Press release by Karen Rivers Watch

ေဒသခံ ကရင္အမ်ိဴးသားမ်ား၏ အုိးအိမ္စည္းစိမ္ႏွင့္ သဘာ၀အလွေတြကုိဖ်က္ဆီးျပီး ဒုကၡေပးမည့္ ဒီဟတ္ႀကီးေရကာတာစီမံကိန္းကုိ ကရင္အမ်ိဴးသားမ်ား အသက္ေပးျပီးကာကြယ္ႀကပါ။ ဒီေရကာတာမွရရွိမည့္ အက်ိဴးစီးပြားမ်ားသည္ တုိင္းတပါးႏွင့္ တျခားလူမ်ိဴးမ်ားအတြက္သာျဖစ္သည္။ သုိ ့ျဖစ္ပါ၍ ဒီကိစၥမွာ KNU ကရင္အမ်ိဴးသားအစည္းအရုံး၏ ပါ၀င္ပါတ္သက္မွဳသည္ အဓိက ခရာက်ပါသည္။ ေကအဲန္ယူ ကရင္အမ်ိဴးသားအစည္းအရုံးသည္ ကရင္အမ်ိဴးသားတုိ ့၏ အက်ိဴးစီးပြားအတြက္ လုပ္ေဆာင္ျပီး တုိက္ပြဲ၀င္ေနပါသည္ဟုဆုိလွ်င္ ဟတ္ႀကီးေရကာတာ ဖ်က္သိမ္းေရးအတြက္ ေရွးဆုံးကေန တက္တက္ႀကြႀကြပါ၀င္သင့္သည္ဟု ရွဳျမင္ပါသည္။ အင္အားသုံးျပီး အစုိးရက ဒီေရကာတာကုိ မျဖစ္ျဖစ္တဲ့နည္းနဲ ့တည္ေဆာက္မည္ဆုိလွ်င္ KNLA ကရင့္အမ်ိဴးသားလြတ္လပ္ေရးတပ္မေတာ္က တန္ျပန္ျပီးကုိယ့္အမ်ိဴးသာအက်ိဴးစီးပြားအတြက္ မားမားမတ္မတ္ရပ္တည္ျပီး တုိက္ပြဲ၀င္ရမည္ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ဤကဲ့သုိ ့မဟုတ္ပဲ ဒီေရကာတာစီမံကိန္းမွာ ေကအဲန္ယူကရင္အမ်ိဴးသားအစည္းအရုံးကုိယ္ႏွဳိက္က ပါ၀င္ပါတ္သက္ အားအေပးအားေျမာက္ျပဳမည္ဆုိပါက ကရင္ျပည္သူမ်ားက ေကအဲန္ယူကုိ ေက်ာခုိင္းသြားမည္ျဖစ္ျပီး ေကအဲန္ယူ သည္ တာဖုိးမရွိတဲ့ ေက်ာက္ရုိင္း(အာပလာတုံး)ေက်ာက္အျဖစ္မ်ိဴး လုံး၀ေရာက္သြားမည္ဟု တာ၀န္ရွိသူ ေခါင္းေဆာင္ႀကီးမ်ားကုိ အထူးသတိေပးလုိပါသည္။

လက္ပံေတာင္းေတာင္ကိစၥေႀကာင့္ ထြန္းေတာက္လင္းလက္ေနတဲ့ ႀကယ္တပြင့္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုႀကည္လည္း စတင္ ေမွးမွိန္သြားခဲ့ပါျပီ။ ေဒသဖြံ ့ျဖိဴးေရးကုိ အေႀကာင္းျပျပီး ေရကာတာစီမံကိန္းႀကီးေတြ ဟုိေက်ာက္တြင္း ဒီေရႊတြင္းေတြေႀကာင့္ ကရင္မ်ိဴးသားမ်ားက သူတုိ ့အစဥ္ေလးစားအားကုိးအားထားျပဳေနတဲ့ ေကအဲန္ယူ ကရင္အမ်ိဴးသားအစည္းအရုံး ဘာေတြဆက္လုပ္မလည္းဆုိတာ မ်က္ေျခမျပတ္ႀကည့္ေနပါတယ္။ သမုိင္းအေျပာင္းအလဲကာလမွာ ေစာစီးစြာ KNU ေနမ၀င္သြားေစခ်င္ရင္ ေဒသခံျပည္သူတုိ ့၏ ဘ၀ကုိ ကာကြယ္ျပီး လက္ေတြ ့လုပ္ေဆာင္ျပပါ။ ေရကာတာစီမံကိန္းမ်ား ဖ်က္သိမ္းေရးကုိ ျပတ္ျပတ္သားသားေဆာင္ရြက္ေပးပါ။

