BRIAN Shaw has long been well-known for his total endorsement of the Bhutanese Government's position on the exodus of ethnic Nepalese from southern Bhutan, so it is not surprising that his letter in the Sunday Morning Post of June 11, was as partisan as the original article he was criticising.
I do not claim to be an expert on Bhutanese affairs, but feel I can still respond as a student of Nepalese history and politics for many years and as someone with friends who have been in Bhutan and talked with refugees in the camps in south-eastern Nepal.
Dr Shaw makes many categorical statements without warning readers that virtually every statistic and every claimed fact about the Bhutanese problem is unsubstantiated.
Conflicting figures have been suggested for the total population of Bhutan and its ethnic composition: estimates of the proportion of Nepali speakers before the exodus vary from below 30 per cent to just over 50 per cent, and the Government itself revised its estimate of the population down from 1.2 million to 600,000 after the 1988 census exercise which supposedly discovered 100,000 illegal Nepalese immigrants inside the country.
Pictures which the Government claim show captured guerrilla fighters and weapons are denounced by the other side as fakes and the Government in turn alleges that the documents many in the camps say prove their Bhutanese citizenship are forgeries.
The only hope of establishing the truth on the issue of who in the camps is or is not a Bhutanese citizen would be through an independent investigation and this the Bhutanese Government seems unwilling to accept: it is distrustful of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and has reportedly rejected a Nepal Government suggestion to establish a commission under Professor Leo Rose, an American specialist on Himalayan politics usually regarded as pro-Bhutanese.