Resistance

Next week Canada's Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) will hear Jeremy Hinzman's case that he should be granted refugee status. A former paratrooper who served the US army in Afghanistan, Hinzman has since become a Quaker and applied for (and been refused) conscientious objector status by the military. As Simply Appalling, from whom I got the story, reports, movement is afoot to form a "Freedom Underground" to help deserters find safe haven in Canada. Hinzman's case is, in this respect, a sort of acid test for Canada's treatment of known deserters. Carl Rising-Moore is one of the activists calling for Canada to provide safe refuge to deserters:

The question is, given strained U.S.-Canada relations and the fact information is shared between the RCMP and their American counterparts, can Canadians offer substantive aid to U.S. deserters? That's what Rising- Moore is here to find out, although he's quick to add that he regards the cross-border escape hatch as the last option for suicidal soldiers. "I'm telling them to go to their clergy, go to their commanding officers, and to claim conscientious objection while in the military, and to fight it out like that. But if they're considering pulling the trigger on themselves, I'm telling them to desert, just as George Bush Jr. did during the Vietnam War."

If you want to support Hinzman, his site gives contact information for the Canadian Prime Minister and Minister of Citizenship and Immigration. As the prospect of a draft is not impossible, the outcome of Hinzman's petition weighs heavily. Hinzman is not the only deserter to have applied for refugee status in Canada, but his is, as far as I know, the only public case. For more on soldiers who have become war resistors, see Tom Joad. His site reports on the status of individual resistors and gives a number of links to related sites.