Press Statement by Thai NGOs on Dawei Deep Sea Port
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UNOFFICIAL TRANSLATION
Press Statement
18 September 2012
The Thai government must review its decision to take over Ital-Thai’s investment in the Dawei Deep Sea Port, and must stop supporting this project and stop increasing public debt
One of the main aims of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra’s visit to Burma between 19-21 September 2012 is to discuss Thai government support for the Dawei Deep Se
Press Statement
18 September 2012
The Thai government must review its decision to take over Ital-Thai’s investment in the Dawei Deep Sea Port, and must stop supporting this project and stop increasing public debt
One of the main aims of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra’s visit to Burma between 19-21 September 2012 is to discuss Thai government support for the Dawei Deep Se
a Port project with the Burmese government.
Ital-Thai Development Public Company Limited started the Dawei project, and was given the right to carry out a feasibility study since June 2008. In November 2010 it was given a 60-year concession to develop the project with the Myanmar Port Authority, and to build a 250 sq km industrial zone, a coal-fired power plant, a gas pipeline, an oil pipeline, electricity transmission lines, and a highway linking to Thailand. The highway will pass from the Thai-Burma border to the Laem Chaban Por in Chonburi province. A company called Dawei Development Limited has been set up to implement the project and raise funds.
Until now, there has been little progress in developing the project by the private sector, apart from building a temporary road from the Thai-Burma border to the project site. It has not been possible to develop any basic infrastructure at the project site, either of the port, water reservoir or coal-fired power plant. There have been problems to raise long-term funds, and there has been no purchase of land in the project either by Thai or other foreign investors.
One significant problem is the fact that the local Burmese population in the area of the Dawei Deep Sea Port is opposed to the project. The people of Burma and the local Dawei population are asking about the actual benefits of the project and its impacts on the people, including the relocation of over 30,000 people from the area, and the impacts on the ecology and environment. These impacts will be similar to those of the Map Ta Phut industrial estate project in Thailand. Also, the building of the highway between the Burma border to the Laem Chabang port has been opposed by local Thai people. At the same time, academic institutions, civil society networks and environmental groups in Thailand have raised concerns about unequal development, particularly letting a neighbouring country bear the environmental costs of the industrial development, and the lack of transparency in using a huge public budget to support a project of the private sector.
However, due to the current deadlock in moving ahead with the Dawei Deep Sea Port project, the Thai government is trying to push the project through. Recently, when President Thein Sein visited Thailand on 23 July 2012, he signed a Memorandum of Understanding between the Burmese and Thai governments. This shows clearly that the Thai government supports the Dawei Deep Sea Port project, and is planning to manage the project, and take over from Ital-Thai. This means that the status of the project will become a government project. However, there are many sensitive issues related to the Dawei Deep Sea Port project: human rights violations, participation of local Dawei people, environmental destruction, and the grabbing of natural resources belonging to Burma’s people, both in and outside the project area. There is also conflict between the central government, the local government and the ethnic minorities in Burma. Therefore, due to the change in the status of the Dawei Deep Sea Port project, we, the undersigned organizations, make the following demands, and would like to raise questions about the ethics and good governance of the project.
1. Before the Thai government makes any decisions, it must carry out new overall assessments of the project, including assessing suitability, economic profitability, and analysis of the short-term profits and long term profits, and a study of the alternative development options for Dawei, environmental and health impact assessments, laws and rules related to Dawei, because the Thai government will be taking the investment risk, which means the Thai people will have to bear any public debts in the long term.
2. All the government agencies must make public all the details about the project that they have been involved in. For example, the Office of the National Economic and Social Development Board, has stated that the Dawei Deep Sea Port Project will enable Thailand’s GDP to increase by 1.9%, but there has been no report made public about what this predication was based on. Furthermore, the Highways Department, which is responsible for building the road link from the Burma border, must make public the details of the road plans and relevant impact assessments. Importantly, there must be public hearings so that the public can express their opinions, before the plans are submitted to the government for funding approval.
3. At present, the Burmese government is not ready, in terms of environmental protections laws, and formal monitoring mechanisms. It is therefore a risky investment in a large project, and the government is going to have to bear the consequences of this lack of readiness, uncertainty, lack of legal standards and mechanisms. At the same time, there is a big question about the ethics of the project, as the investment in this project will have very serious impacts. Thai people and the international community will see that Thailand is just exploiting the natural resources of its neighbor and dumping its industrial waste there.
