FOCUS:BURMESE IMMIGRANTS

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Smiler Greely, 36, spent 23 years in a refugee camp on the Burma-Thailand border before moving to Buffalo.
Derek Gee / Buffalo News
FOCUS:BURMESE IMMIGRANTS
Burmese refugees find home in Buffalo
Oppressed at home, refugees chase the American dream on city’s West Side




Law Eh Soe was one of only two photojournalists to chronicle the monks’ pro-democracy uprising two years ago in his native Burma.

He fled after government soldiers shot and killed a Japanese journalist.

Smiler Greely, another Burma native, spent 23 years in a refugee camp, a virtual city of 40,000 people crammed into a few square kilometers, living in bamboo houses with thatched roofs and no electricity.

He fled to give his three kids an education –and a country they could call home.

Myo Thant, a pro-democracy youth leader in Burma, spent 17 months under house arrest as a key aide to Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize recipient.

He fled because he wouldn’t compromise his beliefs and knew he’d spend much of his life under house arrest, in prison –or worse.

All three refugees –bright, educated men forced from their homeland –now live on Buffalo’s West Side.

And they’re not alone. Buffalo is home to approximately 2,000 Burmese refugees – approaching 1 percent of the city’s population.

The figure is climbing quickly, and Buffalo has become the unofficial state capital for resettling refugees from Burma and elsewhere. This year, more than 30 percent of the refugees coming to New York State have settled in Western New York.

“If it weren’t for refugees, Buffalo would be shrinking even faster,” said Molly Short, executive director of Journey’s End Refugee Services. “This is the incoming population.”

The Burmese make up more than half the roughly 1,000 refugees who resettle in the Buffalo area each year.

Most of the Burmese have fled from refugee camps along the Thailand-Burma border, where some lived for years in primitive conditions, after 3,000 of their villages were destroyed.

They’ve settled mostly on the West Side, west of Richmond Avenue and south of Lafayette Avenue. Many spend their time in all-day English classes, fishing along the Niagara River and walking through their neighborhoods.

Many passers-by think they’re either Chinese or Vietnamese. And they’re adamant that their native land is Burma, not Myanmar, the recent name favored by the military government.

They’re new Buffalonians, chasing their own version of the American dream. But not just for themselves.

“This is only the first generation,” Law said, gesturing toward an English class of Burmese adults. “The second generation will be different. They will speak fluent English and be more educated.”

But Law sounded a warning for that younger generation:

“They shouldn’t forget their roots, and why we had to come to America. Thousands of our people stayed in Burma and suffered, and they shouldn’t forget that.”

New kid in town

The Burmese refugees who have formed their own community on the West Side, as well as smaller enclaves in Black Rock and Riverside, face two major hurdles in adapting to America.

First, few come here speaking much English. Authorities estimate that only 10 to 15 percent of Burmese refugees arrive with a workable mastery of the language. That’s why newcomers spend up to eight hours on weekdays in English class, first having to crack the intricacies of our alphabet.

The Burmese also have to overcome their own diversity. Burma has eight basic ethnic groups, dozens of sub-ethnic groups and about 100 language dialects. That means many of them need interpreters just to talk with each other.

Last week, Denise Phillips Beehag, director of refugee services for the International Institute of Buffalo, asked some Burmese refugees outside English class for permission to have their photos taken for The Buffalo News. She made her pitch in English, before it was translated by one interpreter into the Burmese dialect and then by another into the Karen dialect.

The Burmese refugees also come from three religious groups: Christian, Buddhist and Muslim.

Thant, the former youth leader, dismissed the notion that the Burmese are too divided by their ethnic, language and religious differences.

“We’re all the same,” he said. “We’ve all been oppressed. It doesn’t matter what language you speak. We’re all from Burma.”

The Burmese also face the same challenges confronting any new immigrant group –including the Irish, Italian, Polish and Hispanic groups before them.

“Every new group goes through this,” Beehag said. “They’re the new kid in town, and they’re going to be picked on. But it’s easier to pick on this group. They’re timid, they’re quiet, and they’re not assertive.”

Burmese refugees work with four local resettlement agencies: the International Institute, Journey’s End, Catholic Charities and Jewish Family Service. But the Burmese won’t tell their case managers when they don’t have food or electricity, Beehag said.

“You have to ask them,” Beehag said. “They don’t want to be a burden. That’s a challenge for resettlement agencies.”

These refugees have endured a great deal just to get here.

Burma, located in Southeast Asia, bordering Thailand, China and India, has been in civil war for more than five decades.

Listen to the stories of Law, Thant and Smiler, and you hear about the burning of villages, the shooting of innocent people, the house arrests of democratic leaders, the crowded and primitive refugee camps and the physical and psychological torture of those imprisoned for their beliefs.

You also learn how much freer they feel here, how much they still miss their own rivers and mountains, and how high their hopes are for the next generation of Burmese-Americans.

No Hollywood movie

Back home, Law Eh Soe graduated from Rangoon University with a law degree. But he didn’t want to be a lawyer or judge under the long-running martial law.

