Blog de Ross Dana Flynn

From the outside, recent political and economic reforms in Myanmar/Burma seem to be opening up a society that has languished under military rule for half a century, but despite the promises of development and political freedom, the country’s ethnic minorities are still subject to violence, forced labor and the destruction of their environment by government and corporate interests.

The students at the Health and Earth Rights Training Center (HEART) are all members of affected ethnic groups and have experienced these issues first-hand, so last week I took a trip to the Thailand-Burma border to see what they thought about the changes in their homeland. None of them had anything good to say.

“In the past few months the government has been building many roads to remote villages in my area," said a student from Shan State, who works with an ethnic women’s organization. "However, they use forced labor to build them and the people living along the road don’t have a choice but to work “Sometimes people have to move their entire house or village. They aren’t even very good roads, just dirt and gravel.”

Another student, a former resistance soldier who lost his arm to a land mine, said that opening the country to foreign investment will just bring more suffering to ethnic minorities in Myanmar/Burma. “People are excited about the jobs international investment will bring, but they don’t know what the effects will be. There will be serious environmental, political and social impacts, but all anyone can see now is money.”

In the HEART classroom.

A student from Karen State, just across the border, said that the constitution needs to do more for ethnic rights. “There has been political change, but it’s just talking. Nothing has changed in Karen State. The constitution should protect indigenous rights, especially freedom of demonstration.”

Tomorrow marks the start of the fourth Mekong Legal Network (MLN) meeting in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Public interest legal professions and civil society leaders from all six of the Mekong countries (Cambodia, China, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam), representing both international and local organizations, will be discussing their work, sharing experiences, and developing legal strategies to address key human rights and environmental concerns in the Mekong region. They will be joined by friends and allies from around the world, including ERI's co-founders Katie Redford and Ka Hsaw Wa. The broad themes of the three day meeting include business, human rights and the environment in ASEAN, proposed hydropower projects along the Mekong River mainstream, and investment trends and developments inside Burma.

On the final day of the meeting, the MLN participants will come together with the participants in ERI's new Myanmar Advocacy Training to meet, hear from experts, and discuss joint strategies to address emerging business and human rights challenges as Burma increasingly opens up to regional and international investment and influence. The discussion will focus on issues facing lawyers and legal institutions in the country, the experiences of veteran Burmese lawyers and civil society members, along with frameworks for responsible investment by foreign corporations.

Throughout the meeting, participants will form small groups to exchange ideas on how lawyers and civil society in the Mekong countries can work together and generate support at both the regional and international level. We're very excited to see MLN's members using legal strategies to empower communities facing earth rights abuses, and we'll share more details about this event after it concludes.

The video below was filmed at the last MLN meeting, in late 2011.

Deep in northeastern Thailand, bordering both Cambodia and Laos, Ubon Ratchathani is about as far from the smoggy chaos of Bangkok and sun-baked throngs of tourists as one could get. For Thai activists, however, this remote province was center stage for several of Thailands most dramatic grassroots campaigns for environmental justice. In August, students from the EarthRights School Mekong traveled to Ubon to meet the community members who dedicated their lives to these struggles.

The Pak Mun dam case has been in the Thai headlines since its completion in 1994. The reservoir it created displaced thousands of people and the fish catch decreased by as much as 80%, with 50 of the 265 species disappearing completely. For 25,000 people living along the Mun River whose income depended almost entirely on fishing, the dam was a disaster. To add insult to injury, it failed to produce anywhere near its projected electricity output.

ERSM students at the Pak Mun dam

Our students met with community activists who fought the dam with sustained protests, petitioning the government to pay compensation and decommission the dam. Their efforts were stalled with each change of government, but in 2001 it was agreed that the gates would be opened for at least part of each year. Fish stocks are slowly returning but the fight to destroy the dam entirely continues.

Two hours north of Pak Mun is the small village of Huay Ra Ha, home of Grandma Hai Khanjantha. For three decades she protested the reservoir that flooded her land, impoverishing her family and several others in the village. Her story became international news when she, along with her family and neighbors, broke a hole in the dam with farm tools and began to drain the reservoir while the police looked on. Instead of arresting her, the government agreed to demolish the dam, return her land and, ultimately, compensate her for years of damages.

ERSM students and staff met Grandma Hai in her home and listened to her tell her story, before participating in a traditional Thai ceremony and enjoying a home-cooked local feast.

In December, I joined students from the EarthRights School Mekong (ERSM) on their field trip to Don Chai, a village in Northern Thailand’s Sa Iab Valley.

The residents of Don Chai love their hometown, and it’s not hard to see why. Surrounded by green hills, magnificent teak forests and the meandering Yom River, the Sa Iab Valley is the epitome of idyllic Northern Thai countryside. Don Chai’s inhabitants would like to keep it that way, but it isn't easy: thanks to a proposed dam they’ve spent the past two decades chasing World Bank officials out of town, placing curses on high-profile politicians and organizing protests all over the country.

On the street in Don Chai village

In 1991 the Thai government proposed the construction of a dam at Kaeng Seua Ten (“Jumping Tiger Rapids”), an area on the Yom River a few kilometers upstream from Sa Iab. If built, the dam would flood four villages, displace about a thousand households and destroy countless acres of teak forest. Since the proposal, residents of the Sa Iab Valley have transformed themselves into a model of community activism and become famous throughout Thailand for their hard-hitting and relentless approach.

The Kaeng Seua Ten protest movement offers invaluable lessons for ERSM students, presenting an opportunity to see a thriving grassroots movement in action. The students stayed with local families, learning about the people and plight of Sa Iab through presentations, a walk through the community forest, visits to spiritual sites and a rafting trip down the Yom River.

After arriving, students met their homestay families and local leaders in the town’s temple. Sa Iab’s community is well versed in presenting their case to the public, and through a series of slideshows showed students the livelihoods being threatened and strategies for halting the dam project. Their methods have been so effective that leaders from Sa Iab travel all over the world to meet with their counterparts in similarly affected areas.