Mal leans out and asks a monk trotting beside our car what is going on. ‘It is the first day of the fourth month of our calendar,’ he explains. ‘We are back!’
It is the monk body returning to Thimphu from their winter retreat. This means the worst of the cold weather really is over. I understand the exuberance, and feel like hugging the monks.
It takes us an hour of weaving through traffic to get to the office. It takes His Holiness the Je Khenpo much longer. He is mobbed every inch of the way by people seeking his blessing. Opposition leader Tshering Tobgay writes in his blog that it takes almost seven hours for the Je Khenpo to drive the seven kilometres from one side of Thimphu to his home at Tashichhodzong on the other.
It rains for the rest of the day, a sign that the south-west monsoon is coming early. From my office I can see Yeshe’s lhakhang and the BBS tower poking through a ring of cloud. It looks impossibly eerie. I watch the cloud slide noiselessly down the slope until we are engulfed in dense, silvery fog. I can just make out Rita’s toilet block opposite the newspaper building.
No one wants to leave the comfort of the office, but the relentless rain has moved from minor annoyance to major news story. We can see the roads beginning to flood. Needrup sends out the staff photographer, who brings back evocative photos showing the Wang Chhu river as a bubbling, seething mass carrying debris and even cars. We all stare at them on the screen in the newsroom. Needrup looks pained. It is only Tuesday and the next edition of Bhutan Observer doesn’t go out till Friday.
Kuensel, which went from bi-weekly to six editions a week a month ago, are bound to publish their photos tomorrow, as will the daily newspaper, Bhutan Today.
Needrup decides to post our photos on the Bhutan Observer website. It is the first time I have seen him do that. As it only attracts a handful of visitors each day, updating the Bhutan Observer site is not a priority. But this is major breaking news, and Needrup is a newsman.
BBS starts broadcasting footage of people wading through waist-high water with furniture on their heads and police evacuating homes near the Queen Grandmother’s palace. They put it all together on a continuous loop. It is effective the first time I see it, giving a sense of the scale of the flooding and how people across Thimphu are being affected. But it is not much help after that. BBS does not update the footage or provide advice for residents, with no reporting of the rain or flooding as news. It is that same ten minutes of silent footage, again and again. As the only Bhutanese television station, it is painfully inadequate.
A woman rings Needrup and tells him Bhutan Observer must report that the Prime Minister is the reason for the rain. He is a bad spirit. She warns that the rain will only stop if the previous prime minister is reinstated. Needrup, ever polite, thanks her for ringing.
A journalist reports back that the newly opened Centenary Farmers Market, Thimphu’s architectural pride and joy, is awash with mud. Clogged sewage pipes have given way, spilling their contents onto footpaths and roads.
The Home Minister faxes a statement to the newspapers and BBS radio, telling people not to travel or go to the riverbanks to watch the flood. As most people have a mobile phone and streaming radio is popular, it should be an effective way to spread a public service message. Instead, it seems to inspire residents to see what all the fuss is about. By the time Mal and Kathryn collect me from work, crowds are lining the banks for kilometres, some wading into the murky water to grab pieces of wood as they float past. Others wade in to catch fish, which are suffocating in the muddy waters and floating to the surface. There are traffic jams as drivers abandon their cars on the expressway to check out the spectacle. The atmosphere is like that of a street party.
Wang Chhu is an extraordinary sight. Usually the river is an arctic green, the water fast-flowing but clear enough to see white rocks on the bottom. Today it is brown and bubbling like a chocolate milkshake, steadily rising up the banks, uprooting trees along the way. The sound is an all-pervading roar, as if we are standing on an airport runway.
When we reach our little bridge back to Tashi Pelkhil, Mal pulls over to check its foundations. The smell of dirt fills the air. It is earthy and wet and rather lovely. Tonnes of topsoil, dead fish and whole trees thunder past under our feet, heading for India. Mal says the bridge looks safe enough and shows me where its fault lines are. If the foundations are undermined, this is where cracks will appear. He traces an imaginary line with his foot and tells me if I see a mark here, I am not to cross. This is supposed to make me feel safe.
