BANGKOK - A steady rise of new dams in Cambodia is becoming a platform for the
country's prime minister to showcase where the Southeast Asian kingdom's ties
with China - a late arrival among Cambodia's foreign aid and development
partners - is headed.
"The hydropower dam is just one of the numerous achievements under the
cooperation between Cambodia and China," Premier Hun Sen said in December at a
ceremony in a remote South-western province of the country where the 338
megawatt Russei Chrum Krom hydropower dam is being built.
This US$500 million dam - being built by the Huadian Corp, one of China's
biggest state-owned power companies - is the largest of
five Chinese dams under construction in energy-poor Cambodia, where only a
fifth of the population of nearly 14.5 million have access to electricity.
Chinese companies are already carrying out feasibility studies for four more
dams to be built, say environmentalists and grassroots activists worried about
what such future hydropower projects portend.
"China plays a very important role in investment and development in Cambodia.
But it should take account of the importance of EIAs [environmental impact
assessments] and SIAs [social impact assessments],"
Chhith Sam Ath, executive director of the NGO Forum on Cambodia, said during a
telephone interview from Phnom Penh, where his grassroots network for local
non-governmental organizations (NGOs) is based. "At times the EIA process is
not open to the public and there is little time to comment," Ath told Inter
Press Service.
Global environmental lobbies, such as the US-based International Rivers (IR),
confirmed that a full EIA for the Kamchay Dam has still not been completed four
years after construction began. "Within the EIA process, the Chinese companies
have not pursued best practices," says Ame Trandem, a Southeast Asia campaigner
for IR. "Public participation is limited or there is no participation. And the
developer has not looked at alternatives."
The Kamchay Dam is located "within Bokor National Park and will flood two
thousand hectares of protected forest," notes IR in a study titled 'Cambodia's
hydropower development and China's involvement'.
But Hun Sen leaves little room for such criticism leveled by environmentalists
toward China. "Is there any development that happens without an impact on the
environment and natural resources? Please give us a proper answer," the
region's longest-serving leader said in a broadside fired at green groups
during the December ceremony for the Russei Chrum Krom Dam.
For their part, some Chinese funders of development projects in Cambodia have
begun to engage with local activists - worried at the price a country still
recovering from two decades of civil war and the Khmer Rouge genocidal regime
has to pay now that China's footprint is expanding.
"I told a delegation of Chinese at a meeting last month that there were few EIA
being done for Chinese projects," Meas Nee, a Cambodian social development
researcher, told IPS in a telephone interview. "And even when done and it looks
good on paper, there are flaws because they have not been done properly."
"The prime minister always praises Chinese support and the government prefers
economic assistance from China because it comes with no conditions, unlike aid
from the Western donors," Nee says.
In fact, Hun Sen's ability to play his newfound economic support from China
against the country's long-standing development partners from the West has
highlighted their contrasting aid and development practices.
Until 2006, when China stepped in to help Cambodia, the aid and development
agenda had been dominated by the countries that were part of a pro-free market,
pro-western Washington Consensus. They entered a war-ravaged country after the
1991 peace accord to help rebuild the country.
In mid-2010, Western donors assured Cambodia $1.1 billion in aid - up from the
previous year's $950 million.
Such largess has come despite the Cambodian government falling short of
standards the Western governments were pushing for - ranging from "good
governance", better laws and reducing corruption to strengthening fundamental
rights.
But China - which has gone from having only $45 million in investments in
Cambodia in 2003 to signing 14 deals worth $850 million in December 2009 -
challenged the Western donors' monopoly in the country by "dealing directly
with the political decision makers only," says Shalmali Guttal, senior
researcher at Focus on the Global South, a Bangkok-based regional think-tank.
China is enjoy an edge over the West through its 'no-policy-conditions'
approach, said Guttal, noting also that China did not follow the Western donors
route of pushing for Cambodian NGOs to monitor the aid process.
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