Controversy Over Dam Fuels Rare Public Outcry in Myanmar
The International Herald Tribune
The Myitsone dam under construction on the Irrawaddy River in northern Myanmar.
By THE INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE
MYITSONE, MYANMAR — The massive dam under construction in this remote corner of Myanmar is generating a litany of concerns that are not uncommon to such projects: about the risks of tampering with nature, about damage to wildlife, about the displacement of villagers.
But for many people in Myanmar, also known as Burma, the fears surrounding the Myitsone dam go much deeper. It will be the first dam across the Irrawaddy River, the iconic, even mythic waterway that has given life to centuries of Burmese civilization.
Passions are high. A government minister broke down in tears at a news conference last month when asked about the dam. High-ranking officials are said to be sharply divided over the wisdom of the project.
And in an authoritarian country that has begun to experiment with looser controls on the news media, the controversy has raised the prospect of something exceedingly unusual: that public outrage might actually force the government to reconsider its plans.
The Myitsone dam will flood an area four times the size of Manhattan. Government officials who support the project say it will be an invaluable source of electricity and cash, a milestone in Myanmar’s development. Critics say it will cause irreparable damage to the Irrawaddy, the lifeline of millions of Burmese downstream.
“The people are demanding to stop the project,” said U Ludu Sein Win, a dissident writer who is one of the most outspoken critics of the dam. “If the righteous demands of the people are ignored and they continue the dam project,” he wrote in Weekly Eleven, a popular Yangon-based newspaper, “the people will defend the Irrawaddy with whatever means possible.”
Such strident criticism of a government project in the domestic media, which would have been unheard of just months ago, reflects both the passions surrounding the project and the easing of some restrictions on expression by Myanmar’s new, at least nominally civilian government, which took office in March after decades of overt military dictatorship.
The Myitsone dam, which is being built and financed by a Chinese company, has also become a lightning rod for criticism about China’s power and influence in Myanmar.
Here at the dam site, Chinese workers in orange hard hats have been tunneling, blasting and shoring up riverbanks. The site is a few kilometers downstream from what is considered the “birthplace” of the Irrawaddy — the confluence of two smaller rivers — a place that has mystical value for the Kachin ethnic group that populates the hills of northern Myanmar. (The Kachin have a substantial army that has battled with troops from the central government in recent months, underscoring the instability in the area surrounding the dam site.)
Criticism of the project has been allowed to spread through Facebook, blogs and even local newspapers, suggesting that the government itself may be divided on the issue. Last month the country’s most famous dissident, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, who has otherwise been cautious in her criticisms of the government since her release from house arrest last November, penned an open letter calling for the project to be reassessed.
Critics’ reasons for opposing the Myitsone project vary. Some say they are angry because the decision to begin such a huge project was made without public consultation. Others channel their frustration toward China, which plans to import 90 percent of the electricity the project generates, under financial conditions that have not been fully explained to the public.
“China has colonized Burma without shooting a gun and has sucked the life of the people of Burma with the help of the Burmese regime and its cronies,” wrote U Aung Din , a former democracy advocate who is now in exile in the United States. “Now, they are killing the Irrawaddy River as well.”
In April, four small blasts were reported at the camp in Myitsone where Chinese workers have their sleeping quarters. No one was seriously hurt.
But perhaps the greatest concern among critics of the dam is that it will further degrade a river that has played such a crucial role in Burmese history.
The Irrawaddy draws on glacial waters from the eastern extremities of the Himalayas. As it travels south, the river carries nutrients into Myanmar’s arid central region and ultimately fans out in the Irrawaddy Delta, an area of rice paddies so fertile that it once fed large parts of the British empire in Asia. Like the Mekong or the Mississippi, the river carries enormous symbolism.
“It is the most significant geographical feature of our country,” wrote Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi in her letter, which also aired concerns about the dam being near an earthquake fault zone. The Irrawaddy, she wrote, is “the grand natural highway, a prolific source of food, the home of varied water flora and fauna, the supporter of traditional modes of life, the muse that has inspired countless works of prose and poetry.”
Indeed, leading poets have chimed in on the controversy, including U Maung Sein Win, who wrote a short poem called “Dead River,” which includes this passage:
Whole forests are cleared and mountains laid bare
Sand bars emerge at the narrows
Not so far in the future, Myanmar’s people may disappear
Did we drink our own blood?
This is the frightening thought
That one day the river might be dead.
Unaccustomed to such a barrage of criticism, the government is on the defensive. The information minister, U Kyaw Hsan, wept when questioned about the project at a news conference in August. “We love the Irrawaddy,” said Mr. Kyaw Hsan, who is a retired brigadier general.
“We will protect the Irrawaddy just like other citizens would.”
