ဧရာ၀တီျမစ္ဆုံစီမံကိန္းကုိရပ္ဆုိင္းေပးျပီး နာမည္ေကာင္းရေနတဲ့ ဦးသိန္းစိန္ သံလြင္ျမစ္ေရကာတာစီမံကိန္းေတြကုိ တိတ္တဆိတ္အေကာင္အထည္ေဖၚေန

ဧရာ၀တီျမစ္ဆုံ ကိစၥတုန္းက တတုိင္းျပည္လုံး ဆူညံ့ပြက္ထလာေတာ့ ဦးသိန္းစိန္ဦးေဆာင္တဲ့ ဗမာအစုိးရ အဲဒီစီမံကိန္းကုိ ရပ္ဆုိင္းထားေပးလုိက္တယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္ တရုတ္ေတြ ဗမာအာဏာရွင္ေတြ၊ ဗမာခရုိနီေတြ ေကာင္းစားေရးအတြက္ သံလြင္ျမစ္တေလွ်ာက္ ေရကာတာစံမံကိန္းေတြ တိတ္တိတ္ကေလးလုပ္ေဆာင္ေနဒါေတြ ့ရပါတယ္။

ဒီတခါ တကယ့္ခံရမယ့္လူေတြက လူအမ်ားစုျဖစ္တဲ့ ေဒသခံ ကရင္၊ ကယား၊ ရွမ္းေတြျဖစ္ပါမယ္။ ျမစ္ဆုံတုန္းက ကခ်င္ကစေပးေပမယ့္ ဧရာ၀တီျမစ္ရုိးတေလွ်ာက္ ဗမာအမ်ိဴးသားမ်ားရဲ့ အက်ိဴးစီးပြားကုိ ထိခုိက္မည္ျဖစ္ေသာေႀကာင့္ တတုိင္းျပည္လုံးကလူေတြက ထပ္ေအာ္ႀကပါတယ္၊ ျပည္တြင္းျပည္ပမီဒီယာ၊ လူမွဳကြန္ယက္မီဒီယာေတြ က်ယ္က်ယ္ေလွာင္ေလွာင္ေအာ္ႀကပါတယ္။ ေဒၚစုကုိယ္တုိင္လည္း ဒီကိစၥမွာ ပါ၀င္လာခဲ့ပါတယ္။ သုိ ့ေသာ္လည္း ဒီသံလြင္ေရကာတာစီမံကိန္းေတြမွာ ဧရာ၀တီျမစ္ဆုံကိစၥလုိ လူအမ်ား ေလးေလးနက္နက္ ထပ္ေအာ္မွာမဟုတ္ဘူးဆုိတာ ယခုကတည္းက ကရင္၊ကယား၊ရွမ္း တုိင္းရင္းသားေတြ ႀကိဳထြက္ထားႀကဖုိ ့လုိပါမယ္။ကရင္၊ ကယား(ကရင္နီ)၊ ရွမ္းအမ်ိဴးသားေတြက သံလြင္ေရကာတာစီမံကိန္းေတြကုိ ျပတ္ျပတ္ သားသားဆန္ ့က်င္ဖုိ ့ကုိယ့္ကုိယ္ကုိ ကုိယ္အားကုိးႀကရပါလိမ့္မယ္။ အဘယ္ေႀကာင့္ဆုိေသာ္ ဒီသံလြင္ေရကာတာစီမံကိန္းေတြမွာ နားလည္းထားဖုိ ့က ဗမာအမ်ိဴးသားမ်ားရဲ အက်ိဴးစီးပြားကုိ တုိက္ရုိက္ မထိခုိက္ေသာေႀကာင့္ျဖစ္တယ္။ ေဒၚစုလည္း မသိကိ်ဴးကြ်န္ေနသြားမွာပဲ။

