Burma | Burma Center Prague

DAMMED BY BURMA'S GENERALS
The Karenni Experience with Hydropower Development - From Lawpita to the Salween

"The first large-scale hydropower project ever built in Burma harnessed the Balu Chaung River in Karenni State at the Lawpita Falls. After it was begun in the early 1960s, government-owned
newspapers and regime leaders boasted that the Lawpita project would provide irrigation, electricity, and development for the state. What the Karenni people actually received were water shortages and destructive floods that destroyed their crops, as well as a reservoir that displaced thousands and disrupted fish habitats. Still today, eighty percent of the population has no access to electricity.
Worse than these broken promises, however, was the arrival in the state of thousands of Burma Army soldiers that came to secure the regime's main hydropower source. Further forced displacements, forced labor, extensive laying of landmines on farm fields, sexual violence, and extrajudicial killings followed. Despite these ongoing abuses, Thailand has now agreed to join with Burma's military regime in building a series of new dams on the Salween River in eastern Burma, which will provide electricity to Thailand and revenue to the regime. One of these dams, the Weigyi Dam, will be at least ten times higher than Lawpita's main dam, and will submerge many of the best lowland farming areas of Karenni State, impacting 30,000 people and causing irreversible environmental damage." (excerpt from executive summary)