Vietnam, Laos Split Over Mekong Dam – Update_01

Cached:  http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=20873

By MARWAAN MACAN-MARKAR / IPS WRITER

Friday, March 4, 2011

Laos wants to be the powerhouse of the region—to sell power to its neighbours and earn enough to help the poor, that is a third of its population of 5.8 million.

BANGKOK — The first in a new series of 11 dams planned across the Mekong, Southeast Asia’s largest river, could break a special bond between two communist-ruled countries.

Critics in Vietnam see red over a 1,260-megawatt hydropower project planned by their smaller, poorer, land-locked neighbour, Laos. They call it an environmental disaster.

Laos, however, wants to be the powerhouse of the region—to sell power to its neighbours and earn enough to help the poor, that is a third of its population of 5.8 million.

The dam in an idyllic hill setting in the north Laos province of Xayaburi (or Sayaboury), will be built by a Thai developer. Thailand is expected to buy 95 percent of its power to fuel its booming economy.

Environmentalists say the Xayaburi dam and 10 more such constructions planned on the Mekong’s mainstream, nine in Laos, make a Faustian bargain.

The dam will “reduce fresh water and silt downstream in Vietnam and devastate fishing among others,” stated ‘Tuoi Tre’, the country’s largest circulating paper, published by the Communist Youth Organisation from Ho Chi Minh City (former Saigon) in the south.

The potential threat of the 3.5 billion dollar dam in the Mekong delta, Vietnam’s “biggest rice producing and fish farming area”, has been highlighted by The Saigon Times too.

Vietnam’s government officials have raised their voice against the 32-metre- tall, 820-metre-wide dam. “If built, Laos’ Xayaburi dam will greatly affect Vietnam’s agriculture production and aquaculture,” deputy minister of natural resources and environment Nguyen Thai Lai reportedly said in a meeting of the country’s Mekong River experts.

Such criticism goes against the spirit of a 1977 treaty of friendship and cooperation that binds them in a ‘special relationship’. The treaty followed the communist triumph against the US in the Vietnam War.

Towards the end of the Cold War conflict from 1954 to 1975 the communist North Vietnam defeated and annexed the US supported South Vietnam. The protracted conflict left a long trail of death and destruction in the former French Indochina territory that includes Laos and Cambodia.

“The criticism reflects the concerns and the opinion of the public and the government,” said Nguy Thi Khanh, deputy director of the Centre for Water Resources Conservation and Development, an NGO based in the northern Vietnam city of Hanoi.

Vietnamese scientists have also said “the project should be stopped,” Khanh added during a telephone interview from the Vietnamese capital. “Vietnam’s silence about this dam has been broken.”

For its part, the Laotian government is still sticking to its plan. “We are confident that the Xayaburi Hydroelectric Power Project will not have any significant impact on the Mekong mainstream,” officials from Vientiane (the capital of Laos) have explained in a note to the Mekong River experts.

Mekong experts from Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam—the four countries that share the waters of the lower Mekong—are meeting in late March to approve the Xayaburi dam plans.

Laos has appealed to its neighbours not to place any roadblocks. The government does not want to raise the political stakes to the point of being compelled to get its dam blueprint approved by ministers or even prime ministers.

“There will be no need for any extension of time and no need to forward this matter to the (ministerial) level,” revealed the note by the Laotian government to Mekong River experts.

This dam issue has become the first major test of environmental diplomacy for the four countries in the lower Mekong, members of the Mekong River Commission (MRC). An inter-governmental body that came up after a 1995 agreement, the Vientiane-based body aims to manage the development of the Mekong basin in consensus. Any plan to dam the Mekong has to be scrutinised for its cross-border impact under a special mechanism, formally known as the Procedure for Notification Prior Consultation and Agreement (PNPCA).

“This is the first time that we are going through the prior consultation process,” Jeremy Bird, MRC’s chief executive officer, told IPS. “Countries do not have a veto right (to stop a dam being built in a neighbouring country) yet countries cannot proceed without consultation.”

The MRC’s members have to weigh the provision in the agreement that “a country cannot act irresponsibly to impact its neighbour” against every member’s “right not to agree” and ability to “take its own decision,” added Rudi Veestraeten, Belgium’s envoy to Thailand.

MRC is funded by Belgium, along with other European countries, Australia and Canada.Till now the 4,880-km long Mekong has remained free of dams along its journey through the basin, winding its way past Burma along the four MRC partners till it falls in the South China Sea in southern Vietnam.

But upstream, the river’s flow from its headwaters in the Tibetan plateau through southern China has been harnessed by four dams in China’s Yunnan province, part of a cascade of eight mega dams the Asian giant plans. Local activists, environmentalists and even government experts of the lower Mekong are alarmed.

