Its waters will flood an area almost the size of Singapore and locals think the idea stinks. But in this special report, Melody Kemp outlines how Australian company SMEC is set on building a major hydropower dam on Myanmar’s Salween River – despite rising resistance and at any cost.
Banjo Patterson’s epic The Man From Snowy River caught the nation-building spirit of Australia in the late 1890s.
The Snowy Mountains Scheme, a massive hydropower project taking 26 years to complete, at the time a model of engineering genius, became an additional source of national pride. Inevitably perhaps, the environmental and social consequences were significant.
It appears that in the 100-plus years since, there has been no learning.
A stretch of the Salween River.
Photo: Wikimedia commons
Kunhing locals protest the proposed
dam. Photo: Karen News
Hydrodams, supported by the World and Asia Development Banks and International Finance Corporation, are now proliferating in Southeast Asia, as nations compete to produce energy for the urban wealthy at the cost of rural communities.
One horse keeps cropping up in some of the worst of the races: the Snowy Mountains Engineering Corporation (SMEC). This story is about their adventurism in Myanmar, a nation still embroiled in warfare and brutality, despite the hopes of the West who seem to blithely think all the country’s festering problems are solved.
Today SMEC is all over Asia, meeting a lot of opposition from communities threatened by their megaprojects. In Myanmar SMEC is the public face of a consortium building a giant dam on the Upper Salween River at Mong Ton in Shan State.
The group includes some of the most unsavoury characters in this industry: the disaster prone Three Gorges Corporation, China giant Sino Hydro, the Myanmar Electricity Power Enterprise, headed by the son of a recently deceased member of Thein Sein’s cabinet, and Thai Electricity Generating Authority (EGAT) in effect a state energy monopsony.
It is unclear if UK engineers Malcolm Dunstan and Associates, whose activities in Myanmar are often associated with human right violations on their sites, will be included.
Supposedly the dam, with a wall reaching 241 metres and a capacity of 39.8 billion cubic metres, will generate 34.7 billion kilowatt hours of energy every year. The promise is that it will first meet the energy needs of Myanmar, with any excess being sold on to neighbouring nations.
SMEC and its partners have been told repeatedly and loudly the idea stinks.
The US$10 billion (2015 estimate) hydropower dam will flood an area nearly the size of Singapore, virtually bisecting Shan State, destroying around 100 communities. You can replace houses but not communities, which are organic social structures built on trust, and shared histories. It is the very strength of these communities that enabled their people to endure the hardships of war.
Yet, as is often the case when people and powerful interests collide, no doesn’t always mean no.
In May Myanmar Army tanks were photographed in Kunhing, whose renowned ‘thousand islands’ and 700-year-old Ho Leung temple in the Pang tributary will be submerged by the dam reservoir.
“Many of our highly respected stupas and pagodas will be destroyed,” says Hkyaw Seng, whose village is close to the construction site. In the Australian context, this might be compared to submerging St Patricks Cathedral in Melbourne to power New Zealand.
So what is an Aussie company doing there?
SMEC’s focus is the environmental and social impact assessments (EIA and SIA). The results of these studies are to be submitted to the government prior to sign-off (or, as happens too often, paid off) and plans for mitigation put to the villagers and agreed to before work can start.
This is backed up by the company’s pro forma response to what they are doing in Myanmar.
It is not SMEC’s role to provide recommendations as to whether the project should proceed. The findings of the EIA/SIA will be presented to the Government of Myanmar, who will decide (with other sources of information) whether to proceed.
However a local council member in Mong Ton, said that despite local people’s disapproval, earthworks were already underway along the ridge of the mountain. This has been confirmed by Kai Khur Hseng, a spokesperson for the Shan by phone from the Thai-Myanmar border.
A Chiang Mai lawyer also emailed that “local media report that the project has started, and there is a camp of mostly Chinese engineers doing testing near the site. The river near that area is off limits to all people. Warning shots were fired at a boat that got too close. The contact was not sure who fired the shots.”
“Well you would expect that,” said environmental consultant, and my partner, Sean Foley. “They borrow lots of money for construction and probably to pay off officials. The interest mounts up while the project is delayed, so it’s in their interest to get moving, and pay the necessary fees to ensure the EIA is agreed to.”
SMEC has been facing serial rejection for a while. Meetings have been cancelled due to local hostility. Old Shan women have risen to their feet, their voices rich and challenging, their traditional clothes faded but their spirit and anger still strong, telling SMEC representatives they have survived years of war, and refuse to let their ancestral lands be drowned to produce unneeded electricity for China and Thailand.
SMEC’s habit of giving gifts of cloth bags, bottled drinks and snacks to the people they interview has also angered local villagers, who view these as paternalistic bribes. They report SMEC repeatedly pushes the ‘positive’ impacts of the dam, appearing deaf to protests, while pressuring them to sign documents they don’t understand.
On 22 July, a group of villagers returned the bags they had been given by SMEC surveyors, handing over anti-dam posters. A Shan joint statement calls SMEC’s assessments process “simply a sham, aimed to rubber-stamp the Mong Ton dam plans, rather than objectively assess (sic) the project’s actual impacts.”
In April this year the Australian Federal Police raided SMEC’s international’s headquarters in New South Wales “as part of an investigation into allegations of foreign bribery” – it was unclear if this was associated with the Myanmar project.
War wounds
On 25 August SMEC was handed a petition in Kunhing containing 23,717 signatures opposing the dam. The reservoir would effectively divide war shocked Shan State in half. The next day, a spokesperson from a watchdog organisation reported seven men from the area were used as human shields by the Myanmar Army against Shan fighters, one slapped and beaten.
