Daniel Pedersen

Junta bleeding Burma dry with electricity projects for neighbours

Mizzima

August 14, 2009

The dislocation of between 5,000 and 6,000 people from Burma to Thailand in the past two months has so far been reported as a military thrust against the Karen National Union by Burma’s Army.

Coverage has largely focused on refugees, people fleeing forced conscription, forced labour, murder and rape.

Video footage of militia armies torching people’s modest bamboo homes and the schools and churches the inhabitants relied upon for their sense of community are widely available on the internet.

Free Burma Ranger medical teams shot close footage as community centres and schools built by villagers with material cropped from the surrounding jungle were razed to the ground.

Now, sent packing to Thailand, the people eat from communal kitchens on donated rice rations and sleep under plastic sheets.

On the surface this offensive, which involved a force of 1,700 junta-aligned soldiers, could be interpreted as a State Peace and Development Council (the ruling junta) bid to wipe out dissent before controversial elections planned for next year.

For 60 years the KNU has fought to defend human rights, people’s land rights and to establish its say in how its people are governed.

The Karen people have a population conservatively estimated to be about seven million, their own flag, their own songs, their own culture.

Since Burma’s independence in 1948, shortly after which military offensives began against the Karen people, soldiers of the KNU have stood as a symbol of rejection of centralised rule by the majority Burman race.

Without the KNU, the oldest representative body of the ethnic nationalities defying successive illegitimate military regimes, other people’s bids for recognition would be dealt a severe psychological blow.

A simple conclusion to draw is that what happened during June and July opposite northern Thailand’s Tha Song Yang district is just another incident, albeit severe, in the world’s longest-running conflict.

Dam the consequences

Yet there are untold benefits to be shared between Thailand and Burma.

The planned 33m-high Hat Gyi Dam will span a river the World Wildlife Fund describes as supporting “possibly the world’s most-diverse temperate ecosystem”.

It will produce 1,200 megawatts of power per hour, or 7,335 giga-watts (Gwh) annually, a giga-watt being the production of one million kilo watts for the period of an hour.

Burmese, Thai and Chinese interests will all play roles in funding and construction of the dam.

The Hat Gyi Dam is the smallest of five planned for the Salween River, but the first of which construction is proposed.

The Karen National Union has personally asked Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva to halt construction.

And representatives of 19 villages that will be flooded on the Thai side have asked that the project be halted.

The dam will be built just to the north of where thousands of Karen people lost their homes to the Burma Army in June and July.

Po Luang Nu Chamnankhiripai, the local leader of the Thai group in Mae Hong Song province protesting the dam’s construction, told the government last month that the dam would mean more armed conflict on the Burmese side of the border.

And that, he predicted in a written plea to stop the dam project, would mean more refugees in Thailand.

“The construction of the Hat Gyi Dam will exacerbate human rights abuses against the Karen people and Thailand is bracing herself for more refugees and enormous burden,” he wrote.

Access justifies excess

The access road to the dam on the Burmese side runs straight through the Karen National Liberation Army’s (the KNU’s army) Seventh Brigade region.

At the moment it is a fair-weather road, meaning for about six months of the year it can barely be traversed in a four-wheel drive, let alone trucks moving heavy machinery.

And so the process of sealing the road must begin, raising once again the spectre of forced labour, a crime Burma has been accused of so often that the junta’s continual denials of such practices ring hollow, to say the least.

In the real world, people forced to abandon their homes and their ancestral lands to make way for major state infrastructure projects would be compensated.

But in Burma they have been pushed out of the KNLA Seventh Brigade area by a major military thrust and ended up in Thailand as refugees with nothing.

Back at home their houses have been burned to the ground.

Their farms now go unattended, barring some cross-border sorties by desperate villagers to harvest produce from their subsistence farms so their family can eat.

But even the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army, which since 1994 has sided with the military junta and needs to supply workers to help build the road, has warned farmers not to go back.

The DKBA has suffered massive casualties to landmines and surgeons at Thai hospitals have been busy amputating the limbs of foreign soldiers.

But the job of clearing the area of civilians and the guerilla armies they help nourish is getting done and the population forced from their homes.

For now the KNLA has no base camps in Seventh Brigade, has lost its general headquarters and is waging a guerilla war with soldiers sleeping rough in the jungle, sometimes with not even a pair of boots to their name.

Refuge no haven

It was a surprise to international aid workers stationed along the border when Thai authorities agreed in principle to bringing all of the Seventh Brigade refugees together at one site.

