Burma’s Government must Suspend All Dam Plans on the Salween River

The Karenni Civil Society Network (KCSN) urges the Burmese government and companies from neighbouring countries to immediately suspend their plans to build hydropower dams on the Salween and other rivers in Burma. KCSN has learned that there are at least two large dams planned on the Salween in Karenni State […]

Press Statement on Interational Day of Action for Rivers and Against Dams

(33538) ethnic signatories and (131) civil society and political parties in Burma call for immediate halt to dams on the Salween River

(33538) people from Shan, Karenni, Karen and Mon State and (131) civil society and political parties in Burma have signed a petitionurging an immediate halt to the six dams planned by the Burmese government on the Salween River, including the Kun Long/UpperThanlwin, Nong Pa, Man Taung and Tasang dams in Shan State,Ywathit dam in Karenni State and Hatgyi dam in Karen State […]

ေပါင္းေလာင္းေဒသခံေကာ္မတီႏွင့္ ကယန္မ်ဳိးဆက္သစ္လူငယ္အဖြဲ႕၏ ပူးတြဲသတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ခ်က္

ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္ေတာင္ပုိင္း၊ ပ်ဥ္းမနားအေရွ႕ဘက္ ေပါင္းေလာင္းျမစ္ေပၚတြင္ တည္ေဆာက္ ထားေသာ အထက္ေပါင္းေလာင္ဆည္ေၾကာင့္ ျဖစ္ေပၚလာေသာ အက်ဳိးဆက္မ်ားသည္ ျပည္သူ လူထုႏွင့္ ႏုိင္ငံေတာ္ အေပၚမ်ားစြာ ထိခုိက္မႈရွိေနသျဖင့္ ေပါင္းေလာင္းေဒသခံေကာ္မတီ၀င္မ်ားႏွင့္ ကယန္မ်ဳိးဆက္သစ္ လူငယ္အဖြဲ႕မွ ျပင္းထန္စြာ […]

Development Projects Fuel Conflict in Ethnic Nationality Areas

“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,” said the environmental lobby group, China Dialogue, talking about dam construction on the Salween River earlier this week. In recent weeks, there have been several examples of development projects directly contributing to armed conflict and militarization in ethnic nationality areas.

Fighting renewed between the Democratic Karen Benevolent Army (DKBA) and the government-backed Border Guard Forces in late April after the Burma Army ordered the DKBA to leave the area near the Hat Gyi hydropower dam site in Karen State. The DKBA refused to comply. Clashes have ceased but tensions remain high with the Karen National Union Brigade 5 also opposing the construction of the dam […]

Love Salween Group Condemns Blocking of Free Expression in Karenni State

We, the Love Salween Group, condemn government authorities for denying local villagers their democratic rights by blocking them from organizing a prayer ceremony to mark the Global Day of Action for Rivers on March 14, 2013 at Wan Awn village, Pasaung township of Karenni state […]

2,000 Karens Gather on the Salween to Call for a Halt to Dam Plans

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 […]

Current Status of Dam Projects on Burma’s Salween River

In late February 2013, Burma’s Deputy Minister of Electric Power informed Parliament that six dam projects on the Salween River in Shan State, Kayah State (Karenni) and Karen State had gained approval. With a combined installed capacity of 15,000 MW, the projects will include the Upper Salween or Kunlong Dam, Mai Tong or Tasang Dam, Nong Pha Dam, Mantawng Dam (on a tributary), Ywathit Dam, and Hatgyi Dam. The investment will come from five Chinese corporations, Thailand’s Electricity Generation Authority of Thailand (EGAT) International Co. Ltd and three Burmese corporations.

Investors’ Haste to Build Big Dams is Undermining Fragile Peace Process in Karen State

The push by investors to proceed with large dams in Karen areas of Burma is threatening to undermine ongoing ceasefire negotiations between the Karen National Union (KNU) and the Burmese government.

Increased Burma Army security around dam sites and blatant disregard for concerns of impacted communities are heightening tensions, and throwing into doubt the government’s sincerity in conducting ceasefire talks […]

Villagers Sign Complaint Letter About Anyarphya Hydropower Project in Tavoy

As many as 3,000 villagers sign a complaint letter addressed to President Thein Sein about the ongoing Anyarphya Hydropower Project in Tavoy, Tenasserim Division, expressing their concerns over the local impact of the project and the losses that villagers will have to bear […]

တနသၤာရီတိုင္း ထားဝယ္ျမိဳ႕အနီးတြင္ အေကာင္အထည္ေဖာ္လ်က္ရွိေသာ အညာဖ်ား ေရအားလွ်ပ္စစ္ စီမံကိန္းႏွင့္ ပက္သတ္၍ သက္ေရာက္မည့္ ဆိုးက်ဳိးမ်ားအေပၚ ၎တို႕၏ စိုးရိမ္ပူပန္မႈမ်ားႏွင့္ နစ္နာဆံုးရံႈးမႈမ်ားကို ေရးသားေဖာ္ျပထားသည့္ တိုင္ၾကားစာတစ္ေစာင္ကို ရြာသား ၃၀၀၀ ခန္႕က လက္မွတ္ေရးထိုးကာ သမၼတဦးသိန္းစိန္ထံသို႕ ေပးပို႕ခဲ့ၾကသည္။ […]

Stop Damming the Chindwin

The Burmese military government, together with the government of India, is planning to build a giant hydroelectric dam near Tamanthi on the Chindwin River in northwest Burma’s Sagaing Division. The dam’s flood reservoir will be almost 1,400 sq km, the size of Delhi, and will permanently […]