DetailsPublished on Friday, 15 March 2013 10:29


2,000 Karens gather on the Salween to call for a halt to dam plans
March 15, 2013, Mutraw/Papun District, Karen State:

About 2,000 internally displaced people and villagers from the Wei Gyi area gathered yesterday at Ei Htu Hta Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp on the Salween riverbank to mark the International Day of Action for Rivers and Against Dams in an event organized by Karen Rivers Watch (KRW) and its local member Salween Eyes (SEE).

Six dams are being planned on the Salween River in Burma, including the Hat Gyi Dam in Karen State. With an installed capacity of 1,360 megawatts, the Hat Gyi project will cost US$2.6 billion, according to the US-based International Rivers. Thai NGO TERRA has said that 60 MW of power from the dam will be for Myanmar, while the rest will be sold to Thailand.

The Salween River basin has been inhabited by various indigenous peoples for generations, providing them with refuge, means of transport and nutritious food. If the dams are constructed, local people are sure to experience many negative impacts.

The event, organized to raise local voices about current and future impacts, was joined by environmental activists from other areas.

Paul Sein Twa, director of the Karen Environmental and Social Action Network (KESAN), said: “Today people in different parts of the world are commemorating this Day of Action to protect their rivers against mega-dams. Communities along the Salween share this common goal. We want to raise our voices to let governments and decision makers know of our sufferings and needs.”

“Local people do not want any dams on the Salween River, especially in Karen State, without the free, prior and informed consent of impacted communities. The government and the Karen National Union need to broaden the decision making process so that it is transparent, inclusive and democratic. Dam proponents need to apply international best practices and business due diligence in all their dam building projects.”

The ceremony was also attended by community leaders from Dawei, who are resisting massive development projects in their area, including dams. One of the leaders, Pati Saw Ko said:

“In the Dawei area, two dams will be built - one to produce electricity and the other to supply water for the Special Economic Zone (SEZ). Both dams have been temporarily suspended because the local villagers are standing against them.”

As part of the ceremonies, Christian, Buddhist, and Animist religious rituals were conducted. Afterwards, participants shouted the following slogans:

■Our priority need is: Peace, Peace, Peace!
■What we want is: No dams on the Salween River!
■Why we are calling for this: our Salween River must flow free
■All planned dams on the Salween River must be stopped!
In solidarity with local communities in China, Burma/Myanmar and Thailand who are calling for the free flow of the Salween River, a bamboo raft bearing a large banner: “Save Our Salween, No Dam” was floated down the river.

Ei Htu Hta IDP camp was set up on the bank of the Salween as a result of military attacks and human rights violations by the Burmese Army in 2006. Most of the 4,000 camp residents are ethnic Karens from Taungoo District, who have been supported with food rations and shelter by The Border Consortium (TBC). Already in fear of attacks by nearby Burmese troops, the IDPs are now fearful that the dam plans will lead to increased militarization, human rights abuses, environmental destruction, and loss of local livelihoods.

During the ceremony Naw Phyo Phyo, of the Karen Women’s Organization in Ei Htu Hta camp, said the government of Burma and foreign investors should not carry out any development projects including dams during this fragile ceasefire period, as genuine peace is not yet guaranteed.

“Current development projects will only benefit a few people – mainly governments and investors - but local people like us will face huge challenges, including permanent loss of our lands, displacement, hunger and severe flooding. This will have many negative impacts on our environment and our livelihoods.”

Pati Saw Ko said: “We all want development, but development must not bring suffering and difficulty for local communities.”



Contact person: Saw Paul Sein Twa

Telephone: + 66 821818562
http://kesan.asia/index.php/research-advocacy-campaign/river/193-press-release-by-karen-rivers-watch