Karen children
A solution is in sight for thousands of refugees from Burma who have been "warehoused" in camps for decades and are currently accommodated in nine camps in Thailand.
Following an agreement by the Royal Thai Government to allow large-scale resettlement of Burmese refugees, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has identified 13,000 of an estimated refugee population of 140,000 in need of priority resettlement.
The groups identified are those facing a particularly precarious existence and who have suffered severe persecution, including torture, imprisonment, forced labour, the burning of villages and forced relocation in their homeland.
Eight hundred and ten Karen refugees have been accepted by Canada.
Predominantly members of the Karen ethnic group, the refugees are expected to resettle in Canada later this year.
This is the first time since the resettlement of Indochinese refugees that Canada has accepted a significant number of refugees from Thailand.
Minister Monte Solberg of Citizenship and Immigration Canada said that Canadians are looking forward to helping the refugees rebuild secure lives.
"Welcoming these refugees, who have endured a prolonged state of limbo in terrible conditions, is in the best humanitarian tradition of Canada," Solberg said.
Jahanshah Assadi, the UNHCR’s representative in Canada, welcomed Canada’s swift response to the high commission’s submission of the list of 810 Karen refugees from Burma, also referred to as Myanmar.
"We were delighted at Canada's swift response to our group submission of
810 Karen refugees, and impressed at the smooth and efficient manner in which
the Canadian selection team conducted the interviews in a remote refugee camp
environment," the UN representative said.
Other countries offering to resettle large numbers of Burmese refugees are the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Finland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.
The majority of the refugees fled to Thailand in 1995 following a major offensive by the Burmese government army against the Karen National Union (KNU).
A small portion of the population has been in Thailand since as early as the 1960s, having lived in sporadic settlements until the camps were formed by the Thai government in the late nineties.
Less than a year after being approached by the UNHCR, over 500 refugees from this group are scheduled to arrive in Canada in August and September, with the remaining 300 or so to follow late this year and early in 2007.
The first group of government-assisted refugees will be settling in10 communities stretching across the country from Vancouver to Charlottetown.
The remaining refugees will benefit from the support of the private sponsorship community. Sponsoring groups from small towns as well as large cities have responded favourably and enthusiastically to providing support.