The government official responsible for the dam, U Zaw Min, was adamant at a meeting this month that it would be completed. “We will never rescind it,” he said at one of the occasional news conferences that appear to be gestures by the government toward openness.
But his staunch defense of the project led to further anger.
On Saturday, at a government-sponsored seminar, Mr. Zaw Min seemed ready to offer concessions to minimize the impact of the dam and “ensure the project poses no danger.” Those words were highlighted in bold in an account of the seminar that appeared in the state-owned newspaper The New Light of Myanmar. The dam would be built to resist a thousand-year flood and an earthquake of magnitude 8, the article said.
That was the official account of the meeting. In the Burmese-exile news media, reports said a “heated argument” over the dam had broken out between officials. Myanmar’s president, U Thein Sein, considered by many to be a moderate force in the government, was said to be against the project, according to The Irrawaddy , an online news service based in Thailand. Hard-liners were said to be pushing ahead. The accounts could not be confirmed.
Critics of the dam say it is significant that skepticism of the project extends even to the scientists who were hired by the Chinese project managers to assess it.
China Power Investment , a state-run Chinese company, signed a deal in 2007 with the Burmese government to build seven dams in northern Myanmar, including the one at Myitsone. Although not required to do so under Myanmar’s laws, China Power Investment hired scientists from China and Myanmar to assess how the dam would affect the environment. In 2009, the scientists submitted a report of nearly 900 pages that seemed to question the dam’s very premise.
“If Myanmar and Chinese sides were really concerned about environmental issues and aimed at sustainable development of the country there is no need for such a big dam,” said the report, which was written in choppy English.
Rather than build the massive Myitsone dam, the scientists’ report suggests constructing two smaller dams farther upstream. It warns ominously that the Myitsone site is “less than 100 kilometers from Myanmar’s earthquake-prone Sagaing fault line,” a distance of a bit more than 60 miles.
The report also predicts “substantial losses” in fish populations downstream, and says that more time is needed to understand how wildlife in the area would be affected. Scientists who fanned out into the nearby jungles found sun bears, leopards, elephants, many types of monkeys and red pandas, an endangered auburn-colored animal that resembles a cross between a raccoon and a bear.
The report also recommends that more research be done on the potential effects on other inhabitants of the region: people. The dam is still several years from completion, but thousands of villagers have already been resettled from their rice paddies and fishing villages into prefabricated homes. They were given, among other compensation, 21-inch television sets.
“We can’t make a living in our new place,” Aung San Myint, a father of three who now mines the riverbanks for flecks of gold, told a reporter. “There’s nothing for us there.”
But for many people in Myanmar, also known as Burma, the fears surrounding the Myitsone dam go much deeper. It will be the first dam across the Irrawaddy River, the iconic, even mythic waterway that has given life to centuries of Burmese civilization.
Passions are high. A government minister broke down in tears at a news conference last month when asked about the dam. High-ranking officials are said to be sharply divided over the wisdom of the project.
And in an authoritarian country that has begun to experiment with looser controls on the news media, the controversy has raised the prospect of something exceedingly unusual: that public outrage might actually force the government to reconsider its plans.
The Myitsone dam will flood an area four times the size of Manhattan. Government officials who support the project say it will be an invaluable source of electricity and cash, a milestone in Myanmar’s development. Critics say it will cause irreparable damage to the Irrawaddy, the lifeline of millions of Burmese downstream.
“The people are demanding to stop the project,” said U Ludu Sein Win, a dissident writer who is one of the most outspoken critics of the dam. “If the righteous demands of the people are ignored and they continue the dam project,” he wrote in Weekly Eleven, a popular Yangon-based newspaper, “the people will defend the Irrawaddy with whatever means possible.”
Such strident criticism of a government project in the domestic media, which would have been unheard of just months ago, reflects both the passions surrounding the project and the easing of some restrictions on expression by Myanmar’s new, at least nominally civilian government, which took office in March after decades of overt military dictatorship.
The Myitsone dam, which is being built and financed by a Chinese company, has also become a lightning rod for criticism about China’s power and influence in Myanmar.
Here at the dam site, Chinese workers in orange hard hats have been tunneling, blasting and shoring up riverbanks. The site is a few kilometers downstream from what is considered the “birthplace” of the Irrawaddy — the confluence of two smaller rivers — a place that has mystical value for the Kachin ethnic group that populates the hills of northern Myanmar. (The Kachin have a substantial army that has battled with troops from the central government in recent months, underscoring the instability in the area surrounding the dam site.)
Criticism of the project has been allowed to spread through Facebook, blogs and even local newspapers, suggesting that the government itself may be divided on the issue. Last month the country’s most famous dissident, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, who has otherwise been cautious in her criticisms of the government since her release from house arrest last November, penned an open letter calling for the project to be reassessed.
