Growing numbers of people are speaking out against a massive dam being built at Myitsone, the origin of the Irrawaddy River in Kachin State. The Irrawaddy River is the lifeblood of the country, and this dam—being constructed by China, for China—will cause irreparable damage to the country. This is a turning point for Burma’s officials. Which will they put first: China’s ready money, or the interests of the people? Chinese and Burmese officials have responded to the outcry with a campaign of lies, when what is really needed is a truthful assessment of the impact of this megaproject.
The first lie that needs to be dispelled is the claim that the people of Kachin State support the dam. In fact, the resentment of the Kachin people toward the Myitsone dam has been sustained, diverse and dynamic for years. China insults the Kachin people by claiming that they widely support this project.
Duwa Howa Zau Gan, a prominent Kachin leader, believes that the Chinese government has two objectives in building the Myitsone dam and six other large dams at the confluence of the Irrawaddy River and the Mayhka and Malihka rivers: one is to get hydropower to satisfy China’s growing energy needs; and another is to control Burma under the threat of the possibility of the collapse of these dams.
For Duwa Zau Gan, the Myitsone dam, located just 29 km from the Kachin State capital of Myitkyina, where he lives, is like a time bomb. The people of Kachin State will have to live in constant fear of its sudden collapse, which could be triggered by natural causes, such as earthquakes or heavy rain, or by human error. That is why he and other Kachin leaders have protested against the project since he learned of the agreement between the Burmese military regime and the Chinese government in May 2007 to build seven hydropower dams in Kachin State.
On May 21, 2007, Duwa Zau Gan and 11 other Kachin leaders wrote to Snr-Gen Than Shwe, then chairman of the ruling State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), to demand that he put a stop to the Myitsone dam project. These leaders are not alone. Thousands of Kachin people, as well as civil society groups throughout Burma, have repeatedly appealed to the Chinese and Burmese authorities to stop dam construction projects since 2007. However, the Chinese government has completely ignored the pleas and continued to push ahead with the project.
The Chinese corporations that are building these dams have taken the lead in propagating untruths about the public reaction to the project. In a paper presented to a Technical Workshop held in Naypyidaw on Sept 17, 2011, organized by the Ministry of Electrical Power (1), Li Guanghua, the president of the CPI Yunnan International Power Investment Co, Ltd (CPI), claimed that "the Kachin people generally supported the project construction."
Li based his claim on a public participation survey that included people of "different careers, ethnic groups, faiths and education backgrounds," which found that 80.4 percent of interviewees believed the project would "bring more job opportunities and higher incomes to local people," while 62.8 percent thought that "hydropower implementation could significantly promote development of the local economy." Most of the interviewees, the survey concluded, "were supportive of the country’s development and project construction."
Concerning the 13.8 percent of interviewees who didn’t support the project, Li said that they were people from Tang Hpe, the first village to be relocated, who didn’t understand the project at the time of the survey. He provided no further details on who was included in the survey, or how, where and when it was conducted.
Li was equally disingenuous about the environmental impact of the project, which he said CPI took very seriously. The facts, however, suggest otherwise. He said that in December 2008, CPI hired more than 100 experts from China and Burma to spend more than six months on a joint environmental field investigation. The Chinese experts were led by the Changjiang Institute of Survey, Planning, Design & Research (CISPDR), while the Burmese experts were from the Biodiversity and Nature Conservation Association (BANCA), based in Rangoon. These experts conducted many technical exchanges from June to September 2009 in Myitkyina, Wuhan and other places. Li noted that in March 2010, CISPDR submitted an environmental impact assessment (EIA) report that supported the project. What he didn’t mention, however, was that BANCA’s EIA report, submitted to CPI in the same month, recommended abandoning construction of the Myitsone dam.
At the same workshop where Li delivered his one-sided account, Dr Htin Hla, the chairman of BANCA, told a very different story.
He said the joint assessment, carried out by 84 experts from BANCA and a few dozen Chinese experts, lasted just five months—from mid-January to June 2009—instead of the originally planned seven. Moreover, he said, the Burmese experts were not given permission to study the agreement between the two governments.
BANCA finished its draft report in October 2009 and submitted its final report to CPI in March 2010. In the report, it recommended that CPI "abandon the Myitsone dam site because of the huge cultural significance of the Myitsone confluence for both the Kachin people and the people of Burma as a whole."
The report stated that constructing a series of large and medium dams in Kachin State would "definitely impact on the people of Burma as a whole, in addition to [having] adverse impacts on riverine, aquatic, terrestrial and wetlands ecosystems." The report recommended substituting the Myitsone dam with two smaller hydropower dams at appropriate locations above the confluence of Malihka and Mayhka rivers.
The BANCA report also said that a "systematic social impact assessment must be carried out by competent social scientists," and urged the authorities to "fairly balance between negative and positive aspects of the dams" before approving their construction. However, these recommendations were ignored by CPI, which simply threw the BANCA report into the trash bin and relied entirely on the CISPDR report to get the approval of the Burmese authorities, who gave the go-ahead for construction to begin last year.
In response to questions about the report, which was leaked to environmental groups and activists in June, Htin Hla said that under BANCA’s contract with CPI, he was not at liberty to disclose his organizations’ findings to the public. However, he said that the EIA could not be completed with just a single investigation, but should be an ongoing process that includes public participation and respects public opinion. He suggested that the authorities continue to conduct further assessments.
China and the Burmese regime have played up the benefits of the Myitsone dam, while ignoring the problems that typically beset hydropower projects.
