"Huge Proposed Hydropower Dam in Myanmar Draws Local Opposition", 10 June 2015

A $6 billion hydropower dam planned for a site in Myanmar’s Shan state is drawing fierce opposition from locals who say it will flood an area nearly the size of Singapore, destroying 100 communities. Ethnic Shan community groups and environmentalists are appealing for help to fight the “Mong Ton” project, one of five actively planned hydropower dams planned along the Salween River. Some 16 Shan organizations issued a statement in Bangkok...warning the project could rekindle civil war in an already unstable part of Myanmar by encouraging the government to send in more troops to secure the area...The Shan, one of the ethnic groups involved in sporadic civil wars with the Myanmar government for decades, held several protests...in an attempt to halt the environmental and social impact assessment being conducted by a large Australian infrastructure consultancy firm, Snowy Mountains Engineering Corporation (SMEC). The Shan joint statement calls SMEC’s assessments process “simply a sham, aimed to rubber-stamp the Mong Ton dam plans, rather than objectively assess the project’s actual impacts.” It alleges SMEC field surveyors last month “angered local villagers by only explaining the positive impacts of the dam, giving them ‘gifts’ which they saw as bribes, and persuading them to sign documents they didn’t understand.” The...project involves China’s Three Gorges Corporation, the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (EGAT) and Myanmar’s Ministry of Electric Power and International Group of Entrepreneurs (IGE)...