So he drifted into photojournalism, working for Japanese, French and European news agencies in Rangoon.

“The government didn’t like me because I showed my people’s daily life in Burma,” he said.

On Sept. 18, 2007, thousands of monks protested peacefully in the streets against the military regime. Law and one other photojournalist captured those images, and his photos appeared on CNN, Time magazine and even Al Jazeera.

Previously, Law and others had been warned whenever government soldiers started shooting. This time, there was no warning, and a Japanese journalist was killed in downtown Rangoon.

“When they started shooting, it wasn’t like a Hollywood movie,” Law, now 38, remembered. “In a movie, the journalist can take the picture. In Burma, when they started shooting, I had to run for my life.

“It was no longer safe for me. I thought I would be in prison, or they might hunt for me.”

Two days later, Law fled to a remote area in Burma, then to Thailand. Since resettling in Buffalo in March 2008, he lives with his mother and two brothers on 14th Street and works full time with the International Institute as an interpreter.

“The two important things we have here are freedom and hope. We didn’t have them in Burma. We had to live under fear and doubt, and we didn’t have freedom of speech. Here we can discuss what we want.”

The hardest part of his adjustment to America?

“Nothing is like home. I love to live here, [but] when I close my eyes, I miss my country. I can smell the rivers and the country roads and the mountains.”

Law marvels at the adjustments other Burmese have made.

Many, before moving into the refugee camps, came from remote areas, often in the mountains, where they had no cars or buses or electricity. Now they live in a fairly large American city, with buses, shopping malls, hospitals and other modern amenities.

“It’s like they moved to another planet.”

Man without a country

Smiler Greely’s story is more typical among Burmese refugees.

The son of a teacher and a local agricultural minister, young Smiler lived along the Burma-Thailand border, where the Burmese government attacked its own residents.

“You couldn’t live there anymore,” he said. “You didn’t need to make a decision. You just ran across the river.”

Beehag, from the International Institute, described a typical scenario.

“You’re in your village minding your own business, and your village is burned down by the military government. So you run, and you run until you feel safe and meet up with people from another village.”

At about age 11, Smiler moved to a refugee camp in Thailand, into a life of bamboo houses, thatched roofs, no electricity and little water. The food was rice, fish paste, salt and chili peppers.

“Every 15 days, you have to line up, wait for your name and get your ration of rice,” he said. “Then the next day, you get your fish paste…”

There was no freedom, no choice, he said. The civil war prevented him from returning to Burma. Stateless, living in Thailand, he and other refugees were not allowed to grow their own rice or raise their own animals. He stayed 23 years, past the birth of his three children.

“I was over 30 years old, and I didn’t have citizenship in any country,” he said. “I am not an animal. But what country do I belong to? My children were born in Thailand. They didn’t have any citizenship, because they were in a refugee camp.”

A whole family without a country.

“How can your children survive for the next generation? I’ve spent my whole life in a refugee camp. Are my children going to spend their life there? My grandchildren?”

That’s why Smiler, now 36, came to Buffalo, where he lives with his wife and three young children and works in a school program with Journey’s End.

Smiler wants others to understand where he’s come from and to learn the difference between a democracy and a repressive military dictatorship, where people are shot and young girls raped by soldiers.

“Geographically, I like Burma and the weather. I love the streams and rivers and forests in Thailand and Burma, but not the [Burmese] government.

“The government just kills their own people.”

Words from a poster

Following some of his greatest accomplishments –earning two degrees from Buffalo State College and being sworn in as a U. S. citizen in 2006 – Myo Thant has felt a twinge of sadness.

“I feel like I’m selfish, because my people are still in trouble, being killed and persecuted,” he said. “I feel responsible. I’m OK, but they’re not OK. Even though physically I’m here, my mind is not here. My mind is in Burma, with my people.”

Thant was a youth leader in Burma, becoming a trusted confidante of the National League for Democracy’s Suu Kyi.

“She called me like her son, because I was so young,” he said. “She said, ‘Why don’t you stay with me, to help me plan the youth activities?’ ”

That’s what Thant did, and from May 1996 until October 1997, he was under house arrest with Suu Kyi, the 64-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner who’s on trial in Burma.

Thant never thought about fleeing Burma. But he didn’t want to be in prison for his beliefs. He wanted to keep fighting for them. And that meant leaving.

“I would never change my beliefs,” he said. “The country must be free and democratic.”

Thant, 37, a Journey’s End case manager, wants to keep Burmese culture alive among the young refugees who settle here. Some day, he wants the Burmese to have their own festival, like the Italian Festival, to celebrate their food, their history, their culture, so the young people won’t forget.

This is a tough tightrope for local Burmese leaders to walk. They want their young people to learn English, get jobs and be self-sufficient in America. But Thant doesn’t want them to forget.

“Please speak your language in your home,” he advises his fellow Burmese. “Don’t speak English. You have to maintain your culture in your home.”

On the walls of Thant’s modest Normal Avenue flat, a poster of Suu Kyi looks down at him, with a saying that may sum up his mission:

“Please use your liberty to promote ours.”

gwarner@buffnews.com