A Bhutanese Refugee:
The Story of Hari Acharya

Global Youth Connect is a youth-led organization whose programs are challenging youth to transform the world around them. The following is an excerpt provided to the Asian Social Issues Program from their website. You can also link to the full article.

Hari Acharya is a young activist and refugee from the small South Asian nation of Bhutan. Since being forcefully evicted by the country's Bhuddist monarchy in 1992, Hari has been speaking out and taking action to help repatriate the world's largest per capita refugee population. He also wishes to see democracy and the guarantee of fundamental human rights replace the repressive practices of Bhutan's absolute monarchy. Since March 2000, Global Youth Connect (GYC) has supported Hari in his efforts at raising international awareness about the Bhutanese refugee crisis. He has spoken to many students, youth activists and community groups in and around New York City through GYC's Youth Action Campaign for Peace in Bhutan. A youth delegation is traveling to the Bhutanese refugee camps in June-July 2001.

In December 1992, Hari went to his home in a remote village in southern Bhutan on a short vacation from a college in India to find his father arrested, detained and being tortured for protesting against the unjust policies of the government that were being implemented zealously by the village headman. On inquiring about the injustice involved, Hari was himself arrested and detained with his father for two days. His father was hung upside down and beaten up by the members of the Royal Bhutan Police until he bled to unconsciousness. After seven days of detention and torture, Hari's father was forced to sign a "Voluntary Migration Form" along with 23 other families. Within the next ten days, all these families were thrown out of their homes. In the next twelve days, they were thrown out the country after much harassment, torture, humiliation and a rape at a temporary border camp which Hari was made to witness, tied to a pole.