Myanmar’s government will suspend a US$3.6 billion, Chinese-led dam project, Burmese President Thein Sein told parliament yesterday, according to officials, in an apparent victory for supporters of pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
The Myitsone dam, Myanmar’s largest hydropower project, had sparked rare public criticism in the authoritarian country. It was backed by hardliners with ties to Chinese investors and opposed by an increasingly vocal band of reformers.
Aung San Suu Kyi had said the dam threatened the flow of the powerful Irrawaddy River and she warned that 12,000 people from 63 villages would have to be moved to make way for it. Many other sectors of society had also voiced opposition.
The president “said that his government, being born out of people’s desire, has to act according to the desire of the people,” said an official in parliament who declined to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
The will of the people was seldom considered under the military regimes that made Myanmar one of Asia’s most reclusive and repressive countries for almost 50 years.
The statement is one of many signs of change since the army nominally handed over power in March to civilians after the first elections in two decades last year, a process ridiculed at the time as a sham to cement authoritarian rule under a democratic facade.
Recent overtures by the government hint at possibly deeper changes at work — from calls for peace with ethnic minority guerrilla groups to some tolerance of criticism and more communication with Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.
The Irrawaddy is seen as a national symbol by many Burmese, flowing from Kachin state in the north through at least half of the length of the country until hitting the Andaman Sea in the south, a lifeline for millions of people in a region that a half-century ago was the heart of the world’s biggest rice exporter.
Construction of the dam “will be shelved” during the president’s five-year term, the official said.
An official at the Chinese company investing in the project, China Power Investment Corp, declined to comment. A Chinese Foreign Ministry official said he needed to look into the matter.
The dam, at about 152m long and 152m high, would have flooded an area about the size of Singapore, creating a 766km2 reservoir with a depth of 290m. It was several years from completion.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion