Asia-Pacific, Civil Society, Development & Aid, Environment, Headlines, Human Rights

ENVIRONMENT: Dams on Salween – Test for Burmese, Thai Juntas

Marwaan Macan Markar* - IPS/IFEJ

BANGKOK, Sep 29 2006 (IPS) - Will South-east Asia’s last untouched body of water, the Salween river, emerge as a testing ground for the future relationship between this region’s oldest military regime, in Burma, and the new junta on the block, in Thailand?

That may well be the case if a coalition of over 50 environmental and human rights non-governmental organisations (NGOs) based in Thailand and beyond have their way. They are planning to petition the new interim government in Bangkok, set up after last week’s coup, to cancel a deal between the two neighbours to build a dam across the Salween.

”We want the project stopped and all the information gathered made public,” Pianporn Deetes, campaigner for the South-east Asia Rivers Network (SEARIN), an NGO based in the northern city of Chiang Mai, said in an IPS interview.

The government of Thaksin Shinawatra, which was turfed out by the Thai military on Sep. 19, ”did not make public important information concerning the plans to build the dams,” added Pianporn, whose NGO is part of this campaign. ”There wasn’t even an attempt to inform communities on the Thai side of the Thai-Burma border on how the dam will affect them.”

In fact, this secretive attitude of the Thaksin government was exposed a few days before Thailand’s 18th military coup. A senior official from the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (EGAT), the state-run power utility, was quoted in the local media as saying that construction of the Hat Gyi dam in Burma’s Karen state will go ahead without a social and environmental impact study. The decision to drop universally accepted assessment before a hydroelectric project was on political and such a study is ”an internal affair of Burma,” the EGAT official said.

The Hat Gyi is one of five planned dams across the Salween, a 2,800 km-long river that begins in the mountains of Tibet, snakes through China’s southern Yunnan province, enters Burma, and courses along the Thai-Burma border before flowing out into the Andaman Sea.


EGAT is playing a pivotal role in helping build Hat Gyi and other dams, such as the Tasang, in military-ruled Burma due to a heavy demand for power in Thailand. A deal signed between the Burmese junta and EGAT officials in December 2005 stated that the two sides would cooperate in building hydropower capacity on the Salween that would produce 3,820 million kilowatt hours of electricity annually. The first dam, with an expected output of 1,200 Mw, is the Hat Gyi.

Environmentalists from Burma’s Karen and Shan ethnic communities living as political exiles in Thailand have been protesting against the deal. The planned dams on the stretch of the Salween that flows through the Karen and Shan states will destroy large areas of forests, wildlife, rocky landscapes and farming lands, they say.

”The Hat Gyi dam will not help our community,” Lau Eh Roland, deputy director of Karen River Watch, a coalition of Karen environmental and human rights groups, said in a telephone interview from the Burmese-Thai border. ”About 10,000 people will be displaced.”

In the Shan area, where the Tasang dam is to be built, over 2,000 villages will be inundated by the ”projected flood zone”, states a report on the Salween, released in mid-September by the Shan Sapawa Environmental Organisation, an NGO. ”With a proposed height of 228 m and a maximum height of water level of 420 m, the reservoir will cover an estimated 870 sq km of surface area, or 1.3 times the size of Singapore.”

If that is bad, there are also human rights concerns in the affected areas where the Burmese military is locked in battle with ethnic rebel groups. ”The ongoing conflict, and the increasing number of Burmese army troops, has caused the local population to live in constant fear of abuse,” adds the report. ”Villagers throughout the area have been tortured or killed when suspected of supporting the Shan resistance.”

For Roland, fear of forced labour and relocation will add to the internally displaced crisis in the Karen areas due to the continuing advance of Burmese military troops. ”Forced labour will happen when they start building the Hat Gyi dam. That is how the Burmese military operates its development programmes,” he said.

Burma, which has been under military rule since a 1962 coup, has come under increasing criticism at the International Labour Organisation and other global bodies for continued use of forced labour besides a long list of human rights violations.

That notoriety was hardly on the mind of Thaksin after he came to power in 2001. Bangkok began to forge a new relationship with the Burmese junta that placed stress on building strong economic ties. Thaksin’s policies towards Burma also overrode the influence of the Thai military, in particular its northern command, which had been charged with shaping the relationship.

”The governments before Thaksin had a relationship with Burma that can be characterised as being distant. The Thai prime minister before Thaksin never visited Burma,” Kraisak Choonhavan, former head of the foreign affairs committee in the Thai Senate, told IPS. ”But Thaksin had a very warm relationship with the Burmese generals. He has been there many times.”

”Business interests and investment in Burma became the priority for Thaksin,” adds Kraisak. ”He was not sympathetic to Burmese political activists in Thailand, putting into place strict regulations.”

Thaksin, a billionaire telecommunication tycoon turned politician, was accused by his critics, during anti-government protests this year, of cashing in on his political position to help improve his family’s fortunes by creating a path for investments in Burma’s telecommunication sector.

”We are hoping that the new government in Bangkok will move away from Thaksin’s approach to Burma,” says Sai Sai, coordinator of Salween Watch, an NGO in Chiang Mai. ”All the dams on the Salween river should not be built since they are all linked to human rights violations. This is why we want the dams to be stopped.”

(*This story is part of a series of features on sustainable development by IPS – Inter Press Service and IFEJ – International Federation of Environmental Journalists.)

 
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