MAE SAM LAEB, Thailand - Controversial
plans to dam the Salween River, Southeast Asia's
longest natural free-flowing waterway, will
proceed without a standard environmental-impact
assessment study, despite serious concerns about
the effect the infrastructure project will have on
the area's people and natural surroundings.
This month, Thailand's state-run monopoly
EGAT finally formalized its long-pending plans to
build five hydroelectric dams
along
the Salween River inside Myanmar. An EGAT
spokesman said previous plans for the study were
finally abandoned to avoid meddling in Myanmar's
internal affairs.
Combined, the five dams
have the potential to produce 10,000-15,000
megawatts of power, and would provide a
desperately needed source of income for Myanmar's
cash-strapped ruling military junta. At the same
time, the projects are planned for areas that are
still hotly contested by armed ethnic insurgent
groups, some of which have been fighting for
autonomy for more than 50 years.
The US$6
billion Tasang Dam, if completed as planned, would
generate 7,110MW of power and, at 228 meters,
would be the tallest dam in Southeast Asia, if not
all of Asia. The dam site is also in a highly
militarized area where as many as 300,000 Shan
villagers have been forcibly displaced since 1996.
The Wei Gyi Dam, the second-largest
planned, would have a generating capacity of
4,540MW and would create a flood zone the size of
Singapore, inundating at least 28 villages,
including Lawlake, the historic capital of the
Karenni ethnic group.
Significantly,
Thailand has historically provided military
support and sanctuary to many of the armed ethnic
groups that will be most affected by the dams.
However, caretaker Thai Prime Minister Thaksin
Shinawatra has since 2001 pursued a controversial
"forward engagement" policy toward Myanmar,
stressing closer economic ties with the
rights-abusing military regime.
That has
marked a distinct departure from the previous Thai
government's isolationist approach toward the
junta. It has put Thailand on a collision course
with its Western allies, including the United
States, which since 1997 has banned new US
investments and imposed economic sanctions on the
hardline regime.
Myanmar's reclusive
regime stands accused of a wide range of rights
abuses during its military campaigns in the Shan,
Karen and Karenni ethnic areas, including forcible
relocations, slave labor and extrajudicial
killings in the areas where the dams are to be
built. The junta has consistently denied such
claims. But rights advocates predict a new upsurge
in abuses as the junta moves to clear the area for
Thai and other foreign engineers and construction
workers.
Thailand, one of the most
foreign-oil-dependent countries in Asia, has
plenty of economic incentive for backing the
hydropower project. With EGAT apparently leading
the projects, Thailand is scheduled to receive as
much as 90% of the energy to be generated by the
dams. The fixed-pricing arrangement for the power
would importantly help hedge Thailand's fuel
dependence on imported, expensive fossil fuels.
The Salween dam project is the latest in a
series of megaprojects Myanmar's military junta
has secured with energy-starved Asian nations.
While the US and Europe steadfastly stand by their
economic sanctions, China, India and Thailand are
all cashing in on deals ranging from natural-gas
exploration to major infrastructure projects.
In early August, for instance, Thaksin
visited Myanmar to secure exclusive drilling
rights for majority-state-owned energy concern PTT
PLC to a Myanmar natural-gas field in the Bay of
Bengal. New Delhi is pursuing potential new gas
deals and a possible pipeline that would run from
Myanmar to India. China is also exploring new
energy deals with the junta.
High-profile
companies such as EGAT and the Sino Hydro
Corporation of China, and multilateral lenders
such as the Asian Development Bank, not to mention
plenty of others, are all queuing up for
undisclosed stakes in the megaprojects. But the
history of previous megaprojects in Myanmar's
contested ethnic territories is an unfortunate
one.
Woeful precedent Most
tellingly, US oil and gas giant Unocal found
itself in human-rights-related trouble for its
complicity in junta-administered abuses related to
a US$1.2 billion pipeline project it built in the
1990s connecting contested Karen territory in
Myanmar to Thailand. A group of 15 Myanmar
refugees filed a suit in a US court alleging that
Unocal looked the other way as Myanmar soldiers
enslaved, tortured and raped local villagers to
clear the path for the pipeline's construction.
Although the group finally settled with Unocal in
March 2005 after eight years of legal proceedings,
some legal analysts contend that the deal does not
rule out future lawsuits on the issue.