It rains all night and for the next two days. Tshering Tobgay uploads footage of the swollen river to YouTube and then embeds it on his blog. His excitement is palpable. He writes that he has been practising uploading videos but this is a first for his blog, which he started six months ago. It is also a first for Bhutan. News footage online. Tshering Tobgay, whose blog averages about 300 hits a day, is leading the way. For those with access to the internet, the Opposition leader is forging a formidable reputation as a one-man news outlet. He updates it every evening on his laptop, sitting up in bed. Sometimes he comments on government matters; other times he reports on what is going on in the communities he visits.
Flooding takes out bridges and homes, and causes landslides that block the national highway. The death toll reaches nine – six farmers, a road worker and two children. One of them, a seven-year-old schoolboy, drowns a few hundred metres downriver from our home. He loses his footing trying to cross on his way home from school. When the rain finally stops and the sun does reappear, the city is devastated.
But worse is to come. Just two months later, on 27 July, when the monsoon has well and truly arrived across Bhutan, the country faces a national tragedy.
In Chhukha, south-east Bhutan, seven schoolboys drown in the most heartbreaking circumstances. They are all students at the lower elementary school, in a town of fewer than 3,000 people. The boys, aged 10 to 18, lie to their parents that they are going to spend Sunday studying at school. It is the height of summer, and they sneak off with their lunchboxes and meet at a popular swimming hole on the river. They wade through the knee-deep water, leaping across rocks, and reach the opposite bank. They dive into the river and splash about together, having fun. At lunchtime they light a fire for their picnic, when suddenly the river starts to rise and they are blocked from going back the way they came. It starts to rain heavily and the boys begin to panic. They make it across the river to a large rock in the middle, but are too scared to go further. The eldest, Tshering Samten, feels responsible for the younger ones and tries to swim to another rock. He is swept away but makes it to the bank 100 metres downstream. He yells to the boys to stay where they are and goes for help. The village is over an hour away, mostly uphill through jungle. He gets lost, and it is dark when he reaches his parents. They inform the mayor, who puts together an ad-hoc rescue team comprising ten police officers, ten army officers, 21 village officials and five parents. They all race to the river, arriving at about 10 pm. There, they find the seven terrified boys huddled together, chanting prayers on a rock in the middle of the raging water. For the next five or six hours, by flickering torchlight, the adults try to rescue them. They throw nylon ropes, but over the noise of the raging water, the boys cannot understand instructions. There is massive confusion in the darkness, with dwindling torch batteries, dense fog, howling wind and constant rain. The boys tie the ropes around themselves, tethering the seven of them together. Around 3 am a sudden gush of water sweeps down the river. The series of ropes that is tied around all the boys, and held at the other end by parents and villagers, comes undone. The parents watch in horror as their children are swept away. Some race downriver and throw themselves into the water to try to catch the boys, but they are impotent against the torrent.
The country is left reeling. It is not the first time Bhutan has suffered a national tragedy, but it is the first time they have had such an open and public space to collectively express
their grief. Before democracy there was only Kuensel. It would have reported the facts, expressed the condolences of the government and King, and perhaps written an editorial to give the tragedy some sort of philosophical context. I imagine BBS would have reported it in their news service.
But now there are also three independent newspapers, each with reporters, editors, columnists and letters pages. And there are blogs – the Opposition leader’s, and others. There is Facebook.
And most significantly, the Bhutanese have started to find their voice. Since the Fourth King announced the move to democracy, the people have been encouraged to pay attention, have an opinion and express it. It is part of their responsibilities as citizens in this new democracy. Emboldened, many throw themselves into the new, expanding public space created by the new, modern media.
At first, there is a massive outpouring of grief and pain, which reverberates throughout Bhutan in an unprecedented manner. The expanded public space amplifies people’s emotions. And it happens at a bewildering speed.