The impact of the Chinese dams on the downstream countries has strengthened the campaigns led by Towards Ecological Recovery and Regional Alliance (TERRA), a Bangkok-based green lobby. TERRA warns that dams on the lower Mekong will affect the lives of 60 million people who depend on food and their livelihood from the river.

“Laos has not helped its case because the government has refused to make public the EIA (environmental impact assessment) it has done for the Xayaburi dam,” Premrudee Daoroung, co-director of TERRA, told IPS. “The Laotian government says it is a secret document.”

The dam blueprint puts red and green interests at loggerheads across an international border.

Egyptians demand secret police give up torture secrets

Cached:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12674714

By Alastair Leithead

Cairo, Egypt

–

Egypt’s Revolution

• Bowen: Bumpy ride
• Inside the Brotherhood
• Final moments before the fall
• Can military meet demands?

The headquarters of the Egyptian State Security Services in Cairo is an impenetrable concrete fortress of thick walls and turrets, its main building menacing and imposing.

People used to be intimidated just walking past it, but the myth and mystery of the horrors committed within are now out in the open – the latest stage of Egypt’s continuing revolution.

The army has tanks and armoured cars outside after taking custody of the building and the thousands of documents inside which many people believe will reveal the truth behind the activities of the state security service.

After driving out a president and a prime minister, the protesters who have spent much of the past six weeks out on the streets, have now turned their attention to the feared secret police.

Its buildings have been raided across the country and the main headquarters in Cairo’s Nasr City was no exception.

‘Extremely creepy’

Hundreds of people gathered outside – many of them former prisoners who were held here on spurious charges and tortured before being imprisoned for many years.

They pounded the doors, surging forward and the army relented, letting them into the vast grounds and the buildings inside.

“It was extremely creepy,” said Hossam Hamalawy, who was one of the first inside. He and others filmed their extraordinary raid on one of the most feared buildings in Egypt.

“We managed to find tonnes of documents inside and also underground prison cells. It was like a maze going down eight floors.”

Mubarak’s base of support and his main tool and weapon against dissidents and the Egyptian people in general had been state security police over the past 30 years”

End Quote Hossam Hamalawy Egyptian Protester

The demonstrations had focused on state security buildings in Alexandria on Friday as rumours spread the police were burning and shredding documents.

Inside the Cairo headquarters that’s just what they found – destroyed papers seen as an attempt to destroy evidence of human rights abuses and corruption.

“Mubarak’s base of support and his main tool and weapon against dissidents and the Egyptian people in general had been state security police over the past 30 years,” Hossam Hamalawy said.

“We wanted to storm those facilities to assure everybody we are in control, not the regime’s figures anymore.”

There was an emotional scene as a torture device of metal poles and electricity transformers was brought out of the building. From his own experience one of the protesters demonstrated how it was used.

‘Electric torture’

It is not difficult to find people who were tortured by the enforcers of President Hosni Mubarak’s state.

They are now able to talk about their experiences – both victims and perpetrators.

Three serving secret policemen spoke to the BBC – now willing to speak, if not identified.

“I witnessed torture while serving in a police station in southern Egypt,” one said.

Torture is a widespread, systematic, routine policy in Egypt through the last 30 years. It is everywhere and in every place in Egypt,”

End Quote Dr Mona Hamed Psychiatrist

“I heard screaming on an upper floor. When I went to check, I found a naked girl standing in front of an investigator who was using electric charges on sensitive areas of her body to force her to admit to charges against her.

“She said she would admit anything as long as he stopped.”

They said they had been told to intimidate people during the election and to stop them voting for the opposition.

“There were many methods of torture,” one of the policemen said. “Beating and whipping, hanging in the air for long periods of time, cuffing up their hands and legs, using electric sticks and burning their bodies with cigarettes and depriving them of sleep or food.”

At a small office in downtown Cairo, Dr Mona Hamed, a psychiatrist, nodded and said yes, she had heard many terrible stories.

The El Nadim Centre is an organisation which provides treatment and rehabilitation of the victims of violence and torture.

“Torture is a widespread, systematic, routine policy in Egypt through the last 30 years. It is everywhere and in every place in Egypt,” said Dr Hamed.

She introduced me to one of her clients – an Imam jailed twice in the past 10 years and tortured incessantly every day for a month.

He described how he was stripped, had his hands and legs tied to a chair, how he was beaten and given electric shocks all over his body, especially his genitals.

They accused him of being a terrorist, but after a month released him, only to re-arrest him two years later and to do it all over again.

Amateur video purportedly shows protesters raiding ministry and secret police offices in Cairo

“This is revenge from Allah,” he said. “They thought they were Gods no-one could touch. Now we can live without fear.”

People want an end to the State Security Services because they symbolise the worst human rights abuses of the former regime.

The new interim government has to decide what concessions it gives the protesters and where it draws the line.

Reconciling with and breaking from the past is just one of the challenges in post-revolution Egypt.