Reluctant
activist looking for justice, not trouble
South China Morning Post, Monday, July 24, 2000
IN
PERSON by WILLIAM BARNES He is in the most expensive city in Thailand and needs to do as much
work as he can to make ends meet. Yet Kom Sogun is giving up his
precious time and losing money to push a cause dear to his heart.
''I have to work in Bangkok because there is simply nothing I can do
around the Pak Moon Dam,'' he said. ''Do you really think I want to
work in this dirty, crowded city?''
''No one thought about people like me when they flooded the land,'' he
said on Friday as the protesters made their grievances heard and felt
outside the seat of government. ''Perhaps they thought we could move
somewhere else, probably they didn't care. Frankly I'm not someone who
likes this sort of thing. I don't go out of my way looking for
trouble.''
''In the old days I mean many years ago my father and mother might
have been able to find land somewhere else, but now? Land is so
expensive! The people don't believe what the Government or officials
promise any more because they've seen so many times that promises mean
nothing.
Mr Kom is married and has four children, but his wife lives in the
northeast near Ubon Ratchathani. He works as a foreman with a highway
construction company and earns up to 15,000 baht (HK$2,900) a month.
''The people in my corner of Thailand have learned an incredible
amount about how governments work in the past few years,'' he said.
''We're finding their weak points and we are learning to defend
ourselves. We don't listen to the headmen who have been paid off by
the electricity agency any more. We are much more difficult to deal
with and we won't fall for promises again.''
''What we'd like to hear is them admit the dam was wrong in the first
place. It's very difficult for them to do because the [state] energy
agency never admits it was wrong,'' he said. ''I guess they probably
fear that if they started admitting they were wrong about Pak Moon
then they would come under pressure to explain a lot of other
things.''
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Rising anger of
rural poor seen in dam protest
South China
Morning Post , Monday, July 24, 2000 THAILAND
WILLIAM
BARNES in Bangkok Northern villagers besieging Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai's office - and
sometimes breaking into his compound - have joined the ranks of the
rural poor in their distrust of the Government.
"We've now heard so many lies, seen so many broken promises, we
don't believe the Government's sweet words any more," said Vanida
Tanpivitayapitak, a fiery activist for community rights.
Big dams usually excite controversy: protests over the Pak Moon Dam in
the poor northeast region near Laos started soon after its inception a
decade ago. Experts have claimed the dam "seals off a water
catchment area three times the size of the Netherlands".
"It's unlikely the project would have been built if the true
benefits would have been used in the economic analysis," the
commission said.
Even a generation ago, Thailand appeared to still have plenty of natural
resources which the central authorities assumed were theirs to dispose
of as they saw fit. Critics have not been slow to point out that land
owners, officials and contractors made money, too.
The result has been a steady erosion of trust. Now, as soon as a new
project starts, people arrive to tell the local inhabitants what they
can expect: deterioration in the environment, scant compensation and
resettlement to an "area of barren rock", said a newspaper
pundit writing under the pseudonym Chang Noi.
The protesters have cleverly caught the public's attention by demanding
not only adequate compensation but that the floodgates be opened at
least during the current four-month spawning season. They also point to
the "weak economic excuses" for building the dam and the
damage it is doing to the river.
Yet rather than be cowed by these damning findings, officials from the
state agency appear as obstinate as ever. Their representatives claimed
at a recent public hearing that only their experts were qualified to
understand the rationale behind the dam.
The protesters in Bangkok said the electricity authority had brought in
a paid mob of 500 dam supporters from the same poor region. This, they
said, was a transparent effort to divide and rule. |
