In northern Burma up to 15,000 subsistence farmers and fishermen will be displaced from their homes when the Myitsone Dam, being built by China to provide electricity to China, is flooded. A special correspondent reports from a village that is to be wiped out
IN A REMOTE part of Kachin state in northern Burma, or Myanmar, lies the village of Tang Hpre, one of a series of villages that will be underwater in a few years’ time. Nestled between the mountainous Chinese border and the banks of the mighty Irrawaddy River, it is home to
Fr Jing Paw and his congregation of ethnic Kachin hill people. His redbrick church, built by Irish missionaries in 1952, towers above the shallow banks of the Irrawaddy, a stone monument in a jungle of the wicker-walled thatched houses that radiate from the church compound.
The nearest big town, Myitkyina, is 45km away, almost two hours via dust roads with sharp bends cut into thick jungle.
As Fr Jing Paw watches the heavy rain clouds of the wet season gather over hills across the river, he describes the Kachin people’s history, disturbed only by the distant laughter of children. Tang Hpre is a unique village, as the centre for the Roman Catholic mission to the isolated Kachin tribes, and also lying beside the confluence of the N’Mai and Mali – the “brother” and “sister” rivers that are the birthplace of the Irrawaddy. But Tang Hpre is disappearing. Families are being moved to a new settlement that has been built downstream, and in a few years the church, its boarding houses, school and village will be flooded in the name of progress.
Burma’s military government is planning a dam that will see up to 15,000 Kachin subsistence farmers and fishermen displaced from their homes. The Myitsone dam will lie beside Tang Hpre at the confluence of the N’Mai and Mali, flooding the village and about 47 other communities below the watermark. The project is the brainchild of the China Southern Power Grid company, which signed a deal in 2007 with Burma’s ruling State Peace and Development Council party to dam the Irrawaddy for hydroelectricity.
Asia World Company has started construction, with roads widened, and timber bridges replaced by concrete ones, so that heavy machinery can get to the isolated site to build the dam. Asia World, which is blacklisted by the US treasury department, is contracted by a Chinese state company, Power Investment Corporation. Last month Kachin Development Networking Group wrote an open letter to the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, asking him to halt construction of the dam.
As part of the resettlement plan, two villages of 500 houses each are being built by Asia World Company, with 47 isolated farming communities squeezed into two
small towns. According to the networking group, some of the proposed submerged villages have not been informed about the relocation. Supayalat, a 19-year-old church volunteer, only heard about the dam from a neighbour, and knows just that she and her family must be ready to move when the
time comes. Villagers were originally told to leave their homes by May, but the
deadline was moved to December, possibly in a bid to win votes in October’s national elections.
Supayalat disagrees and believes the contractors are just behind schedule. The government “hasn’t finished building the new settlements yet; it’s taking them longer than expected”, she says.
Life is becoming more difficult, in little ways, Fr Jing Paw confides. Do they plant crops for the coming season? Do they build that new school? There is a lot of confusion here, about relocation plans, and also information, compensation and rights. There is fear, too: fear of resisting, of trucks coming in the middle of the night, of labour camps, of speaking out, of the future, of how will they survive in the resettlements, of where they will find food, of how they will earn money. “Our people have been here for years,” explains the elderly Kachin priest. “These are our farms, our mountains. Here we know how to survive, but what will we do in a new place?”
THE DAMS ARE being built by China for China. An estimated 3,200MW of electricity will be produced, all to be sent to southern China, leaving the local population impervious to the benefits but not the cost, while in Rangoon, Burma’s largest city, rolling blackouts continue. China’s presence here is undeniable: the hilly road to the Myitsone dam site is littered with signs in Chinese characters, and in the town of Myitkyina large, air-conditioned jeeps with blue Chinese number plates speed through dusty streets. Even the building materials are reportedly coming directly downriver from China.
The majority of the labour and engineers are from China – about 300 workers, mostly housed in a guarded camp on the Tang Hpre road.
By agreeing to this deal the Chinese government has effectively said it will support the military junta for 30 years, aside from the financial support the People’s Republic of China will give the sanction-blockaded junta.
China is not alone in taking advantage of Burma’s situation. In 2007 India and Bangladesh announced plans to build dams, and Thailand is constructing multiple dams on the Salween River across its border in Burma. Hkrai Naw, a local hill farmer, sees the dam as an excuse to continue to exploit the natural resources of the Kachin by logging the fast-diminishing but valuable teak forests. The new road gives access to the previously unreachable teak, and night-time transportation hides the extent of logging. “We see the lights from the line of trucks coming down from the mountain on the new China road.” He points to the bare mountains behind Tang Hpre as proof.
The Kachin have been semi-autonomous since a ceasefire in 1994 between the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) and the military government. Officially the KIA and its political arm, the Kachin Independence Organisation, are against the dam, but they are relatively quiet on the issue. According to Myitkyina residents there are three types of KIA: “some who care about the people, some who care about the money and some who care only about the power.”
On April 17th a series of bombs at the Myitsone dam site damaged the local offices of Asia World; the KIA denied involvement.
Violence is rare in the province, however, and there are no signs of religious tension. Each week large congregations gather at Tang Hpre’s Queen of Heaven church. Following a papal request, the Columban Fathers came to Burma in the 1930s; they were dispersed among humid villages dotted around the northern mountains. The Columban Sisters ran schools and orphanages in the Kachin capital, Myitkyina. In the 1960s the schools were nationalised and foreign missionaries were asked to leave, aside from a handful of ageing priests, determined to stand by their flock.
The sun is setting over the banks of the Irrawaddy, though the purple sky is dominated by dark monsoon clouds. As
Fr Paw watches the foreboding rains slowly move towards his home, he confesses the people here are exhausted. They feel powerless to the whims of the junta, and are confused and anxious about what will happen in the future, but they are resilient in their opposition to any forced change.
They feel constantly on guard to protect their culture, the priest says. “This dam is just one more nail in the coffin of Kachin way of life.”
Names have been changed to protect the identity of interviewees
Burmese-Irish night
Christy Moore headlines a concert at the National Concert Hall tonight to celebrate the 65th birthday of Aung San Suu Kyi (left), the Nobel peace laureate who lives under house arrest in Burma. Hosted by Marian Finucane, the performance features Eamon Dunphy, Deirdre Purcell and others.
