Exile, Canadian-Style

Myo Min pointed to the on-board computer in his police patrol car. “This is how we track down the bad guys,” he boasted, clearly relishing his newfound role as a high-tech crime fighter.

But this is Canada, and bureaucracy soon stood in the way of his desire to show off. He couldn’t let me into the vehicle, he said, without getting permission from his supervisor at least 48 hours in advance. I did, however, notice that he was playing a song by Burmese rock star Zaw Win Htut in the car’s cassette player.

It was a brutally cold night, and Myo Min was on duty patrolling the streets of Ottawa, doing his bit to keep the Canadian capital safe from drug traffickers and drunk drivers and free of domestic violence and illegal weapons.

Stopping by the apartment where I was staying with a friend, he adjusted his bulletproof vest and started telling me about his journey from the jungles of the Thai-Burmese border to Canada. Every few minutes, our conversation was interrupted by radio communication from his walkie-talkie.

Twenty years ago, Myo Min was one of thousands of young Burmese who left their country to resist a regime that had just seized power in a bloody coup. He joined the All Burma Students’ Democratic Front (ABSDF), a student army formed in the jungles of eastern Burma, but after several years, he grew disillusioned with the armed struggle and factional infighting within the students’ army. He left for resettlement in Canada in 1997.

In 2003, he joined the police force in Ottawa. These days, he doesn’t talk much about bringing down the regime in Burma. But like many former activists living abroad, he still dreams of returning to his homeland someday.

According to Kevin McLeod, an active member of Canadian Friends of Burma (CFOB) and self-described “unemployed student,” many Burmese asylum seekers in Canada are struggling to keep their heads above water in their new country.

CFOB executive director Tin Maung Htoo (Enlarge)

“They have emotional stress and frustration and suffer from depression,” he said of some of his many Burmese friends and acquaintances.

He noted that Burmese who migrated to Canada in the 1960s were better educated and more financially secure than those who migrated after fleeing political persecution in 1988. Most of these later immigrants came with nothing and have had to rebuild their lives from scratch, making integration much more difficult for them.

McLeod is perhaps uniquely sympathetic to the difficulties faced by Burmese living in Canada. His Burmese friends jokingly call him a “Canadian refugee,” because like many former student activists from Burma, he hasn’t completed his university studies and is often broke. But he is an avid student of Burmese affairs, reading many books on the country and spending countless hours talking with Burmese friends, on whose couches he often finds himself spending the night.

In some cases, the failure to adapt to life in Canada has ended in tragedy. Several years ago, a young activist named Aung Ko jumped off Niagara Falls. Close friends said that he suffered from depression and may have had a drug-abuse problem. Later, another young Burmese activist hung himself in his room in Toronto.

But all is not doom and gloom for Burmese living in Canada. Tin Maung Htoo, the current executive director of CFOB, said that Canada offers great opportunities to Burmese.

As former members of Burma’s clandestine high-school student union, Tin Maung Htoo and his close friend and fellow CFOB member Toe Kyi have followed a familiar trajectory from student activism inside Burma to eventual third-country resettlement. But in their case, they managed to avoid imprisonment in Burma—a common fate among activists—only to end up spending three years in the Special Detention Center in Bangkok for attempting to protest against the Salween dam project in 1993.

The Thai authorities refused to release Tin Maung Htoo and Toe Kyi onto Thai soil, so the two friends finally agreed to go to Canada. They were taken directly from the detention center to the airport.