As the people of Bhutan prepare to go to the polls this month in the tiny Himalayan kingdom’s first general election, Patrick French discovers their remarkable achievements and asks how the success of a royal dynasty may have blunted the desire for democracy. In The Telegraph, UK:
Bhutan is the most beautiful country in the world. You fly in over the Himalayas, the plane cruising at the height of the mountain peaks, and watch the snow glistening in the sheer, sharp sunlight. A white blueness envelops the sky and, before you know it, the little Druk Air plane is dropping into a golden river valley and slaloming its way to Paro, the only airport in Bhutan.
You pass all the mountains: Cho Oyu, Mount Everest, Makalu, each peak spiking in a web of frosted snow and giving way to a further peak, the blank whiteness of the summit becoming a filigree of ice trails as your eyes descend to the lower ridges and see stepped fields and trees, the last great undestroyed Himalayan forests, and bump now on air pockets as the plane turns into the next valley and makes its way towards earth. The other passengers, Americans and Germans with padded ski jackets and virtuous hairstyles, are so busy crowding over to the left of the plane to snap photographs that I fear we will list to port.
[Photo: Would-be voters during another dummy run in December.]
Training reporters to cover elections
Andrea Bernstein, political director of New York Public Radio WNYC, was selected to train 20 Bhutanese reporters as the country prepares for its first-ever elections. The invitation came from Bhutan’s daily newspaper, Kuensel. Bernstein spent a week in Bhutan. Read her blog:
…Today, we began the training (because of the time difference, we were actually going head to head with the Oscars). We were overwhelmed by the response - twenty journalists were supposed to show up, forty three came. One drove “two-days journey” - she actually did in 15 hours by driving through until 3 am over the national highway, the road that hairpins through the Himalayas. Some of the journalists were brand new, but all took their craft amazingly seriously. We were a bit worried that we’d have to draw them out, needlessly so, it turned out. This was a group keenly aware of the history that is taking place in Bhutan, and in the important role they’ll have in shaping it.
