenship status of stateless persons remaining in southern Bhutan, and the situation of political prisoners held in Chemgang and other Bhutanese detention facilities. In a 2004 interview with Inter Press Service, he argued that "the bilateral process is not going to resolve this problem and provide a durable solution to the Bhutanese problem" and called for an international conference involving Nepal, Bhutan, UNHCR, human rights bodies, refugees, donor countries, and non-governmental organisations. He also drew attention to a collapse in medical care and the termination of UNHCR-supported university education in the camps.^[4]

In 2009, Gazmere co-authored — with Dilip Bishwo, AHURA-Bhutan's Secretary for the International Campaign — a piece in Forced Migration Review titled "Bhutanese refugees: rights to nationality, return and property". The article set out the legal framework for return and property restitution, described the AHURA documentation project, and argued that the third-country resettlement process that had begun in 2007 should not extinguish the political claim to return for those who preferred to remain in the region. The piece has been cited in subsequent academic work on Bhutanese statelessness and on property restitution in South Asia.^[2]

Position on Third-Country Resettlement

Gazmere's public statements on the third-country resettlement programme, which began in 2007 and ultimately moved more than 113,000 Bhutanese refugees to the United States, Canada, Australia, and six other countries, reflect a tension common among camp-era leaders. In the 2004 IPS interview and in subsequent writing, he was sceptical that resettlement alone could address the underlying political question of citizenship and property, and expressed concern that the departure of the camps would effectively close the right-of-return claim. He himself ultimately accepted resettlement to Australia after eighteen years in the camps — a trajectory he has spoken about as a reluctant individual choice taken after the collective political option had been exhausted.^[1]

Amnesty International Australia, which profiled Gazmere in a feature marking his arrival in the country, has described him as a continuing Amnesty member working for refugee rights in the diaspora. His position has converged over time with that of other exile figures such as Tek Nath Rizal and Balaram Poudyal, who have argued that third-country resettlement should be treated as a humanitarian response rather than a legal settlement of the underlying dispute.^[1]

Sourcing and Verification Notes

Published documentation on Gazmere is uneven. The Amnesty International prisoner-of-conscience record from 1990–91, the 2004 IPS interview, the 2009 Forced Migration Review article he co-authored, and the 2013 Amnesty Australia profile constitute the most reliable biographical sources in English. Claims that Gazmere founded or directs organisations called "BHRights" or the Association of Press Freedom Activists, Bhutan (APFA-Bhutan) could not be verified in independent published sources at the time of writing, and an earlier version of this article that repeated those attributions has been corrected. Coverage of Gazmere in Bhutan-based media — Kuensel, BBS, The Bhutanese — is effectively non-existent, which is itself consistent with the broader pattern of self-censorship on the refugee issue documented by press freedom monitors.^[5]

Gazmere should not be confused with Jogen Gazmere, a separate Bhutanese prisoner of conscience identified by Amnesty International and by Dr Manfred Ringhofer of Amnesty Japan as one of the detainees whose release was pursued by the same international campaigns. The reference in some secondary sources to the National Security Act 1992 as the law under which Gazmere was arrested is not supported by the primary record: his arrest pre-dated the Act by approximately three years, and the charges recorded by Amnesty were treason rather than offences under the NSA.^[6]

See Also

• Bhutanese refugee crisis
• Lhotshampa
• Tek Nath Rizal
• Balaram Poudyal
• Global Campaign for the Release of Political Prisoners in Bhutan
• List of Bhutanese political prisoners
• National Security Act of Bhutan
• Chemgang Central Jail

References

1. Amnesty International Australia — "From Bhutan to Australia: one refugee's inspiring story"
2. Ratan Gazmere and Dilip Bishwo, "Bhutanese refugees: rights to nationality, return and property", Forced Migration Review (2009)
3. The Communication Initiative — People's Forum for Human Rights, Bhutan (PFHRB)
4. Inter Press Service — "Bhutan: 13 Years On, No Solution in Sight for Refugees in Nepali Camps" (2004)
5. Reporters Without Borders — Bhutan country profile
6. Bhutan News Network — "Dr Manfred Ringhofer honoured in Adelaide" (2013)
7. Amnesty International — "Bhutan: Human rights violations against the Nepali-speaking population in the south" (1992, ASA 14/04/92)
8. Human Rights Watch — "Last Hope: The Need for Durable Solutions for Bhutanese Refugees in Nepal and India" (2007)