Northern exposure

American war resisters who flee to Canada have no easy options. They might seek legal immigrant status like any other immigrant who comes to Canada (a status difficult to obtain once you're in the country), or they might simply stay quiet and try to remain in the country illegally. But many of them seek refugee status on political grounds. And many of them are now hearing about a group called the War Resisters Support Campaign, which pledges to help them whatever their chosen course of action.

Kevin Lee, a former private in the Army who served in Iraq in 2006, arrived in Canada in March after going AWOL. He told Salon in a phone interview that he hid in an apartment in Florida for several weeks before taking a bus to Toronto. His original plan had been to flee to Mexico, but after using Google to research his options, he came across the Web site of the War Resisters Support Campaign and decided Canada was the best place to go. He is now seeking refugee status here.

It was still a tough choice to flee. "I was sad to leave, but I don't regret it at all," Lee said, "because the war is pointless and we're losing too many troops." He was adamant that even if his effort to gain legal status in Canada fails, he won't go home. "I'll go somewhere else," he said. "As far away as I can get."

Jeffrey House, a Toronto lawyer who works on behalf of numerous war resisters, contends that the war in Iraq contravenes international law and soldiers therefore have a right to refuse to serve in it. It is on that basis that he is fighting for them to be granted refugee status by the Canadian government.

But the argument House is making has not yet definitively been put to the test here. Canada has relatively generous refugee laws, but the situation with U.S. war resisters does not fit neatly under the definition of "refugee." According to Lisa Borsu of Citizenship and Immigration Canada, the official agency that handles refugee claims, "the Government of Canada is committed to protecting refugees who have a well founded fear of persecution" based on "political opinions" or "membership in a particular social group."

But whether facing jail time in the United States for breaking a U.S. military law qualifies as "persecution" is a much stickier point. University of Toronto's Macklin, an expert on refugee law, says that the case House is trying to make is a tough one because past interpretations of Canadian refugee law affirm that "prosecution is different from persecution." Though war resisters are taking a political stand, Macklin says that the Canadian system is more likely to view their plight back home -- facing a judge and potential jail time -- as distinct from that of immigrants fleeing an authoritarian regime, who could be imprisoned or executed for their political or religious leanings if sent back home.

The War Resisters Support Campaign, headquartered in Toronto, is lobbying the Canadian government to make a new provision in the immigration laws to allow the U.S. soldiers to stay in Canada legally. It has helped roughly 40 Americans who have contacted the group from within Canada, according to Lee Zaslofsky, the coordinator of the campaign, and more than a hundred others who have made contact anonymously through lawyers. The group helps find them housing, gives them some financial support, and coordinates legal services needed for the fight to stay. Recently, due to the rising number of resisters, the organization put out a call for housing and received more than 300 responses from people across Canada, including from one former Liberal member of the Canadian Parliament, whose name the group declined to disclose.

The group has also given advice to many other resisters in the United States who are considering darting to Canada, according to Zaslofsky. They have also received responses from people in the United States offering their homes as safe houses for resisters as they make their way to the Canadian border -- what advocates refer to as an "underground railroad." Zaslofsky said that his organization has not worked directly with anyone in the United States, but said that if it necessary, "there are people in the U.S. who I could refer them to."

For the Vietnam generation, all this might sound quite familiar. In fact, the support movement here is led and staffed largely by people who refused to fight the war in Indochina, and is seen by many of them as one generation helping the next. Zaslofsky, himself an Army deserter during Vietnam, acknowledges a generational difference; back then they were fleeing the draft, while many of today's soldiers are fleeing an Army they were driven into by economic struggle. "In my day people went to university to avoid military service," Zaslofsky said. Now they go into the military in order to get the money to go to college, he said, or because low-wage jobs at places like Wal-Mart or McDonald's aren't enough to support their families.

Without a draft, the number of Americans fleeing north is a fraction of what it was four decades ago. More than 30,000 fled to Canada during the late 1960s and early '70s. Only a few thousand have gone AWOL during the current war, and most of them have apparently remained in the United States. Still, as the war in Iraq drags on and disillusionment grows in the ranks of the military, the numbers are rising. While 3,101 soldiers went AWOL between October 2005 and October 2006, more than 1,700 soldiers deserted in the six months between October 2006 and early April, according to figures released recently by the Army. According to the War Resisters Support Campaign, the number of soldiers coming to Canada over the past six months has risen correspondingly.

Corey Glass, a former National Guardsman who worked in military intelligence in Iraq before deserting to Canada in 2006, says he once considered it his duty to serve. But he says that in Iraq, he was directed to "sanitize" intelligence reports. "I was told to pretty much go with the story you're given, take out the real details, and paint a picture for the commander," he told Salon. Eventually Glass came to believe that "they used lies and plays on words to get us over there, and ordered us to commit crimes, in my opinion, against another country."

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