အစုိးရရဲ့ ေရကာတာစီမံကိန္းႀကီးေတြကုိ ဆန္ ့က်င္ဖုိ ့လုပ္ေဆာင္ႏုိင္မွာ ေတာ္လွန္ေရးသမား လက္နက္ကုိင္တဲ့အဖြဲ ့ေတြသာျဖစ္တယ္။ ေသနတ္မရွိတဲ့လူထုကုိ ဗမာအစုိးရက ေသာက္ဂရုမစုိက္ပါ။ သူ ့ဗမာအခ်င္းခ်င္းေတာင္သူဂရုမစုိက္ရင္ တုိ ့တုိင္းရင္းသားေတြ ေရေအာက္ေရာက္သြားလည္းသူတုိ ့ဂရုစုိက္မယ္လုိ ့ေတာ့မထင္ႀကနဲ ့။ ဒီေနရာမွာ အဓိက ခရာက်တာက ျပည္သူေတြ ရဲ့ေခြ်း ေသြး ေတြနဲ ့တည္ေဆာက္ထားတဲ ေတာ္လွန္ေရးအဖြဲ ့အစည္းေတြပဲ။ သူတုိ ့လူမ်ိဴးကုိဒုကၡလွလွႀကီးေပးမယ့္အရာကုိ မဆန့္က်င္ရင္ မသိက်ိဴးကြ်န္ ျပဳရင္ အဲဒီေသနတ္ကုိင္တဲ့ေတာ္လွန္ေရးအဖြဲ ့ေတြအားလုံးဟာ အလာကားေကာင္ ဖြတ္ခ်ီးေတြပဲလုိ ့ေျပာရပါမည္။

ေရကာတာစီမံကိန္းေတြက ပြင့္လင္းျမင္သာမွဳရွိျပီး ေဒသခံေတြကုိ အက်ိဴးျပဳမယ္ဆုိရင္တမ်ိဴးျဖစ္ပါမယ္။ ဥပမာ - ကရင္ျပည္နယ္မွာတည္ေဆာက္မယ့္ေရကတာရဲ့ ရရွိလာမည့္ အက်ိဴးအျမတ္အနည္းဆုံး ၅၀ ရာခုိင္းႏွဴန္း တ၀က္ကုိ ကရင္လူထုအထြက္ျဖစ္ရမည္ဆုိသည့္အခ်က္မ်ိဴးစာခ်ဴပ္တြင္ အတိအလင္းေဖၚျပထားတာမ်ဴိး၊ ၄င္းစာခ်ဴပ္တြင္ အစုိးရနဲ့ကုမၼဏီကုိယ္စားလွယ္ပဲ လက္မွတ္ထုိးတာမ်ိဴးမဟုတ္ပဲ ေဒသအတြက္ ၅၀% အက်ိဴးအျမတ္အတြက္ ကရင္ကုိယ္စားလွယ္ပါ၀င္လက္မွတ္ထုိးႏုိင္တဲ့အခြင့္အေရးမ်ိဴး.. စသည္ျဖင့္.. တာေတာင္ေဒသခံေတြရဲ့ သေဘာထားကုိဦးစားေပးရယူႀကရပါမည္။ လုိရင္းတုိရွင္းေျပာရရင္ ကရင္ျပည္နယ္က ကရင္ေတြ အသက္အုိးအိမ္စြန္ ့ေပးျပီး ရလာတဲ့ေငြေတြကုိ ကရင္လူမ်ိဴးေတြ အနည္းဆုံး ၅၀ ရန္ခုိင္ႏွဴန္း သုံးပုိင္ခြင့္ရွိရပါမယ္။ 
အခုေတာ့အဲလုိမဟုတ္ဘူး.. ဗမာအစုိးရက သူခုိးလုိ အိမ္ေနာက္ေဖးက တိတ္တိတ္ကေလး၀င္လာတယ္။ ျပီးေတာ့ ေသနတ္ကုိင္တဲ့အဖြဲ ့ေတြရဲ့ေခါင္းေဆာင္ေတြကုိ ေငြထုတ္ႀကီးနဲ ့ပါးစပ္ထုိးပိတ္ပစ္တဲ့ နည္းဗ်ဴဟာေတြကုိပဲသုံးေနတယ္။ ဒီလုိနဲ ့လူတခ်ိဴ ့ကအစုိးရရဲ့ ဗ်ဴဟာေအာက္မွာ သာယာေနျပီး တုိင္းျပည္နဲ့လူမ်ိဴးအတြက္ပါးစပ္ကသာေအာ္ေနျပီး လက္ေတြ ့မွာ သူတုိ ့လွမ္းေနတဲ့ေျခလွမ္းက သူ ့လူမ်ိဴးကုိ ေဂ်ာက္ထည့္ တြန္းပုိ ့တဲ့ လမ္းျဖစ္ေနတယ္။
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Thein Sein Enjoys Myitsone Praise as Dams on Salween Secretly Proceed

By WILLIAM BOOT / THE IRRAWADDY| Thursday, May 9, 2013 |

President Thein Sein’s surprise suspension of the Chinese-led hydroelectric dam on the Irrawaddy River at Myitsone in northwestern Burma secured him widespread praise at home and abroad and seemingly dismayed China.

This was a project that would help solve power shortages in China’s Yunnan Province by generating up to 6,000 megawatts of electricity to pump north across the border.
But away from the mass media spotlight, environmentally questionable large hydro dams further east in Burma on the Salween River are quietly going ahead with the approval of the Thein Sein government.