In the first two days the newspapers publish stories explaining what happened, without blame or sensationalism. They are often contradictory, reflecting the confusion of the night. The editorials are thoughtful and measured. Kuensel writes that accidents have happened before and will happen again, adding philosophically: ‘Fatalism is an integral part of our psyche, shaped by the belief that our destiny has already been charted by how we lived our previous lives.’
But very quickly a seam of anger and resentment rises to the surface, first appearing in columns and letters and blogs. The Bhutanese cannot accept that police, army and government officials struggled for six hours and still the boys died. In chat rooms, citizens make inflammatory, sometimes nasty comments, while hiding behind anonymity.
The Bhutanese want to yell at someone; they just cannot agree who. Older rural people believe that the deaths were caused by wrathful river deities. In Thimphu and larger cities, some blame the government or the police, while others question if any role was played by the Chhukha hydropower station, which is a few kilometres upriver from the site of the tragedy. Questions are asked on blogs, in letters and editorials, as well as in homes and offices across Thimphu. Why weren’t police able to rescue the children? What about the senior officials? What were they doing in those six hours? Why was there no warning from upstream? Whenever a Westerner is hurt in the mountains, they are choppered out. Why didn’t the government send a helicopter for Bhutanese children? Are their lives worth less?
Needrup sums up the mood of the nation in his Friday editorial:
Early this week, seven boys died after staring death in the face for hours. For the nation, the initial reaction was shock. As the details of the failed rescue operation emerged and everybody mulled over the tragedy, the shock gave way to regret, pity and helplessness. Now the national sentiment carries an undertone of anger and frustration. In hindsight, every other person on the street thinks that the boys could have been rescued.
On the day Needrup’s editorial is published, the anger and frustration he writes about reaches a crescendo and spills from the newspapers and cyberspace onto the street. As the morning unfolds, many Thimphu residents come to the sacred chorten, a type of Bhutanese shrine, near the centre of town, to light butter lamps in the traditional way of Bhutanese mourning. One thousand are lit. But then a group of Thimphu citizens do something entirely un-Bhutanese. Around 100 ‘march’ from the chorten to the swimming pool, about 300 metres away. Watched by police and one or two curious onlookers, they walk in silence behind a large poster showing a photo of flickering butter lamps and the words ‘In Memoriam; remembering the seven young lives lost in Chhukha’.
The idea for the march originated in the offices of Bhutan Times, then spread to other newspapers and beyond. The marchers are mostly people from the media, with some civil servants. At the swimming pool they hand over a petition addressed to the Prime Minister. It reads, in part:
We cannot help but feel the duty of the citizenry to seize the opportunity to build a collective national consciousness and to let the nation know that we have come together, to awaken ourselves and take action, and to seek explanation for this tragedy, so that seven lives, albeit irredeemable, have not been lost in vain; so that the turmoil felt by the six stricken families is assuaged; so that the doubts, questions and emotions of sorrow and anger, which the nation is justifiably feeling, are appropriately addressed.
Concerned Citizens of Bhutan
The marchers are not aggressive or threatening. Rather, they seem earnest and subdued. Most of them are in their twenties, a few in their thirties, and all are neatly dressed in ghos and kiras. They look enthused, engaged and, to my eye, somehow healthy and wholesome. Bhutan Today reports the next day that the people ‘exercised their right to peaceful assembly as granted by article 7.12 of the Constitution of Bhutan’. To me it looks like democracy, in all its aspects, is flourishing.
But I am wrong.
If the country was shocked by the boys’ deaths, it is nothing to their reaction to Bhutanese ‘demonstrating’ on the streets of Thimphu. Many see the march as the beginning of the end. Total anarchy. Next it will be rabid crowds setting fire to trucks, just like their neighbours in India and Nepal.
A few of the Bhutan Observer staff took part, but Phuntsho disapproves. She cringes at turning grief into a public spectacle. She says it is un-Bhutanese. It would have been more effective if they had lit lamps. She lit butter lamps in her shrine room at home, quietly, on her own, and said prayers for the boys and their families.