There are widespread concerns among
environmental and rights groups that similar
abuses will arise during and after the
construction of the Salween dams. Myanmar's ruling
State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) has
recently upped the intensity of its military
offensives against Karen guerrillas near the
proposed dam sites, sparking condemnation from
international rights groups.
"In terms of
the offensives, this is quite clear," said David
Scott Mathieson, a research consultant with
US-based Human Rights Watch. "The current
offensives have to do with [the] dams, as did the
Shan forced relocation campaign between 1996 and
1998. The best way to [see] this is to place maps
of proposed dam sites next to maps of the
offensives and previous campaigns. The SPDC is
clearing people away from development sites."
The first dam, which is to be built with
Chinese funding near the town of Hat Gyi in Karen
state, is scheduled to begin ground-breaking in
November 2007. That gives the junta a one-year
window to flush out Karen guerrillas and forcibly
secure the area. Reports have already emerged of
incidents of forced relocation and labor, rape and
extrajudicial killings - as well as the torching
of nearby villages and the planting of mines.
Mathieson was quick to point out that the
"dams are not the only reason for the offensives,
but one of many, including cutting off civilian
support for Karen insurgents, actually destroying
Karen infrastructure, plus general militarization
to pursue road construction and other economic
ventures such as mines and agri-projects".
Similarly, the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reports that
over a three-month period this year, at least
2,000 Karen fled across the border into Thailand
during the junta's intensified military
operations. And the Thailand-based Karen Human
Rights Group (KHRG) reports that another 18,000
people have been forced to flee their villages and
seek refuge in the diminishing areas inside
Myanmar controlled by the armed Karen National
Union (KNU) insurgent group.
"Access roads
are being built near dam sites. Often villagers
are forcibly relocated from one area and then used
as forced labor," said a KHRG spokesperson, who
also alleges that relocated people are being used
to clear forest areas and build access roads to
newly established SPDC camps in areas near the dam
sites.
Pianporn Deetes, spokesperson for
the Salween Watch Coalition, an umbrella group
monitoring the situation, said the biggest worry
is the potential human impact of the dams. "On the
Thai side of the border there are at least 50
small communities that will have to be relocated.
In Karen state over 35,000 will be displaced and
another 30,000 in Karenni state."
Underscoring the militarization of the
areas to be dammed, land mines have been placed
along the newly built access roads - sometimes
apparently haphazardly. Surveying for the 1,200MW
Hat Gyi Dam was halted this year after an EGAT
employee was killed on May 9 when he stepped on a
land mine.
As many as 140,000 registered
refugees currently live in refugee camps in
Thailand, according to the UNHCR. That
humanitarian crisis is winning renewed attention
in the West. Recently US lawmakers waived an old
law preventing thousands of Karen from being
resettled in the US for supporting the KNU, and up
to 2,700 are scheduled to be resettled this year
in the United States.
The Salween, which
originates in the Tibetan Plateau and snakes its
way through China, Myanmar and Thailand, is widely
recognized as one of the most diverse biological
environments in the world. Part of the so-called
Three Parallel Rivers area, the Salween was named
a World Heritage Site in 2003 and is home to more
than 7,000 species of plants and 80 rare or
endangered fish and animals.
The cloak of
secrecy surrounding the dam projects, including an
ongoing official reluctance to divulge key
information about potential environmental and
social impacts and who exactly will finance their
construction, could raise future legal problems
for Thailand, rights groups contend.
A
report by the Karenni Development Research Group,
a rights-related research organization based in
Thailand, notes that "contrary to sections 58, 59
and 60 of the 1997 Thai constitution, and the 1997
Official Information Act of Thailand, Thai
authorities have withheld vital information on the
dam plans and their expected impacts and [as
required by Thai law] there has been no
consultation with or participation of local
stakeholders in the decision-making process".
In April 2004, China postponed its own
plans to build 13 dams along the upper reaches of
the Salween - known in China as the Nu River -
after intense lobbying by Chinese non-governmental
organizations and prominent academics based in
Yunnan province. That marked an unprecedented
state response to civil-society pressure in China
and forestalled plans that would have made the
Salween one of the most heavily dammed rivers in
the world.
In militarized Myanmar, those
voices are seldom heard. And as government,
corporate and multilateral-lender interests line
up behind the dam projects, the Salween and its
peoples' fates float precariously in the balance.
Will Baxter is a Thailand-based
photojournalist.
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