SMEC apparently nonplussed, went back to the same villages from which the signatures came and tried again.
Kunhing is a traumatised township. Memories are long, wounds unhealed. Between 1996 and 1998 the Myanmar Army drove 300,000 people from Shan State. In order to decimate resistance, over 47,000 villagers were forced from their homes at gunpoint, and over 300 killed. During that long war the army committed many abuses, including arbitrary execution and detention, torture, looting, rape, forced relocation and forced labour.
On 10 September, there was another outbreak of fighting south of Kunhing when a new unit of Myanmar troops, from Battalion 149 in Murng Hsu, was deployed. The day before, Nag Wah Nu a local Shan MP had said in no uncertain terms that the dam building did not have the consent of local people, so should be stopped.
If the dam is built it will have negative effects on our society and environment on which the local people have been relying on for generations, including sacred historic sites […] The project would force tens of thousands of local people to relocate again with no responsibility for their welfare taken by another of those involved, including the government.
On the 29 September, I was sent a copy of another letter sent to SMEC’s EIA Team Leader Michael Holics. Signed by 219 groups, the letter was sent by Saw Alex Htoo of the Karen Environmental and Social Action Network (KESAN). It reads:
We refuse to participate in this highly flawed process that threatens to exacerbate conflict and undermine peace building…. it is our view that the ESIA fails to address key concerns or meet international standards for transparency and human rights.
To date there has been no response. In what seems like a prediction of things to come, the Shan State armies were not signatory to the recent October ceasefire.
Hardly surprising. A Thai based relief agency reported by email on 14 October that “during the past week Naypyitaw has launched a massive offensive against the Shan State Army North […] in an area close to the Salween River to the north of Kunhing. This has already displaced 1,000 villagers.”
Social and environmental impacts
It should be obvious, when confronted with rooms full of people, most of whom are farmers whose lands will be flooded, wearing ‘No Dams’ headbands, that maybe, just maybe, these people think the social and economic costs are not worth it. Despite SMEC’s claims to hold free and fair consultations, the presence of local militias and pro-government representatives in meetings inhibits villagers from full participation.
I asked Holics, how much forest was going to be destroyed, how many tonnes of concrete and other GHG sensitive questions, also about resettlement, land allocation, livelihoods, and fish stocks. The response was the same as the pro forma reply quoted above.
Meanwhile, tropical dams are under scrutiny, found to emit as much greenhouse gas as coal fired power plants with similar energy output, while devastating huge areas of land. The government of Myanmar still has no regulations governing relocation rights, compensation or the obligation to assist with livelihoods.
Director of the Karen Environmental and Social Action Network (KESAN) Paul Sein Twa, reported that business cronies of the regime have already been clear-felling dense teak forests around the dam site. Twa also told Mongabay that proposed multiple dams would do irreparable damage to the Salween Basin extending across, China, Myanmar and Thailand.
The basin is “home to the world’s last great teak forest, to dry-season islands rich with crops, and to healthy fisheries upon which many people depend. This river is of vast ecological and cultural value, and it is worth preserving for present and future generations,” Twa says.
SMEC’s job has already been done by International Rivers (IR) and other local groups who have listed the environmental and social factors that should halt the dam. Pianporn Deetes of International Rivers reported that tens of thousands of ethnic people living on the floodplains near the dam site have already been forcibly relocated.
“All dams planned on the Salween River will greatly disrupt the riverine ecosystem and destroy the livelihoods of peoples living along the river.”
A warning has also been issued about impending risk of a serious movement of the nearby Sagaing fault after the recent Nepal ‘adjustment’. Scientists have warned of additional 7+ scale adjustments in the next decade and have clearly advised against dam building. A dam this size could itself cause a catastrophic seismic event, as happened in Sichuan China.
Himalayan and Tibetan glaciers are also melting faster than earlier predicted, offering increased flows in the short-term but ‘dry ice’ in the future along with risk of Glacial Lake Outburst Floods – which can without warning send destructive walls of pressurised water downstream, as demonstrated in Nepal.
Changing tides?
In early July, four SMEC officials went to the Wa capital, seeking to survey the Wa Special Administrative Region. They were ‘advised’ to return at a later date by leaders of the China-backed United Wa State Army.
SMEC is now effectively unable to carry out surveys in a large swathe of Wa-controlled territory along the eastern bank of the Salween above the planned Mong Ton dam.
A spokesperson for the Shan thought this, more than anything, indicated the wider rejection of the dam. “After all, the Wa usually support the Chinese and this is in most part a Chinese project,” she said while in Laos recently.
The Burma River Network (BRN) asserts large dams are planned for all of Burma’s major rivers and tributaries by Chinese, Norwegian, Thai and Indian companies. The dams, causing displacement, militarisation, human rights abuses, and irreversible environmental damage – threaten the food security of millions, while power and revenue go to the military regime and neighbouring countries.
Myanmar’s government has not publicly addressed villager’s complaints, but have praised the Salween dam projects as benefiting local populations, securing critically-needed electricity for Myanmar and leading to peace.
But the opposite appears to be true, with the poor losing hard-won security and military build ups occurring daily. SMEC’s role as a vanguard make them complicit in burgeoning militarisation, breaches of rights, and the devastation of globally important ecosystems.
Maybe SMEC’s shareholders should understand the implications of the company’s activities and make their discontent clear.
Melody Kemp is a freelance writer and environmental journalist who has worked in Southeast Asia for many years.
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