Therefore we urge the Thai government to review and carefully assess the economic profitability and impacts of the Dawei Deep Sea Port project, and listen to the opinions of all groups of people, before deciding to take over the investment from the private sector, in order to avoid risk and to avoid placing the social, environmental and economic burden onto the people of both countries.
Signed:
1. Project for ecological recovery in Mekong region (?)
2. Spirit in Education Movement
3. Foundation for ecological recovery
4. Healthy Public Policy Foundation
Ital-Thai Development Public Company Limited started the Dawei project, and was given the right to carry out a feasibility study since June 2008. In November 2010 it was given a 60-year concession to develop the project with the Myanmar Port Authority, and to build a 250 sq km industrial zone, a coal-fired power plant, a gas pipeline, an oil pipeline, electricity transmission lines, and a highway linking to Thailand. The highway will pass from the Thai-Burma border to the Laem Chaban Por in Chonburi province. A company called Dawei Development Limited has been set up to implement the project and raise funds.
Until now, there has been little progress in developing the project by the private sector, apart from building a temporary road from the Thai-Burma border to the project site. It has not been possible to develop any basic infrastructure at the project site, either of the port, water reservoir or coal-fired power plant. There have been problems to raise long-term funds, and there has been no purchase of land in the project either by Thai or other foreign investors.
One significant problem is the fact that the local Burmese population in the area of the Dawei Deep Sea Port is opposed to the project. The people of Burma and the local Dawei population are asking about the actual benefits of the project and its impacts on the people, including the relocation of over 30,000 people from the area, and the impacts on the ecology and environment. These impacts will be similar to those of the Map Ta Phut industrial estate project in Thailand. Also, the building of the highway between the Burma border to the Laem Chabang port has been opposed by local Thai people. At the same time, academic institutions, civil society networks and environmental groups in Thailand have raised concerns about unequal development, particularly letting a neighbouring country bear the environmental costs of the industrial development, and the lack of transparency in using a huge public budget to support a project of the private sector.
However, due to the current deadlock in moving ahead with the Dawei Deep Sea Port project, the Thai government is trying to push the project through. Recently, when President Thein Sein visited Thailand on 23 July 2012, he signed a Memorandum of Understanding between the Burmese and Thai governments. This shows clearly that the Thai government supports the Dawei Deep Sea Port project, and is planning to manage the project, and take over from Ital-Thai. This means that the status of the project will become a government project. However, there are many sensitive issues related to the Dawei Deep Sea Port project: human rights violations, participation of local Dawei people, environmental destruction, and the grabbing of natural resources belonging to Burma’s people, both in and outside the project area. There is also conflict between the central government, the local government and the ethnic minorities in Burma. Therefore, due to the change in the status of the Dawei Deep Sea Port project, we, the undersigned organizations, make the following demands, and would like to raise questions about the ethics and good governance of the project.
1. Before the Thai government makes any decisions, it must carry out new overall assessments of the project, including assessing suitability, economic profitability, and analysis of the short-term profits and long term profits, and a study of the alternative development options for Dawei, environmental and health impact assessments, laws and rules related to Dawei, because the Thai government will be taking the investment risk, which means the Thai people will have to bear any public debts in the long term.
2. All the government agencies must make public all the details about the project that they have been involved in. For example, the Office of the National Economic and Social Development Board, has stated that the Dawei Deep Sea Port Project will enable Thailand’s GDP to increase by 1.9%, but there has been no report made public about what this predication was based on. Furthermore, the Highways Department, which is responsible for building the road link from the Burma border, must make public the details of the road plans and relevant impact assessments. Importantly, there must be public hearings so that the public can express their opinions, before the plans are submitted to the government for funding approval.
3. At present, the Burmese government is not ready, in terms of environmental protections laws, and formal monitoring mechanisms. It is therefore a risky investment in a large project, and the government is going to have to bear the consequences of this lack of readiness, uncertainty, lack of legal standards and mechanisms. At the same time, there is a big question about the ethics of the project, as the investment in this project will have very serious impacts. Thai people and the international community will see that Thailand is just exploiting the natural resources of its neighbor and dumping its industrial waste there.
Therefore we urge the Thai government to review and carefully assess the economic profitability and impacts of the Dawei Deep Sea Port project, and listen to the opinions of all groups of people, before deciding to take over the investment from the private sector, in order to avoid risk and to avoid placing the social, environmental and economic burden onto the people of both countries.
