Activists angered by CPI's misleading Myitsone dam survey

Beijing Rongzhi Corporate Social Responsibility Institute meets with Kachin villagers at the Aung Myin Thar relocation camp 24th April, 2013.

 

In a press release issued late last week the Kachin Development Networking Group (KDNG) blasted the state owned Chinese firm behind the officially suspended Myitsone dam project, the China Power Investment Corporation (CPI) for what the group suggests is the company's ongoing efforts to misrepresent the views of thousands displaced villagers who were forced to leave their homes to make way for the dam.


According to KDNG, a group hired by CPI recently carried out a survey of residents who were forcibly displaced by the dam which was skewered in such a way as to imply that the displaced residents wanted the dam restarted. KDNG alleges that the flawed methodology of the survey is just the latest in a long list of surreptitious actions taken by CPI to mislead and misrepresent the opinions of the people affected by the dam.

The survey does not ask whether the residents want the dam or not and instead presumes that the villagers want to make the dam “better”, a clear bias according to the survey's critics.

According to documentation uncovered by KDNG the survey which was conducted by the Beijing Rong Zhi Corporate Social Responsibility Institute was officially carried out with the aim of “improving” the Myitsone dam project in a way that gives “more consideration to economic, social and environmental impacts \[in] the local in the construction process, in order to make more contributions to local development.”

KNDG which also obtained a copy of the survey says that representatives of the institute met with displaced residents at the Aung Myin Thar relocation camp on April 24th2013. Residents of the camp have been barred from returning home by official Presidential decree despite the fact that the dam has been officially suspended. According to KDNG the camp residents live in squalid conditions which are far from their original homes and completely ill-suited for their needs.

The planned 152-meter high Myitsone dam was to be the first in a series of seven dams that CPI will build on the upper Irrawaddy which according to the dam’s opponents would flood an area larger than Singapore and dramatically affect the lives of millions of people who live downstream, including in the Irrawaddy delta, home to two thirds of Burma’s rice production.

To build the series of dams which according to Chinese state media will produce a combined output of electricity that rivals the Three Gorges dam the world's largest, CPI partnered with Burma's state power utility Myanma Electric Power Enterprise (MEPE) and Asia World, a Burmese conglomerate owned by Steven Law and his father, both alleged by the US government to be major narco-money launders.

While the Myitsone dam has been officially suspended work on the other 6 dams continues. As Chinese state media have previously reported the overwhelming majority of the electricity generated by the dams will be sent to China.

KDNG is also critical of CPI's attempt to restart the Myitsone dam while “delicate negotiations are continuing to try and end the conflict in Kachin State”. The dam was a major sticking point between the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) and Burma's central government. Tensions over the dam are widely viewed as contributing to the break down in a 17-year ceasefire between both sides in June 2011.

“President Thein Sein should stop these clumsy Chinese attempts to restart the Myitsone dam,
which risk derailing the Kachin peace process,” said KDNG spokesperson Seng Mai in last week's press release.

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