The forced labour Janie and I witnessed in Bhutan was, to say the least, bugging me. The night of 25/26 March, ahead of our last full day, I found myself unable to sleep for fretting about it.
I decided that night to write an open letter to the King, which I would ask Pema to deliver via Kuensel after Janie and I had flown out of the country. My ruse, to render Pema blameless for the content of a letter which might be deemed to be criticising the King, was to tell Pema that the letter was a thank you letter to the editor of Kuensel for publishing, a few days earlier, my letter with thoughts about the Bhutanese stock exchange.
Criticising the King of Bhutan was, at that time, a criminal offence subject to imprisonment, hence my extreme caution and in depth planning to arrange the timed delivery of my 26 March letter via my wise and savvy friend Pema.
I was not expecting the letter to be published in Kuensel and suspected that the letter might not find its way directly to the King, but I had written out a full draft in my log book and planned to send the letter to various relevant parties on my return to England. That I did, a few week’s later.
The Economist didn’t publish the letter, but word did reach me from Bill Emmott that he had passed the letter on to the Economist journalist who was working on pieces about Bhutan. I recall the matter of forced labour in Bhutan being raised in occasional Economist pieces in the subsequent months/years, which I sensed was, to some extent, informed by my letter.
Interestingly and more directly, a few month’s later, I received a phone call “out of the blue” from an investigator at the International Labour Organisation. He was very hesitant and cautious with me, explaining that the call was entirely informal and off the record. Contacting complainants was not part of the protocol, but, he explained, the ILO had received several communications about this topic and he wondered whether I could provide him with some more specific evidence about what we had seen, where and when we had seen it, etc.
I spent some time on the phone with the ILO dude, delving into my log and photos, explaining in as much detail as I could the sightings that had motivated me to write my letter.
At the end of the call, he told me that I had been very helpful and/but that he would not be able to communicate with me formally, either to thank me or to let me know what the ILO had done/was planning to do. He did assure me, however that the ILO was pursing the matter.
I’ve no idea whether my letter had any practical impact at all. I was well-connected in the international voluntary sector world at the time and I do remember discussing the matter with one or two knowledgeable people who suggested that the issue was a “banging head against a brick wall” matter at that time in Bhutan.
But my small intervention might have helped change the mood a tiny bit, or helped others to move the dial a little towards improved conditions and/or circumstances for labourers on public works in Bhutan. If so, I’d gladly raise a glass of ara to that:
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