Signed:
1. Project for ecological recovery in Mekong region (?)
2. Spirit in Education Movement
3. Foundation for ecological recovery
4. Healthy Public Policy Foundation
ေလာင္းလံုး ေရနံစက္႐ုံအတြက္ ဥယ်ာဥ္ၿခံေျမမ်ား အသိမ္းခံရဖြယ္ရွိ
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တနသၤာရီတိုင္းေဒသႀကီး၊ ေလာင္းလုံးၿမိဳ႕နယ္၊ ညင္းေမာ္ရြာအနီးတြင္ ေရနံခ်က္ စက္႐ုံႏွင့္ ေရနံသန္႔စင္စက္႐ုံ တည္ေဆာက္ရန္အတြက္ အနီးရွိ ေက်းရြာမ်ားမွ ၿခံေျမမ်ားကို သိမ္းယူရန္ စီစဥ္ေနေၾကာင္း ေဒသခံမ်ားက ေျပာသည္။
တ႐ုတ္ႏိုင္ငံမွ လာေရာက္ ရင္းႏွီးျမႇဳပ္ႏွံမည့္ ထိုစီမံကိန္းအတြက္ ဇြန္လကုန္ပိုင္းတြင္ တ႐ုတ္ႏွင့္ ျမန္မာမ်ားက ေျမယာ တိုင္းတာမႈ ျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့ၿပီး စက္႐ုံတည္ေဆာက္မည့္ အေၾကာင္းႏွင့္ ေက်းရြာ ေရႊ႕ေျပာင္းေရး၊ ဥယ်ာဥ္ၿခံမ်ားကို ေလ်ာ္ေၾကးေပး သိမ္းယူေရးတို႔ကိုလည္း ေဒသခံမ်ားႏွင့္ ေဆြးေႏြးသြားခဲ့ၾကေၾကာင္း ညင္းေမာ္ရြာခံ အမ်ဳိးသမီးတဦးက ေျပာသည္။
ထား၀ယ္ေရနက္ဆိပ္ကမ္း သိပ္အေရးႀကီး
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တနသၤာရီတိုင္းေဒသ၏ ထား၀ယ္ၿမိဳ႕ရွိ ေရနက္ဆိပ္ကမ္းစီမံကိန္းအေပၚ ျပည္သူ႔လႊတ္ေတာ္၌ ဦးသိန္းၫႊန္႔က ယေန႔ထိတိုင္ေအာင္ လိပ္ခဲတည္းလဲ ျဖစ္ေနရသည့္ အက်ဳိးအျမတ္ကိစၥႏိုင္ငံသား ကုမၸဏီက မည္သို႔အခန္းက႑မည္မွ် စြမ္းေဆာင္ႏိုင္သလဲႏွင့္ သဘာ၀ပတ္၀န္းက်င္ အလုပ္သမားမ်ား၏အလုပ္အကိုင္ရရွိေရး အလားအလာမ်ားအား ျပည္သူ႔လႊတ္ေတာ္သို႔ ေမးျမန္းရာ ရထားပို႔ေဆာင္ေရး ဒုတိယ၀န္ႀကီး သူရဦးေအာင္လြင္မွ လႊတ္ေတာ္ ေရွ႕ေမွာက္တြင္ ေျပာၾကားခဲ့သည္မွာၾကား သိခဲ့ရေသာ္လည္း တြက္ခ်က္မႈအရ စီမံကိန္းသက္သက္ မဟုတ္ေစဘဲ အက်ဳိးခံစားမႈအရ ႏိုင္ငံႏွင့္ ႏိုင္ငံသားမ်ားအတြက္ ဟုဆိုခ်င္ပါသည္။
ငါတို႔ေနရာ ငါတို႔သာ ပိုင္ဆိုင္ၾကရမည္
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မႏၱေလးၿမိဳ႕၏ လမ္ဆုံးလမ္းခြ အခ်က္အခ်ာတို႔တြင္ တ႐ုတ္စာလုံးႀကီးမ်ား ထီးထီးမားမား ျမင္ေန ရသည္ႏွင့္ တၿပိဳင္ နက္ အတိတ္ကို လြမ္းဆြတ္၍ မေၾကမခ်မ္းျဖစ္ၿပီး စိတ္ပင္ပန္း ဝမ္းနည္းရ သည္။ သည္သို႔ အခ်က္အခ်ာ ေနရာမ်ား ဗမာစာလုံးႀကီးမ်ား ထီးထီးမားမား ျဖစ္ေနရမည့္စား