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| Southeast Asia | |
| Rice waives law to allow Myanmar refugees into US | |
| 2006-05-06 | |
| WASHINGTON - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has waived a law to make a group of Myanmar refugees, almost all of whom back an armed group fighting the Yangon military junta, eligible for resettlement into the United States, the State Department said Friday. With the waiver, some 9,300 ethnic Karen refugees housed in Tham Hin camp in Thailand along the Myanmar border and who backed the Karen National Union (KNU) will no longer be viewed as terrorism supporters, officials said. Under US law, people who provide material support to terrorist organizations are not eligible to immigrate into the United States. One provision defines terrorist organization as any group of two or more people who bear arms with the intent to endanger the safety of any individual. “Now what the secretary did was she exercised a waiver authority -- and this is under the Immigration and Nationality Act -- so that certain refugees who might otherwise meet all the criteria for refugee resettlement in the United States could be considered for resettlement in the United States,” State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters. “So this waiver is not a guarantee that individuals might be resettled in the United States, but merely something that allows the Department of Homeland Security to consider them as potentially eligible, even though they might be considered under the law to have provided what I refer to as material support,” he said. “That’s the term under the law.” The waiver, which Rice signed Wednesday, followed months of internal argument among the State, Justice and Homeland Security departments. “The argument has pitted concerns about combating terrorism against worries that people with legitimate claims to asylum were being blocked from immigrating to the United States,” the Washington Post reported. The State Department said that because of their association with the KNU, a significant portion of the refugees were expected to be affected by the “material support” issue. But the waiver does not apply to KNU members who had fought the junta but are now living as refugees in the camp, said Aung Din, co-founder of the US Campaign for Burma, which is coordinating a global push to free Myanmar’s democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi. “This is going to split families and we appeal to the US authorities to reconsider and give all of them a chance to be resettled in the United States,” Aung Din said. The KNU is the de facto civilian government of the Karen tribe in areas it controls in Myanmar, resisting and seeking autonomy from the junta.
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| Posted by:Steve White |