Network Calls for Significant Problems to be Addressed Before Dawei SEZ Project Revived

Dawei Development Association (DDA) calls on the Myanmar and Thai governments to refrain from reviving the Dawei Special Economic Zone (DSEZ) development project unless the problems associated with the project thus far are remedied and international best practices are in place going forward. The Prime Minister of Thailand, retired general, Prayuth Chan-ocha, is visiting Myanmar this week, as his first overseas visit since taking power earlier this year. The leaders of both countries are due to meet to discuss reviving the stalled Dawei deep-sea port and Special Economic Zone development project […]

Japan’s Opportunity to Prove Itself a Responsible Investor in Burma

As Japan deepens its economic ties with Burma at the Japan-ASEAN summit in Tokyo, civil society from Tavoy, Tenasserim Region, express concerns over investing in a huge special economic zone that has already caused widespread human rights violations.

Adding to the US$867 million in loans pledged in May, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe promised a further US$578 million in loans for infrastructure development for the Thilawa Special Economic Zone (SEZ), as well as upgrading Burma’s railway network. Another agreement was made in which greater protections for Japanese businesses investing in Burma are established, thus creating a safer environment to explore business opportunities […]

A Dangerous Precedent for Development in Burma

On 30 September, Shwe Gas Movement released a new report entitled, “Drawing The Line: The Case Against China’s Shwe Gas Project, For better Extractive Industries in Burma”. The report highlights the consequences, violations, unequal development, inadequate laws and the dangerous precedent set by the Shwe Gas Project. With increased investment and the liberalization of Burma’s economy, development projects similar to Shwe Gas are set to increase. If they follow a path of code and conduct similar to the Shwe Gas Project, the future of Burma will be rife with increased land confiscation, labor abuse, environmental degradation, loss of livelihoods, conflict, arrests and imprisonment of rights activists defending themselves and their communities. The benefits will be unequally distributed and negative consequences will be borne by farmers, fishermen, and by the citizens of Burma.

The Shwe Gas Project is the largest extractive resource project in Burma with dual gas and oil pipelines traveling almost 800km beginning in Arakan State, passing through Magway and Mandalay Regions, exiting Burma through northern Shan State and terminating in Kunming, China. The now operational project provides China with a valuable energy transportation system and is expected to earn US$54 billion for the Burma government, a government that was given the lowest resource governance ranking in the world three months ago by the Revenue Watch Institute […]

ထား၀ယ္ၿမိဳ႕၌ပထမဆံုးအေနျဖင့္လယ္သမားတစ္ေယာက္ေထာင္ဒဏ္ခ်မွတ္ခံရ

ထား၀ယ္ၿမိဳ႕နယ္ ၊ ၀ဲကြ်န္းထိန္သစ္ရပ္ကြက္ ၊ကေျမာကင္းလမ္း၊ ကေျမာကင္းတံတားနံေဘး ၌လက္ရွိလယ္ စိုက္ပ်ဳိးလွ်က္ရွိေသာလယ္သမား ဦးစံလင္းအား ထား၀ယ္ခရုိင္အုက္ခ်ဳပ္ေရးမႉး ဦးေက်ာ္ေဆြ မွ ၁၈၇၆ ခုႏွစ္ ေျမယာႏွင့္ အခြန္ေတာ္ဥပေဒ ပုဒ္မ (ဏ ) ျဖင့္တရားစြဲဆိုကာ၂၆.၈.၂၀၁၃ (တနလၤာေန႕)တြင္ဒဏ္ေငြ (၂၀၀) ႏွင့္ေထာင္ဒဏ္(၁)လကို ထား၀ယ္ၿမိဳ႕နယ္ တရားသူႀကီး […]

Land Loss Resident in Dawei to Sue ITD

The Dawei Watch Group has said that a local resident is planning to sue the Italian-Thai Construction Company (ITD) for losses incurred when the Thai firm built a highway through his land in Yay Phyu Township.

Win Lwin Oo says he lost two acres of farmland because of the highway construction which leads from the Dawei Special Economic Zone in Tanintharyi Region to Kanchanaburi in Thailand […]

First Village Ordered Out for Construction of Dawei Deep Sea Port

A seaside fishing village of over 15 houses was ordered to move out last week to make way for the planned Dawei Deep Sea Port.

Residents of Charkhin Beach village, which has been declared an “illegal” settlement, received an official order on March 20 to move out within three days or face prosecution. However, most of the villagers are refusing to move, as they rely on fishing in the sea as their main livelihood […]

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 […]

Port Project Raises Concerns About Rights, Environment

A new deep-sea port and special economic zone in Tavoy, southern Burma, will bring much-needed infrastructure to the military-ruled country and be a boon to regional trade, but will also present serious risks to the local population and environment, according to experts […]