မဟုတ္ တရား တိုင္းတပါးစာက မည္သို႔ ေနရာယူရသနည္း။ ထိုအခ်က္ကိုၾကည့္လွ်င္ ဗမာလူမ်ဳိးတို႔သည္ အသုံးမက်သည့္ လူမ်ဳိးဟု သ႐ုပ္ေဖာ္ေနသကဲ့ သို႔ပင္။ မႏၱေလး ေ႐ွ႕ေနာက္ေတာင္ေျမာက္ က်ဴံးနေဘးတြင္ တ႐ုတ္ ႏွင့္ ကုလားတို႔သာ ျမင္ရၿပီး ဗမာ့ယဥ္ေက်း မႈႏွင့္ လုံးဝမစပ္ဟပ္၊ တ႐ုပ္မေလးမ်ား အဝတ္အစားတို႔ကို ျမင္ရသည္မွာလည္း စိတ္ပင္ပန္းစရာ။ ဗမာမ်ားမွာေတာ့ ဆိုက္ကားနင္း ျမင္းလည္းေမာင္းေနသည္ ကိုသာ ျမင္ေတြ႕ခဲ့ရသည္။ ရွိေစ၊ မႏၱေလး အေၾကာင္းကို ဆိုခ်င္သည္ မဟုတ္။ ယခုက ထားဝယ္ၿမိဳ႕ အေၾကာင္း။
ထား၀ယ္ေဒသမွ ပ်ဴယဥ္ေက်းမႈအေထာက္အထားအခ်ဳိ႕
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ႏိုင္ငံပိုင္ သတင္းဌာနမ်ားႏွင့္ ဂ်ာနယ္မ်ား၏ ေရးသား ေဖာ္ျပခ်က္အရ ထား၀ယ္ေဒသတြင္ အေရွ႕ေတာင္အာရွ၌ အႀကီးမားဆံုး စီမံကိန္းတခုျဖစ္ေသာ ေရနက္ဆိပ္ကမ္း စီမံကိန္းကို စတင္ေတာ့မည္ ျဖစ္သည္။ ထား၀ယ္ေဒသ၏ ဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးတိုးတက္မႈႏွင့္အတူ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ၏ စိတ္၀င္စားမႈကို ရရွိေတာ့မည္ ျဖစ္သည္။ ထား၀ယ္ေဒသေန ျပည္သူမ်ားအေနျဖင့္ အရွိန္အဟုန္ျဖင့္ ေျပာင္းလဲမည့္ အေျခအေနမ်ားကို ရင္ဆိုင္ႏိုင္ရန္ ႀကိဳတင္ျပင္ဆင္မႈမ်ား ျပဳလုပ္ရန္ လုိအပ္ေနပါသည္။
ထား၀ယ္ဟာပ်ဴလူမ်ုဳိးမ်ားျဖစ္ေနေရာ႔သလား
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ဆရာဟိန္းလတ္ခင္ဗ်ား . . .
ဟဲဟဲ . . .
(ထို “ဟဲဟဲ“ သည္ ကိုရင္တာ၏ မူပိုင္ “ဟဲဟဲ“ ျဖစ္ပါသည္။
သူသည္ စာဖတ္သူမ်ားထံသို႔ ဦးေႏွာက္အေျခာက္ခံ စဥ္းစားစရာျပႆနာတစ္ရပ္ကို သယ္ေဆာင္လာေတာ့မည္ဆိုလွ်င္ ထိုသို႕ တဟဲဟဲျဖင့္ အာလုပ္ျပဳကာ ႀကိဳတင္ မ်က္ႏွာခ်ဳိေသြးထားေလ့ရွိပါသည္။ ထိုအေလ့ကို အလြန္သေဘာက်ေသာ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ကလည္း သူ႕ ဟဲဟဲႀကီးကို ခဏဆြဲသုံးကာ ဆရာတို႔၏ဦးေႏွာက္မ်ားအား ေအာက္က်ဳိ႕ခယ၊ တင္ႀကိဳ မ်က္ႏွာခ်ဳိေသြးလိုက္ပါေၾကာင္း) မီဒီယာဟိုင္းေ၀းလမ္းမႀကီးထဲ ေကာက္ရိုးလွည္းႀကီး၊ ဆူးလွည္းႀကီး ေမာင္း၀င္ လာသည္ဟု မထင္ၾကေစလိုပါခင္ဗ်ား။
(ထို “ဟဲဟဲ“ သည္ ကိုရင္တာ၏ မူပိုင္ “ဟဲဟဲ“ ျဖစ္ပါသည္။
