Asia-Pacific, Development & Aid, Environment, Headlines, Human Rights

ENVIRONMENT-ASIA: Activists Capitalise on Cracks in the Media

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Nov 18 2004 (IPS) - Environmental activists from countries that share the Mekong River are helping to shed light on the cracks emerging within some of the oppressive governments in the region. Permitting space for the right to free expression is one of them.

The country that best reflects this hint of change is China, since groups campaigning to protect the environment against mega-development projects such as large dams are being given public platforms to express their views.

Among those who have tasted this privilege is Yu Xiaogang, the 53-year-old director of Green Watershed, a body of researchers and activists based in the southern city Lijiang.

”It is possible now to express critical views on the environment than, say, 10 to 15 years ago,” Yu, an anthropologist by training, told IPS. ”These views are welcome by government officials working to protect China’s environment.”

Even sections of the Chinese media have broadcast programmes or published reports that expose the environmental and social cost of large development projects in the pipeline, he said.

Yet it is an atmosphere fraught with uncertainty. ”There is no boundary, no clear line that says how much freedom we have to criticise or get local communities to challenge the development plans,” he adds. ”You can be penalised suddenly.”

By contrast, activists from countries like Vietnam and Laos, which like China are ruled by communist parties, are still to feel the whiff of openness that Yu is enjoying.

In both these Mekong River basin countries, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) or activist groups with strong environmental agendas are prohibited. What prevails are mass organisations or volunteer bodies that are sanctioned by the authorities.

”The mass organisations are the only ones that can express views concerning the environment,” Nguyen Van Be, head of the environmental management department at Vietnam’s Can Tho University, told IPS. ”Open protests are not permitted.”

Yet of late, environmentalists like Nguyen have found allies in the country’s media, despite they being controlled by the state. ”More and more newspapers are writing stories exposing the destruction of the environment due to bad planning,” he said.

A typical example was the expose about an effort to cut down a forest of melaluca trees in the southern province of Ca Mau and replace it with acacia. That plan was aborted mid- way this year after stories in the media drew attention to the environmental damage that would ensue.

Military-ruled Burma, on the other hand, ranks among the worst of the four Mekong region countries that have iron-fisted policies towards the right to free expression. Environmentalists have no space to form groups or to get the local media to highlight the environmental cost of planned development projects, such as building large dams.

”We have to collect information secretly and make local communities aware of environmental problems through underground networks,” Sai Sai, a member of the Shan ethnic community in Burma, told IPS.

”The government does not get the views of the local communities when preparing environmental impact reports about dams to be built,” he added.

Such contrasting realities came into focus this week during a three-day conference that underscored the need for local communities and environmental groups to play an influential role in managing the natural resources in the Mekong Region.

Even activists from Thailand, which has the freest political climate of the six Mekong River countries, asserted during the conference that grassroots voices are ignored when they clash with large development schemes.

The 4,880 kilometer-long Mekong River begins its journey in the Tibetan plateau and then flows through China’s Yunnan province in the south. The river then touches Burma, Laos and Thailand and cuts through Cambodia till it flows out into the South China Sea in Vietnam.

This week’s conference is the latest effort to get the Mekong River countries to open their doors to greater public participation in the wake of efforts by international financial institutions like the Asian Development Bank to exploit this resource rich area for economic gain.

The Chinese government’s plans to build a cascade of eight large hydroelectricity dams along the upper stretch of the Mekong are also as contentious.

”Countries downstream fear, not without good reason, that these dams will deplete fish resources, damage fertile farmlands and destroy the livelihoods of tens of millions of people in the Mekong River Basin,” stated a background note distributed at the conference.

Environmentalists like Yu are in the vanguard to raise awareness about the impending disaster such dams would cause. ”There are many minority communities living in the river basin who will be affected,” he said. ”The dams will also destroy an area rich in bio- diversity.”

But for Yu, the very fact that he can assert such views in communist-ruled China is a small, yet significant, crack against a system that has been hostile to open debate and public scrutiny of development programmes.