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.

Both Sides File Suits in Mine Protest

Over 1,000 villagers staged a symbolic demonstration on Tuesday at a graveyard to dramatize their struggle against a Chinese co-owned mine in the Letpadaung mountain range near Sagaing Division’s Monywa city.

The villagers are protesting their displacement from land following months of confrontations with the company and the authorities […]

U.S. State Department Must Hold U.S. Companies in Burma to International Standards

New investors in Burma should be required to publicly report on their human rights and environmental impacts, land acquisitions, security arrangements, and government payments – as well as those of their subsidiaries and business partners […]

Mining, Repression and Imprisonment, an Uncertain Future

Burma has been internationally praised for moving in a more democratic direction recently. Sadly for many citizens these changes are a world away. Their interactions with the Burma government are characterized by the same repressive, corrupt, strong armed tactics that made Burma an international pariah for decades.

In the Letpadaung mountains, huge amounts of land have been forcibly confiscated by the government, environmental degradation has occurred and a policy of arrest and detention of peaceful protestors has been implemented. The Monywa Copper Project is located in central Burma’s Sagaing Division with four large deposits: Sabetaung, Sabetaung South, Kyisintaung and Letpadaung. The project covers almost 8,000 acres of land, the majority of which was forcibly taken from villagers.

Resource extraction has been the cause of some of Burma’s largest human rights violations and land confiscations. The Monywa Copper Project is the country’s largest mine in terms of recovery rates, production and revenue. Protests over the project and national attention have been growing, as have the number of arrests and detentions in association with those protests and land confiscation cases.

Lahu Women Demand End to Destructive Platinum Mining in Burma’s Shan State

A Lahu women’s group is calling for an immediate end to destructive platinum mining operations in Eastern Shan State. In a new report “Grab for White Gold: Impacts of platinum mining in Eastern Shan State,” the Lahu Women’s Organization (LWO) describes how recent platinum mining […]

Grab for White Gold: Platinum Mining in Eastern Shan State

Since 2007, destructive platinum mining has been taking place in the hills north of Tachilek, eastern Shan State, impacting about 2,000 people from eight Lahu, Akha and Shan villages. The platinum is being extracted by Burmese mining companies […]

South Korean Corporate and Government Should Not Exploit Burma’s Liberal Movement

Recently the movements such as nomination Aung San Suu Kyi, in Burma election have shown positive progressive movement of democratization in Burma. However, even after the official liberalization, it is still plausible to say that Burma is still being controlled […]

Burma Environmental Working Group Issues Benchmarks for Investment in Energy, Extractive and Land Sectors in Burma

Today, the Burma Environmental Working Group (BEWG) – an alliance of grassroots-based organizations – has issued its Benchmarks for Investment in Burma’s Energy, Extractive and Land Sectors to serve as a framework for responsible investment in critical sectors in Burma […]

မိခင္ ဧရာဝတီျမစ္ၾကီး ထာဝရ ရွင္သန္ေစေရး ျမန္မာတမ်ဳိးသားလံုးအေရး

ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံေျမာက္ပိုင္း ကခ်င္ျပည္နယ္တြင္ ျမစ္ဖ်ားခံျပီး အိႏၵိယသမုဒၵရာထဲသို႕ စီးဝင္ေနေသာ ဧရာဝတီျမစ္ၾကီးသည္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအတြက္သာမက အာရွတိုက္ၾကီး တခုလံုးအတြက္ပါ အေရးပါေသာ […]

Endangered Elephants in Megatha Forest, Karen State, Burma

Megatha Forest is a 156 sq km protected Wildlife Sanctuary in Karen State. The Karen Social and Environmental Action Network (KESAN) sent a study team to the forest. The team spent two years looking for elephants and talking to local people and forest officials about elephants and other biodiversity […]