THE HIDDEN KINGDOM

The Globe and Mail

15 May 1999

John Stackhouse

 

Wangchuck has the royal touch

The King is building a welfare state,

with free education, health care

In a region dominated by political thugs, crooks and buffoons, Bhutan's King Jigme Singye Wangchuck stands out, and not just for his dashing looks and four gorgeous wives, all sisters.

The 43-year-old monarch, who ascended the temporal throne at the age of 18 after his father died on safari in Kenya, is slowly emerging as a Himalayan version of Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew, the leader of a tiny outpost who may yet turn his country into a model state and gain disproportionate influence with its much larger neighbours.

Like Singapore in the 1960s, Bhutan already has the most successful public- school and health systems in the region, doubling its literacy rate and halving infant mortality in only one decade. The King has also used authoritarian rule, forcibly deporting about 90,000 people of Nepali origin, to overcome ethnic and linguistic tensions that threaten to divide the country.

King Wangchuck has won much praise for building a welfare state, with free education and health care, while maintaining the lowest budget deficit in the region. After touring the country two years ago in his sport utility vehicle, he and his government allocated 17.8 per cent of the national budget to health and education.

To free up funds for social spending, he pulled his government out of the business world, selling eight of its 12 major industries to private owners.

Bhutan has long won acclaim for preserving its culture, and the King's personal efforts to preserve its stunning forests -- Coronation Day doubles as Tree Planting Day -- have made him a role model for environmentalists everywhere. By law, 60 per cent of Bhutan must be forested.

Once an outpost of the ancient Tibetan empire, Bhutan was largely a feudal theocracy until the early 20th century, when the aristocratic lord Ugyen Wangchuck, the present ruler's ancestor, forged together an aliance of regional barons and declared a hereditary monarchy, with himself as King.

Then, as China overran neighbouring Tibet and India swallowed the former Buddhist states of Sikkim and Ladakh, Bhutan was horrified. It cut an isolationist path, relying on India for defence while fiercely guarding its cultural independence.

Bhutan did not build its first national road until the 1960s, linking the capital with a succession of valleys, each with its own dialect, lord and protector deitis. But it returned to its shell in the 1980s, closing monasteries and sacred mountains to outsiders, and declaring a dress code to instill a sense of national identity.

Anyone who publicly criticized the King and his regime, the last authoritarian one in South Asia, was jailed or thrown out of the country. About 90,000 Hindu Nepali settlers -- one-eighth of the population -- were also driven out of the country in the early 1990s for fear that their numbers were growing much faster than the Buddhist majority.

The Nepalis, most of whom claim Bhutanese citizenship and say their families have lived in southern Bhutan for generations, now live in refugee camps in eastern Nepal.

The government drew more criticism last year when it forcibly retired 219 ethnic Nepali civil servant on the grounds that they were related to dissidents and posed a threat to national security.

But that was quickly overshadowed by the most stunning political reforms in a generation. The King sacked his handpicked cabinet and gave full executive powers to the national assembly, which is made up of local representatives. The assembly now elects the cabinet to five-year terms and has the power to remove the King from his throne with a simple two-thirds majority.

The King and his new cabinet, who are known to hold little respect for their overcrowded, impoverished and polluted neighbour, have yet to propose a settlement with Nepal.

Bhutanese officials say the King is only trying to ease his tiny nation into democracy rather than plunge it into a new order. Human-rights groups say the changes were only cosmetic, made in order to calm international protests of ethnic cleansing.

'With instability and discontent growing [both within and outside Bhutan's borders], the recent concessions to democracy reveal that the King is attempting to find a means by which to preserve the monarchy,' said a report by the South Asian Human Rights Documentation Centre, the respected New Delhi- based group.