Oversea Shans Protest Building of Salween Dam

Oversea Shans Protest Building of Salween Dam

The Overseas-Shan Organization yesterday sent a letter to Japan's ministry of finance requesting to reconsider financing the Tasang Dam Project on the Salween. 

The letter, dated 11 November, and signed by Sao Noan Oo of Lawkzawk, who resides in the United Kingdom, appealed to Mr. Miichi Miyazawa of the Ministry of Finance, "to refrain from supporting and giving aid to the Burmese military regime, particularly in financing the Tasang Dam Project." 

Since the project came into being, she said, "the area around the site has been increasingly militarized, resulting in increased forced labour and force relocation... The dam will not only have a devastating social and environmental impacts: large area of farmlands will be inundated and countless more people will be displaced with little hope of compensation. Even if not submerged, forcests in the area will inevitably be depleted, when logging companies move in to use the infrastructure built to serve the dam." 

Sao Noan Oo, a scion of one of the former princely states of Shan State, previously known as the Shan States before the formation of a union with Burma "proper" in 1947, maintained that the people of Shan State "are resolutely opposed to the building of the dam on the Salween. The fear that if the river ceases to flow the Shan State as we know will be lost forever. The Salween or Nham Khong River is as important symbolically to the Shan as Mount Fuji is to the Japanese people." 

She also stated that since joining Burma, the people of Shan State "have lost all the human rights taken away from them: the right not to be massacred, the right not to be raped and the right to refuse to work like draught animals." 
The International Labour Organization on 16 November passed a resolution urging members to re-evaluate their relations with the military regime in Rangoon. 

The Salween flows down from the foothills of the Himalayas, rushes down from north the south along the whole length of the Shan State before flowing through the Karenni, Karen and Mon states into the Indian Ocean at Moulmein. 

The GMS Power, a subsidiary of the MDX company from Thailand, has been conducting studies since 1997. Human Rights watchers have reported that at least 300,000 people from the area have been forced relocated since. 
A Shan academic in North America also commented the Japanese were making a seemingly needless mystery out of the project. 

"The Japanese are up to their eyebrows in it, but very cagey about - like they are committing a crime..." 
He said reasons being given: to supply Thailand with electricity and to bring water down to supply dams "all these seems like a big smoke screen (because) Thai experts say there is enough water and that the decrease of water in Thai dams is seasonal. As for electricity, Thailand now has gas from the junta which it now doesn't want and can't use...."