သူသည္ စာဖတ္သူမ်ားထံသို႔ ဦးေႏွာက္အေျခာက္ခံ စဥ္းစားစရာျပႆနာတစ္ရပ္ကို သယ္ေဆာင္လာေတာ့မည္ဆိုလွ်င္ ထိုသို႕ တဟဲဟဲျဖင့္ အာလုပ္ျပဳကာ ႀကိဳတင္ မ်က္ႏွာခ်ဳိေသြးထားေလ့ရွိပါသည္။ ထိုအေလ့ကို အလြန္သေဘာက်ေသာ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ကလည္း သူ႕ ဟဲဟဲႀကီးကို ခဏဆြဲသုံးကာ ဆရာတို႔၏ဦးေႏွာက္မ်ားအား ေအာက္က်ဳိ႕ခယ၊ တင္ႀကိဳ မ်က္ႏွာခ်ဳိေသြးလိုက္ပါေၾကာင္း) မီဒီယာဟိုင္းေ၀းလမ္းမႀကီးထဲ ေကာက္ရိုးလွည္းႀကီး၊ ဆူးလွည္းႀကီး ေမာင္း၀င္ လာသည္ဟု မထင္ၾကေစလိုပါခင္ဗ်ား။
ထား၀ယ္ – ျမိတ္ မီးရထားလမ္း စီမံကိန္းကို ေခတၱရပ္ဆိုင္း
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တနသၤာရီတုိင္း ေဒသၾကီးအတြင္းရွိ ထား၀ယ္ႏွင့္ ျမိတ္ျမိဳ႕တုိ႔ကုိ ဆက္သြယ္
ေဖာက္လုပ္မည့္ ထား၀ယ္ – ျမိတ္ မီးရထားလမ္း စီမံကိန္းအား
ေခတၱရပ္ဆိုင္းထားေၾကာင္း မီးရထားပို႕ေဆာင္ေရး ၀န္ၾကီးဌာန၊ ဒုတိယ ၀န္ၾကီး
သူရ ဦးေသာင္းလြင္က ဇူလိုင္လ ၁၇ ရက္ေန႕တြင္ ျပဳလုပ္သည့္ ျပည္သူ႕လႊတ္္ေတာ္
အစည္းအေ၀းတြင္ ေျပာၾကားသည္။
ထားဝယ္စီမံကိန္းနဲ႔ ယံုၾကည္မႈ
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ဘာပဲလုပ္လုပ္ ယံုၾကည္မႈရွိမွ ေအာင္ျမင္ပါမယ္။ ယံုၾကည္မႈသာရွိရင္ အခုမေအာင္ျမင္ေတာင္ အခ်ိန္ကာလတခုမွာ ေအာင္ျမင္မွာပါ။
ေရနက္ဆိပ္ကမ္း သေဘာတူညီခ်က္ အေသးစိတ္ ထားဝယ္ေဒသခံမ်ား သိရွိလို
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ထားဝယ္ ေရနက္ဆိပ္ကမ္းႏွင့္ အထူးစီးပြါးေရးဇုန္ အနီးရွိ ေဒသခံမ်ားက
ယခုအပတ္အတြင္း ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံႏွင့္ ထုိင္းႏုိင္ငံတို႔
လက္မွတ္ေရးထုိးခဲ့ၾကသည့္ သေဘာတူညီခ်က္မ်ား၏ အေသးစိတ္ကုိ
သိရွိလိုေၾကာင္းႏွင့္ ၎တုိ႔၏ လိုအပ္ခ်က္မ်ားကုိ လည္း
ထည့္သြင္းစဥ္းစားၾကေစလိုေၾကာင္း ေျပာသည္။
ထား၀ယ္ခ႐ိုင္အတြင္းရႇိ ၿမိဳ႕နယ္ႏႇင့္ ေက်းရြာမ်ားတြင္ ေရႀကီး ေရလွ်ံမႈမ်ား ျဖစ္ေပၚလ်က္ရႇိ
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တနသၤာရီတိုင္းေဒသႀကီး၊ ထား၀ယ္ခ႐ိုင္အတြင္းရႇိ ၿမိဳ႕နယ္ႏႇင့္
ေက်းရြာမ်ားတြင္ ေရႀကီးေရလွ်ံမႈမ်ား ျဖစ္ပြားလ်က္ရႇိၿပီး သြားေရးလာေရး
ခက္ခဲမႈမ်ား ျဖစ္ေပၚလ်က္ရႇိေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။
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