The argument put forward was that they would be far easier to care for and supply logistics simplified if everyone was in the same place.

So the hunt for a place where refugees could be housed began.

It wasn’t long before the deserted Eden Valley Academy School was proposed and all non-governmental organisations based out of the bustling town of Mae Sot agreed that 2,300 people could be housed there.

The site had buildings, most with walls and some with roofs. Of the buildings in structural disarray, at least bare concrete slabs and footings remained.

It was by no means perfect, prone to some flooding, needing a footbridge to link it to another area of flat land, some construction and general maintenance.

But it was a beginning, an opportunity to get everyone to a single location.

But when the NGOs raised the most-pressing issue – security – they drew a blank.

DKBA patrols were known to pass through the area regularly, despite the site being well inside Thailand.

Thai authorities said they were unable to provide security.

Too many of their soldiers, they said, had been sent to the south, where a Muslim insurgency grinds away against the Malaysian border.

Eventually plans to inhabit the Eden Valley Academy School were abandoned – the refugees were granted permission to stay where they were, or return home.

But Thai authorities insisted that anyone returning to Burma would have to declare it was their own decision and sign a form to that effect.

They did not want media allegations they were forcing people back across the border into a war zone.

Who’s in power?

Thailand and Burma signed a memorandum of understanding to build the Hat Gyi Dam in 2006 and mutual benefits are assured.

But on the Burmese side the benefits seem mostly financial and therefore destined for the junta, which is widely estimated to spend 40 per cent of its national budget on its formidable military force.

Thai government officials told a July gathering representing the 1,800 people who will be officially relocated that Thailand would receive 90 per cent of the power generated by the dam, but were quick to add the project could yet be cancelled.

Much of Burma’s population relies on diesel-powered generators for electricity, one of the reasons escalating fuel prices acted as a catalyst for the 2007 “Saffron Revolution”, in which Burmese citizens were executed, beaten and jailed by their own army.

For Burma to “receive” just 10 per cent of the new dam’s power load suggests there is not much benefit pending for inhabitants of Karen State – a land kept isolated – and certainly none for those who will lose their homes and livelihoods.

Thailand’s current National Energy and Development Plan, which pledges to both diversify energy supply by buying from foreign countries and to reduce national dependence on energy imports, was implemented in late 2006.

Even at this stage, almost two years after construction had been planned to begin, Thai officials are publicly hedging their bets on whether the project will go ahead.

The Salween is Southeast Asia’s longest river that has not yet been dammed.

It was declared a World Heritage Site in 2003 and is home to 80 endangered animal species.

Eventually, after wending its way through 2,815 kilometres from the mountains of Tibet to Moulmien in Burma, the river spills into the Andaman Sea.

It is a wild river – just 89km of its course, through a series of gorges as much as a kilometre deep, is navigable.

Power partners

On July 30, at the 27th Association of South East Asian Energy Ministers’ meeting, representatives of the 10-member bloc agreed on a plan drafted by Thailand.

The plan, to be known as the ASEAN Plan of Action for Energy Cooperation 2010-2015, includes development of the Hat Gyi Dam.

Sometime this month a committee established by the Thai government, at the behest of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, is to recommend whether or not to go ahead with the dam.

ASEAN ministers are backing the project as an integral part of the region’s power grid.

Burma’s ruling generals are hungry for more foreign revenue and looking to cement their place as Burma’s legitimate rulers, while ingratiating themselves with their ASEAN partners.

Abhisit, in forming a committee to recommend to the government whether or not to go ahead, has distanced himself and his shaky coalition government from the decision.

There will be a maelstrom of international criticism if the Thai government goes ahead with damming the only major river in South East Asia that remarkably still follows its natural course.

But it is no secret that “development” and securing future energy reserves take precedence over protecting the environment in most of the world.

But what of human rights? Will the Hat Gyi Dam form the Salween’s first loch, and will there be more to follow?
And what of the proposed benefits for Burma?

Only the Thai government at this stage can answer these questions and it is due to do so this month.

In the aftermath of ASEAN’s salute to Thailand and Burma’s plans, environmental and Burma’s ethnic groups, not to mention Thai residents who will lose their homes and communities reliant on the river for their existence, issued statements condemning the project.

But Ethnic Community Development Forum representative Sai Khur Seng summed it up best: “Energy projects in Burma should be for the benefit of the Burmese people and not at their expense.”

ENDS