CONTROVERSY DOGS BURMA'S SALWEEN DAM

MAINICHI DAILY NEWS Thursday, August 3, 2000

ASIA FOCUS

In the First World, they're being de-commissioned, blown up. The fact that they do more harm than good is no longer just conjecture. Big dams are obsolete. They're uncool. They're undemocratic. ---Indian author Arundhati Roy.

BY RICHARD HUMPHRIES, Contributing Writer

Richard Humphries is a free-lance journalist living in Japan and regular Asia Focus contributor)
Harn Yawnghwe was just 13 when the soldiers came to his house. It was Rangoon, March 2, 1962, and Gen. Ne Win had just launched the coup that would begin military rule --- which continues to this day.

Harn's brother Myee was killed in cold blood but it was their father the soldiers had come for it.

That man, Sao Shwe Thaike, had been sapha (prince) of Yawnghwe, a Shan state principality. More importantly, he had also been independent Burma's first president. Eight months later he died in jail under mysterious circumstances.

Harn and his surviving family members had to flee their homeland. Nonetheless, he remains deeply committed to Burma and all its peoples. Today, Harn Yawnghwe live s in Brussels and is program director for Euro-Burma Office, an EU-funded prodemocracy organization.

On May 30, Harn accompanied Dr. Thaung Htum, the prodemocracy movement's U.N. representative, to Tokyo to visit Japanese government officials. Their purpose was to express their deep concern about Japanese aid and investment, which they felt was benefiting Burma's military clique and not its long-suffering people's.

At a subsequent professional dinner in Tokyo with correspondents and embassy officials, Harn emphasized one particular project. "We believe there is a plan to dam the Salween River," he said

"The Salween is one of the last river left in its natural state. The Japanese government is involved in the sense that the Electric Power and Development Corp., Ltd. (EPDC), which is 67 percent owned by the Ministry of Finance, has done a feasibility study for this dam."

The Salween is a 2,400-kilometer-lomg waterway that begins life in China's Tibetan plateau, and travels through Burma before entering the Gulf of Martaban near Moulmein. It is the last major Southeast Asian river that is free-flowing and it drains some 320,000 square kilometers of the land.

The project dam site is at Ta Sarng, a river crossing in southern Shan state, some 80 kilometers north from Thai border. As Burma is ruled by an unpopular and surreally brutal dictatorship, and Shan state is, if anything, turbulent, it would want to seem at first glance unusual that foreign governments and companies would want to become involved in at all.

Greed is paramount but regional politics and the role of environmental activism have played some role. In the developed world, with a few exceptions, large dam building has declined. There has been more transparency and debate about hypothetical projects and sometimes even ridicule ("a boondoggle visible from Mars") has been enough to stifle the more absurd notions. Dam builders have shifted their attention to the developing world.

Even there, resistance has flared. Attempts in the 1980s to build a dam at Nam Choan on Thailand's river Kwai were eventually defeated, despite official sanction, by vehement public opposition. Thai authorities then looked to that country's neighbors where, it was thought, the rulers would be less discerning and public opinion more easily manipulated or ignored. Thailand wanted more electricity for its industries as well as diverted water to fill its reservoirs and flush out its river.

INVESTORS LONG FOR SALWEEN

For years potential builders and founders have eyed the Salween the same way hungry wolves might gaze upon a stray lamb, frolicking in a distant meadow.

Various Thai, German and Japanese concerns have carried a series of feasibility studies since 1979. The recently completed ERDC one is only the latest but, it is believed, the definitive one that will lead to final design and construction. In this sense the term "feasibility" can be taken to mean not "whether" but "how."

On its English Internet site, the EPDC announced that it "will give great respect to the natural environment and regional communities and strive to construct and operate power generation facilities in a manner that harmonizes with the natural environment and communities." Boilerplate statements such as those can ring hollow.

When asked if the EPDC had spoken with him or with local communities in Shan State, Harn was emphatic. "No, we 've had no contact. We believe they only talk with the SPDC (Burmese junta).There's been no discussion with the local population.Nothing."

