Support a Canadian role to restore peace and democracy in Burma
Dear friends,
Inter Pares has been working with refugees and displaced people from Burma for more than fifteen years. Along with all Canadians these last two weeks, we have been watching with horror as the peaceful demonstrations led by Buddhist monks and nuns were brutally suppressed. While the official death toll is ten, unconfirmed reports put the death toll as much higher.
Inter Pares has written to the Prime Minister of Canada asking him to express the outrage of all Canadians over the illegal military junta's violent suppression of the democracy movement and the continuing war against the ethnic peoples of the country. We invite our supporters to do the same. We are asking the Government of Canada to do the following:
- Implement the
House of Commons motion on Burma, which was passed on May 18, 2005; - Work within the international community to promote and implement a comprehensive arms embargo against the military regime;
- Through Canadian diplomatic missions, encourage the states of India, Bangladesh, China, Thailand and Malaysia to accept Burmese asylum seekers who are fleeing the latest crackdown against the democracy movement;
- Implement comprehensive trade and investment sanctions in conjunction with internationally coordinated initiatives with respect to financial transactions and the freezing of assets of members of the Burmese junta; and
- Call on China and Russia to end their opposition to a UN Security Council Resolution on Burma and support the UN Secretary General in efforts to facilitate dialogue between the military, the National League for Democracy (the party of Aung San Suu Kyi, which won the 1990 national elections) and the ethnic nationalities, and to facilitate a transition to democracy.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper can be reached at:
Office of the Prime Minister
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa K1A 0A2
Fax: 613-941-6900
E-mail:
pm@pm.gc.ca
Rallies and vigils continue to be held in cities across Canada. If you would like to be notified of such activities, we suggest signing up for the Canadian Friends of Burma's electronic mailing list at www.cfob.org.
We also encourage our supporters to stay informed. Accurate news from Burma can be difficult for Canadians to obtain, due to limited access by foreign media and the junta's control of state media. Independent border-based media organizations such as the ones Inter Pares supports have been invaluable sources during this period, as they are able to collect news inside the country daily, process and edit the news without censorship, and send this news back inside Burma or internationally. Inter Pares counterpart Burma Net International is an alliance of ten independent Burmese media organizations, whose Web site provides a compilation of its members' stories: www.bnionline.net. An additional valuable resource is BurmaNet News, which presents articles from Burmese media sources as well as international coverage of Burma: www.burmanet.org.
Thank you for your attention to this very important social justice issue, and for your solidarity.
| Reviewed October 4, 2007 |  |
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