China presses Myanmar on stalled
dam By Melody Kemp
One
of the first indications that change was afoot in
Myanmar came when President Thein Sein announced
last year the suspension of the China-backed,
US$3.6 billion Myitsone dam slated for the
country's remote Kachin state. Now, signs are that
the fight is not over as Chinese hydro-power
lobbyists go on the offensive to have the
mega-project restarted despite extreme
environmental risks.
A PowerPoint
presentation circulated by a delegate to the recent
Mekong Energy and Ecology meeting in Bangkok
indicates that China's hydro-power industry is
working hard to resurrect the shelved project. The
presentation along with other Chinese-language
documents indicate that China wants to resurrect
the project as a symbol of its still strong clout
in Myanmar at a time the United States and
European Union bid to make diplomatic
and commercial inroads.
The Myitsone dam is also apparently viewed
by Beijing as a bellwether on Myanmar's stance on
other major Chinese investments, including the
$17.5 billion oil and gas pipelines designed to
transport fuel from Myanmar's southern coast to
China's southwestern, land-locked Yunnan province.
The Chinese press have reported the
pipelines create 50,000 new jobs and yield Yunnan
economic returns estimated at 33 billion yuan
(US$5.2 billion) in refined products per year. The
pipelines will also allow China to avoid sending
its energy imports through the congested and, in
case of a future conflict with the United States,
easily blocked Malacca Straits.
The
Chinese Hydropower Association, government
officials and Chinese media have all accused
Myanmar's government of breach of contract and of
being in the thrall of foreign, read Western,
non-governmental organizations that have
campaigned steadily against the mega-project's
potential negative environmental and social
impacts.
Chinese officials have asserted
that Myanmar needs China's foreign investment,
which currently amounts to over 44% of the
country's foreign direct investment, to fuel
economic development. However, 90% of the
estimated 3,600-6,000 megawatts of electricity
that would have been generated by the dam was
slated for export to China.
Chinese
hydropower interests, meanwhile, continue to
assert that the environmental impacts of the dam
would be minimal. That is the portrait painted by
the upstream Ayeyawady Confluence Basin Hydropower
Corporation, a local subsidiary of the China Power
Investment Corporation, one of China's top five
electricity producers, in their latest publication
"A Better Tomorrow on the Ayeyawady River."
Zhang Boting, deputy secretary general of
the Chinese Society for Hydropower Engineering and
who writes for the government's mouthpiece
People's Daily newspaper, has led the propaganda
offensive against Myitsone's suspension. In a
recent newspaper column he referred to Thein
Sein's safety concerns over the project as
"“illogical".
"Will the natural beauty of
Kachin and Myanmar be destroyed by the project?
Absolutely NOT - dams and even earthquakes have
been proven to create new beautiful scenery. This
is the case with [China's] Three River Gorges Dam,
which is now more beautiful than before. Don't
listen to the extreme statements of
environmentalists," he urged Thein Sein in a
newspaper column.
Striking a more
assertive pose, he also recently wrote: "It is
impossible that the investor move the hydropower
projects out of Myanmar ... If the Myanmar people
are at risk, the investment by the investor is at
risk as well. The investor and the Myanmar people
are both stakeholders in dam construction."
"Will the reservoir cause people upstream
to lose livelihoods? ... As a World Bank official
once learned in China, many people hope that they
will be lucky enough to be resettled as a result
of a dam project ... as this is a way out of
poverty," Zhang's China Society for Hydropower
recently said in a statement.
"The people
who designed the Myitsone are the same that
designed the Three River Gorges Dam - for them
resolving resettlement issues are very simple. The
people living in the [Myitsone] resettlement area
now live like people in upscale villas in China,"
the statement said.
World Bank officials
could not confirm the anonymous quote attributed
to it in Zhang's statement. Nor have those
resettled from the Myitsone dam site been
resettled into "upscale villas", as he claimed.
Photographs and reports received by this
correspondent indicate that most of the resettled
villagers - estimated by the opposition National
League for Democracy to number 12,000 - have been
forced off their fertile ancestral lands and
lucrative orchards into tiny houses on clay beds
incapable of producing basic crops.
Dam
high risks The environmental risks of
Myitsone, meanwhile, are enormous by threatening
the flow of the Irrawaddy River, Myanmar's main
and most culturally significant waterway. The
proposed 152-meter high dam, which if built will
create a reservoir the size of Singapore, would be
situated between the Yunnan and Sagaing Faults.
A recent geological study jointly
conducted by Myanmar's Ministry of Transport and
Japan's International Institute of Seismology and
Earthquake Engineering indicates that a major
shift in the Sagaing fault, situated only 100
kilometers west of the dam site, could soon occur
and might affect the new capital Naypyidaw. Their
analysis and maps showing the fault extending
south into the Andaman Sea and north into Kachin
State is thought to have influenced Thein Sein's
decision on the dam.