According to Li, the project will provide a significant boost to Burma’s economy. He said the total investment of over US $20 billion will become Burma’s fixed assets, while the country will receive about 2,000 MW of electricity—10 percent of total output—free of charge. Furthermore, during the project’s 50-year operation period, the Burmese government will receive about $54 billion in foreign exchange earnings. Roads, bridges and earthquake monitoring stations will be built. Job opportunities for the people of Burma will be created. And under the Build, Operate and Transfer (BOT) agreement between the two countries, after 50 years, Burma will receive full ownership of the dams free of charge.
These figures cannot, however, be taken at face value. Building large dams is very expensive, and usually takes longer than planned, with outcomes that are always less than expected. In Thailand, for instance, 25 hydropower dams have produced just 50 percent of the electricity they were expected to generate over the past 20 years. It is also notoriously difficult to estimate the final cost of dams, in large part because they often become feeding troughs for construction companies and others involved in their creation. Former Argentinian President Carlos Menem once described the Yacyreta dam, located on Argentina’s border with Paraguay, as a "monument to corruption" that cost $11.5 billion to build—far more than the $2.7 billion originally estimated. It produced only 69 percent of the power it was designed for.
It is also unreasonable to expect that the dams being built in Kachin State by China will continue to yield much electricity after they are handed over to Burma in 50 years’ time. All dams have finite lifetimes. Sediments from the upstream river accumulate on the floor of the reservoir because there is no way for them to flow further downstream. This build-up reduces the water level and, consequently, the amount of electricity that can be generated. Therefore, when the Chinese government transfers ownership of the dams to Burma after 50 years, they may be little more than large man-made ponds full of sediment and mosquitoes, with no ability to produce electricity.
According to Li, there are at present a total of 4,819 employees working at the dam construction sites, of whom 1,440 are from Burma. Although he didn’t specify what kind of work the Burmese are doing, we can assume that most are engaged in unskilled labor and paid far less than their Chinese counterparts. In any case, there are already well over 3,000 Chinese workers involved in the project, a number that is expected to increase to 40,000 in the coming years.
Having this many foreigners in this relatively remote part of the country, with no ability to speak the local language and no understanding of Kachhin culture, will surely have a negative impact on the lives of Kachin people, whose cultural heartland of Myitsone is being destroyed by these foreign invaders.
Speaking in Naypyidaw, Li said that the Myitsone project, from planning to design and construction, is being carried out according to Chinese standards, which he described as among "the strictest and most advanced standards systems in the world."
In September 2003, China’s People’s Congress approved the Environmental Impact Assessment Law, which makes it mandatory for all enterprises to conduct an EIA with public participation prior to beginning construction on any project. Under this law, the EIA must also be approved by the Ministry of Environmental Protection, which in February 2006 issued the "Provisional Measures for Public Participation in Environmental Impact Assessment," which include procedures for engaging the public in the EIA process, deciding who should be included in public participation, what methods can be used to facilitate public participation (hearings, soliciting comments, public forums, experts forums, etc) and how to address, incorporate and preserve public input on the EIA.
While China may have, at least on paper, a well-developed system for addressing public concerns about the impact of mega-projects, there is no evidence that CPI employed it before implementing its dam projects in Kachin State. BANCA’s recommendations were ignored and its EIA report and other official documents were never made available to the public. No public hearings or experts forums were conducted before construction began. The people of Kachin State and the rest of Burma only learned about the dam projects when the regime’s mouthpiece, the New Light of Myanmar, ran a story on the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between the Department of Hydropower Implementation and CPI on June 20, 2009.
According to the intergovernmental Mekong River Commission, a full EIA requires a total of ten assessments, including basin and catchment ecosystems and habitats; river flows and water levels; flooding patterns; wetland ecosystems and habitats; irrigated agriculture; population growth in relation to domestic and industrial water use; water quality (including suspended sediments); saline intrusion in river deltas; riverbank erosion and sedimentation/channel erosion; and flood management in the lower basin and delta. The EIAs conducted by BANCA and CISPDR were just a preliminary assessment, and more assessments remain to be done.
Although Li indicated that further studies are being conducted on the impact of the project on downstream hydrological conditions, watercourse evolution, ecology and water resource utilization, these studies should have been done before the project was approved and the start of construction.
Despite the best efforts of CPI and the Burmese government to obscure the facts about the Myitsone dam project, the people of Burma are no longer in the dark about the adverse impact it will have on the Irrawaddy River and their lives. Kachin leaders like Duwa Zau Gan are determined to protect their cultural heritage, and the people of Burma now know that they may lose the Irrawaddy forever if they don’t stand up to demand a halt to this project.
The Irrawaddy River is the major lifeline of the people of Burma, past, present and future. Building a New York City-sized reservoir at the origin of the Irrawaddy will have a huge impact on agriculture, transportation and the environment. It will exacerbate poverty and contribute to the destabilization of the climate. In 20 years time, it could wipe the Irrawaddy off the map. That is why the people of Burma have begun to realize that this is an issue of national importance.
Opposition to the Myitsone dam project grows day by day, and now is the time for the government of President Thein Sein to make a choice: listen to China, or listen to the will of the Burmese people. If Burma’s rulers continue to cling to China as their great benefactor, they will be swept aside by the tide of history. The Irrawaddy revolution has begun.
Aung Din was a student leader during the 1988 pro-democracy uprising who served more than four years in prison. He is now the executive director of the Washington-based US Campaign for Burma.
This article appears in The Irrawaddy’s latest e-magazine. http://issuu.com/irrawaddy/docs/irr_vol.19no.3_sep2011_issuu/10?viewMode=magazine&mode=embed on the day this issue of The Irrawaddy went to press, Burma’s President Thein Sein told Parliament that construction of the Myitsone Dam would be suspended.