A response was sought from the EPDC but it was not able to provide a comment as of the time of the story going to print.As for the company's communications with the people at the dam site, not just the EPDC but of all companies involved there seem to avoid the locals.

According to monitoring groups such as Salween Watch, the Shan Herald Agency for News, and TERRA (Towards Ecological Recovery and Regional Alliance), a Thai environmental nongovernmental organization, some 400 to 500 Burmese troops are along the Salween "protect" those companies involved in preparatory work on the dam.

The main company involved is Thai, the GMS public Power Co. Ltd. It hopes to sell the electricity to EGAT, the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand.

GMS is part of Thailand's MDX group of companies and has been involved in dam projects in Laos, Cambodia, and in China's Yunnan province.

The plan for the Salween is thought to call for a concrete-faced rockfill dam, 188 meters in height. That would make it mainland Southeast Asia's highest dam. A 230-kilometer long reservoir would flood an area of at least 640 square kilometers. It would store about one-third of the Salween's annual flow.

The logistics of such a project would be immense, as would the cost, at least 3 billion dollars by one estimate. By no means does GMS have the financial wherewithal to undertake the project. It is effectively bankrupt, but no without influential friends on its board and abroad. Rumors abound of funding interests from Japanese sources, perhaps via a third country, but they are as yet unconfirmed.

Proponents of big dams will of course point to their benefits. It can't be denied that dams supply a significant amount of the world's present energy needs --- 20 percent by some accounts. Large dams typically generate far more electricity than nuclear or coal-fired plants. Dams can also be used to regulate river flow, divert that flow elsewhere, manage water demand, and by dampening rapids they can assist navigation.

But, like the pawn taken without sufficient forethought in a chess match, disadvantages have proved overwhelming with the passage of time. Frequent cost overruns detract from energy savings and sedimentation can ruin efficiency. Worse, tens of millions of people worldwide, very often helpless indigenous minorities, have been forced off their lands.

The Salween project would be no different. Ethnic conflict still ranges in Shan state and an estimated 300,000 Shan have been forcibly displacement is also occurring in the dam site/ projected reservoir area. "What typically happens is that you're given three days notice to leave and if you are found in that area after three days, you are shot," explained Harn.

Ironically, some members of those "regional communities" have managed to escape the terror by rafting down the Salween to exile. One Shan man reported to human rights monitors that, "I saw drilling machines on both sides of the bank and some were sucking water and drilling. Three machines on each bank." Should the reservoir be built he, and thousands others, would likely have no homes to dream of returning to.

DISEASE THREAT

In tropical area, dams can increase the outbreak of deadly disease. Shan state already lies within an endemic malarial zone. Areas of stagnant water along the edges of the reservoir would be an ideal breeding ground. And, according to TERRA, other ecological disasters would ensue.

"The fishes of the Salween River Basin have evolved in a riverine system. If the river were transformed into a reservoir, most of these fish species would be extirpated by the reservoir, as will many of the fish species living downstream of the dam due to the ecological impacts of altered water flow and the poor quality of water released from the reservoir."

Building the dam itself would probably add to Burma's appalling human right's record. Large infrastructure projects have typically involved the massive use of forced labor. Complicity does not end with the junta though, and prodemocracy groups are well aware of this.

"We would caution the Japanese government for its involvement here," Harn says. "If the dam is ever built, you can be very sure forced labor would be used."

When Arundhati Roy made her quote on big dam, she was speaking about the furor surrounding India's Sardar Sarovar dam project. Public displeasure over that project was so vehement that even the Japanese government got cold feet, withdrawing from funding part of it in 1900.

Opponents of the Salween project hope that Japan will again see the light and not play any further role in helping to build the dam.There may be a further incentive for companies and governments to rethink investing Burma, as Dr. Thaung Htun has pointed out.

"Yes, we clearly say the Burmese regime is illegitimate. They have no authority to manage the resources of the country. Based on this we clearly mention that all contracts which have been done with the military government will be reviewed by the next democratic government."