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Press Release:

CFOB gravely concerned with the case of Toronto refugee

October 12, 2007
No. 141

Ottawa (February 2, 2009) - On a Saturday night in November 2007 Ler Wah Lo Bo, a Karen refugee from Burma living in Toronto, received devastating news. Ler Wah’s wife, her sister and her sister's 14-month-old baby had died in a car accident in North Carolina.

Five months earlier Ler Wah’s wife, Pawleenar Wah 47, and their three children Ner Ta (Victor) Wah 21, Ner Soe (Vincent) Wah 16 and Mae Kaba (Violet) Wah 12, arrived in the US after living under a plastic tarp in a Thai refugee camp for 10 years.

Ler Wah desperately wanted to be reunited with his distraught children and attend his wife's funeral but he couldn’t because after being in Canada for more than six years, he still does not have permanent resident status.

Ler Wah had tried in vain to sponsor his wife and children from the squalid Thai refugee camp and bring them to Canada. After waiting for more than five years for Ler Wah to be able to do so, Ler Wah's wife decided to join her late sister in the US. She was desperate, during her last 18 months in the camp, things had changed rapidly; most of Pawleenar’s friends had already left for resettlement in third countries. With her support network greatly diminished she feared for her children's safety. She hoped that going to the US to join her sister would be the fastest way to be reunited with her husband whom she hadn't seen since December 2001.

Ler Wah's inability to get status stems from Canadian government policy that continues to discriminate against refugees for their involvement in the resistance to the Burmese Armed forces war against its own people. Ler Wah was a member of the Karen National Union (KNU), Burma's largest and oldest ethnic opposition group. For decades the KNU has operated as the de facto government in large areas of eastern Burma.

Ler Wah served in the KNU for 16 years, first as a teacher and then as solider in the KNU's armed wing Karen National Liberation Army. In the mid 1990's Ler Wah left the KNU and helped set up refugee camps on the Thai Burma border for the thousands displaced by decades of war. Ler Wah then spent several years working along the Thai-Burma border for NGO's mapping and monitoring land mines.

After more than 6 years in Canada, Ler Wah is unable to get legal status because the Canadian government deems his involvement with the KNU and KNLA as unlawful. Under Canada's current refugee screening policy Nelson Mandela would also be denied status in Canada because the ANC, like the KNU was a political organization with an armed wing. Were participants in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising to apply for asylum in Canada today, they too could be denied asylum due to their equally "unlawful" resistance to Nazi slaughter.

Mandela like Ler Wah's hero Aung San Suu Kyi received Honorary Citizenship from the Canadian government. Sadly Canada refuses to extend the normal kind of citizenship to Ler Wah and others like him because like Mandela they resisted a brutal regime committed to repression, slavery and tyranny.

In Ottawa in November 2001 minutes after Mandela received his honorary citizenship, the rebel turned world statesman told reporters "Where the oppressor tightens the screws of oppression and uses force to suppress the legitimate aspirations of the oppressed, the lesson of history throughout the world, right down the ages, is that the oppressed take up arms. Not because they become terrorists, but because their struggle is just. That was the nature of our struggle (against apartheid). Any other struggle that follows that pattern is not a terrorist organization".

Over the last 2 years Canada has accepted more than 2000 Karen refugees from camps in Thailand. Ler Wa, however remains separated from his children as a result of his involvement in the very organization that protected these refugees and thousands of others and facilitated their escape from a violent military dictatorship including those from the dominant Burman majority.

Exiled activist Toe Kyi was a high school student in Burma’s third largest city Moulmein when in August 1988 he took part in the massive anti government demonstrations that swept Burma. Following the military's violent crackdown Toe Kyi and tens of thousands of students fled to rebel territory to avoid the Burmese military. According to Toe Kyi “If I had stayed I would have been arrested or killed. The KNU helped me and thousands of others escape a violent military regime. I really appreciated the fact that they helped us even though we weren't Karen. Without their assistance many more students would have died.”

Toe Kyi’s comments serve not to glorify the KNU but to put into perspective the long and complicated history of Burma, a country wracked by 46 years of military dictatorship and an even longer civil war. A decade before Ler Wah joined the KNU in 1981, the KNU entered into an alliance with a guerrilla Army run by Burma’s deposed democratically elected Prime Minister U Nu and a group of his followers whose stated goal was to overthrow the military regime. Ironically it was U Nu’s government who greatly bolstered the KNU raison d’etre when in 1961 he had declared Buddhism Burma’s official religion infuriating Burma’s substantial religious monitories including many Karen (roughly half of Burma’s Karen population is Christian as are a majority of the KNU leadership).

Following the 1990 elections won overwhelmingly by Aung San Suu Kyi’s opposition party the National League for Democracy the military government refused to relinquish power. A group of elected opposition MP’s led by Aung San Suu Kyi’s cousin Dr. Sein Win fled to the KNU’s rebel capital Manerplaw where they formed a government in exile. The government in exile remained in KNU territory until shortly before Manerplaw fell to the Burmese military in January 1995.

In July 2008 during Ler Wah's most recent meeting with Immigration Canada officials he was repeatedly asked if he was a terrorist. As evidence the immigration official confronted Ler Wah with articles from the Burmese regime's official newspaper the “New Light of Myanmar” that accused the KNU of terrorism. The New Light of Myanmar notorious for its bellicose support of the Burmese junta declares on a regular basis that there are no political prisoners in Burma and that all demonstrators are criminals. If Canadian authorities continue their policy of relying on the New of Myanmar to determine Burmese “terrorists” then Suu Kyi could be barred entry to Canada because the NLM frequently describes her as an inciter of terrorism and claims that the overseas wing of her political party the National League for Democracy is a terrorist organization.

According to exiled student activist and Canadian Friends of Burma executive director Tin Maung Htoo“The only terrorists that I know of from Burma are the generals and their henchman who continue to wage war against their fellow people. The idea that the KNU, or the KNLA are terrorists is totally wrong. Terrorists do not harbor democratically elected MPs and protect them from military generals”.

It is truly tragic that Ler Wah will never see his wife alive again. Canada’s reluctance to grant Ler Wah status in Canada is a major impediment to him being permanently reunited with his children and only makes his pain worse. Without normalized status in Canada, Ler Wah is relegated to the life of second class citizen, unable to travel, go to university and at the mercy of a temporary work permit that frequently expires and condemns him to menial labour. The government of Canada must reconsider an ill-informed policy that punishes those who stood up to resist a brutal regime from murdering their fellow citizens.

As CFOB executive director Tin Maung Htoo says “I know Ler Wah personally and I consider him a principled, honest and truthful individual. He is held in high regard in the Burmese community in Canada by both Karen and non Karen alike, Buddhist, Christian and Muslim. We are lucky to have him in Canada, his deeply unfortunate predicament must be rectified as soon as possible.”

Media contact: 613-297-6835

The Canadian Friends of Burma (CFOB) is federally incorporated, national non-governmental organization working for democracy and human rights in Burma since 1991. Contact: Suite 206, 145 Spruce St., Ottawa, K1R 6P1; Tel: 613.237.8056; Email: cfob@cfob.org; Web: www.cfob.org