By Choekyi Lhamo
DHARAMSHALA, May 12: China has reportedly been setting up villages in Bhutan as part of a major construction drive by the Chinese President Xi Jinping since 2017, revealed an investigative report published by Foreign Policy on Friday. The report argued that the Beijing administration has been occupying territories historically understood as Bhutanese territory since 2015.
China announced the construction of a new village called Gyalaphug (Ch: Jieluobu) established in the south of the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR). The findings on Gyalaphug revealed that it is one of the three new villages, two already occupied, out of which one is currently under construction. The author of the report, Robert Barnett claimed that the occupation of land in Bhutan is strategically aimed to force the Bhutanese government to cede territory that China wants elsewhere in Bhutan, to gain military edge in its confrontations with New Delhi.
The military intervention into Bhutanese territory openly violates the terms of China’s founding treaty with Bhutan. “By mirroring in the Himalayas the provocative tactics it has used in the South China Sea, Beijing is risking its relations with its neighbours, whose needs and interests it has always claimed to respect, and jeopardizing its reputation worldwide,” the report added.
The military stand-off in 2017 on the Doklam plateau following Beijing’s attempt to build a road was met with a 73-day face-off between Chinese and Indian troops. It also speculated similar motives of the Chinese government in this major construction drive, which seems to have eerily silenced the Bhutanese lawmakers to comment on the issue.
“[Gyalaphug village] includes an estimated 50 construction workers, technical advisors, and security forces, many of them Chinese rather than Tibetans. A special unit from the police agency overseeing borders is based in or near the village. The most important task of this police agency, one officer stationed on the western Tibetan border told a Chinese news agency, is to catch “illegal immigrants”—meaning Tibetans trying to flee to India or Nepal,” the report further remarked.
The publication said that it received no response from the Indian Ministry of External Affairs, the Bhutanese mission to the UN and from the PMO. Both the Chinese embassy in Washington and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing did not respond to the queries from the news agency. The concerned Bhutanese government also refused to comment on the matter.