Critics’ reasons for opposing the Myitsone project vary. Some say they are angry because the decision to begin such a huge project was made without public consultation. Others channel their frustration toward China, which plans to import 90 percent of the electricity the project generates, under financial conditions that have not been fully explained to the public.
“China has colonized Burma without shooting a gun and has sucked the life of the people of Burma with the help of the Burmese regime and its cronies,” wrote U Aung Din , a former democracy advocate who is now in exile in the United States. “Now, they are killing the Irrawaddy River as well.”
In April, four small blasts were reported at the camp in Myitsone where Chinese workers have their sleeping quarters. No one was seriously hurt.
But perhaps the greatest concern among critics of the dam is that it will further degrade a river that has played such a crucial role in Burmese history.
The Irrawaddy draws on glacial waters from the eastern extremities of the Himalayas. As it travels south, the river carries nutrients into Myanmar’s arid central region and ultimately fans out in the Irrawaddy Delta, an area of rice paddies so fertile that it once fed large parts of the British empire in Asia. Like the Mekong or the Mississippi, the river carries enormous symbolism.
“It is the most significant geographical feature of our country,” wrote Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi in her letter, which also aired concerns about the dam being near an earthquake fault zone. The Irrawaddy, she wrote, is “the grand natural highway, a prolific source of food, the home of varied water flora and fauna, the supporter of traditional modes of life, the muse that has inspired countless works of prose and poetry.”
Indeed, leading poets have chimed in on the controversy, including U Maung Sein Win, who wrote a short poem called “Dead River,” which includes this passage:
Whole forests are cleared and mountains laid bare
Sand bars emerge at the narrows
Not so far in the future, Myanmar’s people may disappear
Did we drink our own blood?
This is the frightening thought
That one day the river might be dead.
Unaccustomed to such a barrage of criticism, the government is on the defensive. The information minister, U Kyaw Hsan, wept when questioned about the project at a news conference in August. “We love the Irrawaddy,” said Mr. Kyaw Hsan, who is a retired brigadier general.
“We will protect the Irrawaddy just like other citizens would.”
The government official responsible for the dam, U Zaw Min, was adamant at a meeting this month that it would be completed. “We will never rescind it,” he said at one of the occasional news conferences that appear to be gestures by the government toward openness.
But his staunch defense of the project led to further anger.
On Saturday, at a government-sponsored seminar, Mr. Zaw Min seemed ready to offer concessions to minimize the impact of the dam and “ensure the project poses no danger.” Those words were highlighted in bold in an account of the seminar that appeared in the state-owned newspaper The New Light of Myanmar. The dam would be built to resist a thousand-year flood and an earthquake of magnitude 8, the article said.
That was the official account of the meeting. In the Burmese-exile news media, reports said a “heated argument” over the dam had broken out between officials. Myanmar’s president, U Thein Sein, considered by many to be a moderate force in the government, was said to be against the project, according to The Irrawaddy , an online news service based in Thailand. Hard-liners were said to be pushing ahead. The accounts could not be confirmed.
Critics of the dam say it is significant that skepticism of the project extends even to the scientists who were hired by the Chinese project managers to assess it.
China Power Investment , a state-run Chinese company, signed a deal in 2007 with the Burmese government to build seven dams in northern Myanmar, including the one at Myitsone. Although not required to do so under Myanmar’s laws, China Power Investment hired scientists from China and Myanmar to assess how the dam would affect the environment. In 2009, the scientists submitted a report of nearly 900 pages that seemed to question the dam’s very premise.
“If Myanmar and Chinese sides were really concerned about environmental issues and aimed at sustainable development of the country there is no need for such a big dam,” said the report, which was written in choppy English.
Rather than build the massive Myitsone dam, the scientists’ report suggests constructing two smaller dams farther upstream. It warns ominously that the Myitsone site is “less than 100 kilometers from Myanmar’s earthquake-prone Sagaing fault line,” a distance of a bit more than 60 miles.
The report also predicts “substantial losses” in fish populations downstream, and says that more time is needed to understand how wildlife in the area would be affected. Scientists who fanned out into the nearby jungles found sun bears, leopards, elephants, many types of monkeys and red pandas, an endangered auburn-colored animal that resembles a cross between a raccoon and a bear.
The report also recommends that more research be done on the potential effects on other inhabitants of the region: people. The dam is still several years from completion, but thousands of villagers have already been resettled from their rice paddies and fishing villages into prefabricated homes. They were given, among other compensation, 21-inch television sets.
“We can’t make a living in our new place,” Aung San Myint, a father of three who now mines the riverbanks for flecks of gold, told a reporter. “There’s nothing for us there.”
Credit : New York Times