The tragedy of the boys’ deaths is momentarily replaced in the media by news about the march. The motivation of the marchers varies: some call it a solidarity march, others a peace walk, and still others say it is a strike. Some say they want to show the grieving parents that all of Bhutan grieves with them. Some blame the government that they could not save those children.
At a dinner a few nights later, held by the Vice Chancellor of the Royal University of Bhutan, the march dominates the conversation. Among the handful of Westerners present, none seems to think the march was a big deal. Even using the term ‘march’ seems at odds with what we saw. But the 40 or so Bhutanese see it very differently. Not one of them is supportive.
The newspapers also come under fire, in particular Bhutan Times for its gratuitous coverage of the grieving families. Their reporter goes back again and again to interview the 18-year-old boy who made it to safety and sounded the alarm. One story is headlined ‘Their screams still haunt me’.
But according to the people present at the Vice Chancellor’s dinner, the newspaper has reached a new low that morning with its front page, which carries a photo of a row of empty children’s chairs. Beneath are photos of six of the boys. The seventh box has no picture and carries the words ‘Tashi Penjor did not even leave a photograph behind’. It is excruciatingly maudlin.
The story is not unlike many that fill tabloid newspapers in the English-speaking world after a catastrophe. But that does not make it welcome in Bhutan. Again, Bhutan Times has crossed a line they did not know existed.
‘That was the final straw,’ says Kunzang Choden, the outspoken international writer. ‘Emotive. Playing on heartstrings. We don’t want that kind of reporting in Bhutan.’
The Vice Chancellor’s wife feels for the grieving families who are living through this media maelstrom. ‘If I was one of the parents, I would be devastated to read all this. Leave the families alone,’ she says.
The Bhutan Times approach is certainly very tabloid, and the way the Bhutanese at the dinner responded would suggest that is not appreciated here. They recoil against such overt emotional manipulation.
Literacy levels are low and those who can read do not necessarily read newspapers. Only the educated elite voluntarily read newspapers and engage in public discussion. There is no populist readership, which in the West has traditionally been the ma
rket for tabloid-style news. Bhutan Today publishes Hollywood or Bollywood celebrity photographs, but they are not particularly salacious. The occasional appearance of Jennifer Aniston in the paper is really an excuse to run her photo. The accompanying story, if there is one, usually reports briefly on a new movie, not speculation on her love life. Nor is there tabloid-style television. There is an innocence, a lack of hype, in the public space opening up in Bhutan. It would seem that its educated citizens are demanding this space be treated with seriousness and integrity.
The Bhutanese present at the Vice Chancellor’s dinner are equally unhappy about the march itself. As head of the Bhutan Centre for Media and Democracy, Siok Sian Pek-Dorji is uncomfortable that most of the marchers were journalists. It is not their role to be activists, she says.
A senior civil servant says newspapers are there to report news, not make it.
Kunzang Choden questions the motivation of the marchers. As with Phuntsho, it is the public nature of the gesture that makes her cringe. She tells me that they are stealing someone else’s grief for their own purpose. It won’t help the families. ‘It would mean more if they went to the temple,’ she says.
For weeks, the march – and the anarchy it could presage – continues to be big news. It is dissected and debated on blogs and in the newspapers. Popular blog www.kuzuzangpo.com publishes a range of views.
‘Years from now, the death of the 7 unfortunate children will be remembered as an event that ushered in a movement that gave birth to the social evil known as STRIKES,’ writes ‘The Laggard’.
‘I for one don’t see anything wrong with the “Solidarity Walk” … strikes and protests are some of the major tools in democratic set up; of course it has to be in the interest of the larger mass,’ responded ‘123’.
After a few days, news that the Fourth King disapproves of the march filters through Thimphu society, which confirms what the majority seems to be feeling.
The Dragon's Voice Page 19