Approval for a clutch of dams on the Salween which collectively will generate much more electricity than the Myitsone project has been given in the old-fashioned military regime way—without any public consultation, independent environmental impact assessments, or regard for the simmering military-ethnic conflicts in their midst.

Apart from a brief announcement earlier this year by the Ministry of Electric Power, the Naypyidaw government has so far failed to identify who will build the Salween dams, who will benefit from the electricity generated and how the local communities will be compensated.

The ministry said approval had been given for six projects on the Salween in Shan and Karen states.
A map shows the location of the dam sites situated along the Salween River in eastern Burma (Photo: Salween Watch)

A map shows the location of the dam sites situated along the Salween River in eastern Burma (Photo: Salween Watch)

They include hydro dams at Tasang and Hatgyi which have been debated for years and have had a number of Chinese and Thai backers, including the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand, or EGAT. They would have a combined installed capacity of 15,000 megawatts, according to the US-based environmental lobby group International Rivers.

That is about four times Burma’s present total electricity producing capability.

“These projects are proceeding in areas where conflict is continuing between ethnic resistance forces and the Burmese Army, and are shrouded in secrecy,” says International Rivers. “Investment for these projects will come from five Chinese and three Burmese corporations, and Thailand’s Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand.”

The Beijing-based environment lobby group China Dialogue has identified three large Chinese state-owned companies it says now have contracts from the Burmese government to proceed with dams construction on the Salween.

They are Sinohydro Corporation, China Three Gorges Corporation and China Southern Power Grid.

The Three Gorges Corp developed the world’s biggest hydroelectric system on the Yangtze River in China which has caused considerable environmental problems since its completion. China Southern is not a dam builder but an electricity transmission infrastructure builder responsible for all power supply in southern China.

“Tensions remain high around China’s role in developing dams in Myanmar largely due to questions about who will benefit,” says China Dialogue, which also has offices in London.

“In a country where energy shortages occur daily and about a third of people live below the poverty line, many criticize the development of natural resources for the sake of providing energy to neighboring states.

“Local communities and internally displaced persons are concerned that the dam plans will lead to increased militarization, human rights abuses, environmental destruction and loss of local livelihoods,” China Dialogue noted.

The risk of armed conflict around two of the Salween dam sites has heightened recently with demands by the Burmese Army for local militias to move away.

The army’s Southeast Command ordered Karen militia forces to leave an area near the Hatgyi dam site they are occupying by May 4, but the Karen have not complied.

This follows an earlier order by the Burmese Army to the Shan State Army-North to vacate their base beside the Salween which they have occupied under the terms of a ceasefire agreement.

Their base is near the sites of two planned dams. One is at Nong Pha and one at Man Tung on the Nam Ma tributary of the Salween and they will have a combined electricity generating capacity of 1,200 megawatts, according to the Burma Rivers Network NGO.

“To my knowledge, EGAT International is actively involved in the Hatgyi dam, but has tried to keep itself more behind the scenes,” International Rivers’ Thailand coordinator Pianporn Deetes told The Irrawaddy on May 8.

“EGAT International and Sinohydro are taking advantage of the conflict situation [along the Salween] to proceed with their investment. Most local ethnic people have already been forced to flee to the border and were not given a say in the decision to build the dams.

“Dams on the Salween including Hatgyi, Tasang, and others, have been used as a weapon to control the conflict areas.”

The Bangkok government is anxious to reduce the country’s dependence on natural gas to fuel electricity generation. Thailand’s own gas resources in the Gulf of Thailand will decline after 2021 without new discoveries and the Thais already import about 30 percent of their needs from Burmese fields.

There is a virtual moratorium on new dam construction within Thailand because of vocal public opposition and EGAT is already co-financing development of a highly controversial hydro-dam directly on the Mekong River inside Laos.

EGAT is the main financial backer of the US $3.7 billion Xayaburi dam and Thailand will buy most of the electricity generated by the 1,260 megawatt capacity operation.

The Xayaburi project is going ahead despite objections by the governments of Cambodia and Vietnam, which share the Mekong downstream. They argue that the dam will disrupt river water flow and levels and undermine agriculture and fisheries.

EGAT has for a long time eyed the lower Salween’s potential to provide electricity to also help solve Thailand’s future power needs. It flows parallel to the Thai border and electricity could easily be transferred across it by power grid cable.

Meanwhile, at the upper end of the Salween in Burma, China could yet get the electricity it needs for Yunnan Province—without the Myitsone dam project.

http://www.irrawaddy.org/archives/34103