Independent geologist
and blogger Ole Nielsen noted in a blog entry that
previous dams built in Myanmar have collapsed and
suggested that the Kachin state capital Myitkyina
would be wiped out in the event of a Myitsone dam
collapse. He added that the Ching Hkrang dam 16
kilometers north of Myitkyina and the agricultural
Washawng dam in Wiangmaw district collapsed in
2006 after incessant rains.
Experts say a
dam as large as Myitsone, in combination with its
seismic location, could also trigger earthquakes
though so-called reservoir induced seismicity, a
geological phenomenon where water in large
reservoirs shifts land masses and through
infiltration weakens underlying fault lines. There
have been over 90 identified incidences of
earthquakes triggered by water reservoirs
worldwide, including in China's Sichuan province
in 2008.
Meanwhile, a United States
Geological Survey team indicated in a recent
report that the Himalayan glaciers, some of which
feed the Irrawaddy River, are retreating at an
alarming rate. (If so, in a few years the Myitsone
dam could become a giant sandpit.) The survey
warned that the glacial retreat brings a greater
risk of so-called Glacial Lake Outburst Floods,
which occur when melt water inside a glacier
breaks out with extreme force and sends a tsunami
of silt carrying water down stream slamming into
dam walls. This has already had devastating
effects in nearby Nepal.
The controversy
over Myitsone runs deeper, however. Myanmar's
military junta first proposed the dam's
construction in 2006 and three years later
contracted the local Asia World Company and China
Power Investment Corp (CPI) to build it. Asia
World was established by Lo Hsing Han, a Kokang
Chinese from the opium-producing region of Myanmar
's Golden Triangle who has been identified by the
United States Drug Enforcement Agency for
involvement in narcotics trafficking and money
laundering.
Asia World is now controlled
by his son Stephen Law (Tun Myint Naing) and close
to Myanmar Vice President Aung Myint Oo who in
turn is a close ally of former junta leader Senior
General Than Shwe.
The now stalled joint
venture agreement between the CPI and Asia World
involves many powerful interests. The deal enabled
CPI to build and operate Myitsone in partnership
with Myanmar Electric Power Enterprises and a
consortium of Chinese companies, including the
China Gezhouba Group Corporation, whose contract
is worth $153 million, China Power Investment
Corporation Materials and Equipment Company, whose
concrete work had been priced at $75 million and
the politically connected Sinohydro Corp, which
was responsible for road building and civil
engineering.
Despite those big commercial
interests, Thein Sein said he was responding to
the "will of the people" in suspending the dam.
The decision has raised bilateral tensions, with
China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Hong
Lei saying in October soon after the announcement
that Myanmar must "protect the legal and
legitimate rights of Chinese companies". It's
unclear if Myanmar has paid any compensation since
the mega-project was stalled.
CPI
president and Communist Party secretary Lu Qizhou
said in interviews soon after the September 30
suspension was announced that he was "shocked" by
the decision and insisted that his company had
followed all legal procedures in winning the
contract.
The various interested parties
in the dam maintain that hundreds of scientists
had agreed that the environmental impacts would be
minimal despite the size of the reservoir and the
biodiversity significance of the dam site. (Some
Yangon-based cynics say that this is because
Chinese poachers have already cut or mined
everything of value around the dam site.)
Myanmar has yet to formulate comprehensive
laws supporting regulations or even research teams
capable of completing the rigorous testing and
reporting necessary to properly assess such a
massive project. However, it is clear from Thein
Sein's "will of the people" statement that his
government takes environmental concerns more
seriously than the previous ruling military junta.
While the dam has been deferred until
2015, coinciding with the end of Thein Sein's
term, wrangling over the multi-billion dollar
mega-project is expected to animate China-Myanmar
relations in the years ahead. Taking into account
the cultural significance of the Irrawaddy River
and the ongoing conflict in Kachin state, it is
possible that Thein Sein's suspension will
eventually lead to an outright cancellation.
(Already some of the resettled families have
returned to their home villages, according to
on-the-ground sources.)
In a survey
published in Myanmar Affairs, a website maintained
by Myanmar academics, 58% of respondents surveyed
approved of Thein Sein's environmental
initiatives. The survey found that 90% of the
1,000 people interviewed opposed the Myitsone dam
for environmental, socioeconomic and cultural
reasons. While China continues to propagandize
that the Myitsone dam is Myanmar's national
interest, Myanmar's people and leadership view it
differently.
Melody Kemp is an
environmental journalist currently living in
Indonesia.
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