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24-Aug-2005
Last Edited
The Nation
Bangkok
Saturday, June 14, 2003
How will the waters flow?
by Nantiya Tangwisutijit
Two prominent historians from Australia and Thailand share some concerns
about the present and future of the Mekong River
A river of contradictions, of a turbulent past and an extremely uncertain
future is how the Mekong is portrayed by its "old friend", Australian
historian Milton Osborne.
Despite its remarkable importance as the earth's 12th largest river, the
Mekong is relatively unknown to the outside world when compared to others
like the Nile or the Amazon, Osborne notes.
The fact that little is known about the Mekong is a fascination for
Osborne's Thai counterpart, Charnvit Kasetsiri. To this scholar, the Mekong
is a river of mystery. It was not until this decade that the river's
headwaters in Tibet were exactly determined by Chinese geographer Liu Shao
Chaung, using remote-sensing technology. Another unique contradiction lies
with Osborne's observation that the Mekong divides rather than unites
people in its riparian nations.
"The fact is that the Mekong has always been important to people, but the
river never made it easy for them to navigate up and down in the way the
Nile unites lower and upper Egypt, and this gives it a contradictory
character," says Osborne, who first set foot in the river in 1959.
Gigantic waterfalls larger than the size of Niagara, thousands of rocky
rapids, cascades and islands along the Mekong's 4,800 km-course make it
difficult for people in the region to travel uninterrupted.
In the 1930s, when the French finally managed set up a travel route on the
river from Saigon to Luang Prabang (interrupted by a section of train
travel), they noted that the journey took them longer than from Saigon to
Marseilles by sea, says Osborne, who has completed seven books about the
Mekong and the history of Southeast Asia.
But how much longer will this contradictory character persist given the
ongoing changes the river is facing? Osborne's unknown river is
increasingly appealing to several industries as an untapped resource. Since
the mid-1990s, some 250 million inhabitants living along the Mekong in
(southern) China, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam have become
an attractive group of potential consumers.
A decade ago, this once war-torn region emerged under a new "trademark"
created by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) as the Greater Mekong Subregion
(GMS). But ADB's grandiose economic and infrastructure development plan was
by and large a stillborn project once the region was badly hit by the
1997economic crisis.
Now that the economy has started to recover, the Mekong has regained its
attraction. A number of international conferences have been organised in
the region to discuss the Mekong's potential for development and business
opportunities. Osborne and Charnvit spoke at one of them in Bangkok earlier
this week.
Charnvit's river of mystery is being more and more exposed. A current
search through Google using the key words "Mekong River" resulted in 89,700
listings, he says.
To the Thai historian, today's industrialists and businessmen are not too
different from those from the colonial era. They all imagine the hefty
profits they can make from getting every Chinese and every other Mekong
inhabitant buy a pen they make, or a pair of shoes or a hamburger.
Over the past centuries, superpowers in the region - the French in the 19th
century and the American during the Indochina War in the 1960s - all dreamt
of "taming" the Mekong, the former by improving navigation and the latter
by hydro-dam construction.
However, it was not until the 1990s that their ambitious dreams began to be
materialised by the Han Chinese.
In 1993, China completed the first hydroelectric dam, Manwan, on the
mainstream Mekong (with up to five more to come) and in 2000 began blasting
a series of river rapids from its border to Luang Prabang in Laos (about
800 kilometres in length). A Chinese engineer from Yunnan told The Nation
that China would achieve what has been an impossible dream for France: to
navigate uninterrupted from China to the Mekong Delta in Vietnam.
Both Osborne and Charnvit find the Chinese plan disturbing. The Australian
scholar asserts that although the Mekong has witnessed the rise and fall of
empires through which it has flowed for centuries, the latest development
initiated by China on the Mekong mainstream, and on its major tributaries
by other riparian states, may for the first time in its history prompt
questions about the "possibility of a fundamental alternation of the Mekong
character".
"Will a change in flow affect the river's fish, whether in Laos, Cambodia
or Vietnam?" Osborne asks. "Eighty per cent of the protein for people in
Cambodia is from fish. As dams may even out the flow of the river, what
will happen to people living on horticulture which depends on the rise and
fall of the Mekong?.
Charnvit at the same time questions if the current "raping" of the Mekong
is worth it when compared to the massive losses in bio-diversity which
provide food and other life necessities for millions of small people in the
region.
The Chinese government undertook the projects without even notifying
downstream countries. So far, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam have
stayed mute over China's development plans.
"They all find China's might too intimidating to make their dissenting
voice heard," Chanrvit notes. "Or could it be that their governments have
already been co-opted by China?"
To both historians who have travelled extensively in the Mekong countries
over the past four decades, the interaction of people through travelling in
the region could be better developed on land by building and improving
roads and bridges instead of forcing navigation on the Mekong.
"If the rapids are not blasted, is it possible for boats to travel up and
down the Mekong?" Charnvit raises the question and answers it himself:
"Yes, as long as we use the right kind of boat with the right size.
Moreover, there are several roads under construction to connect Thailand,
Laos and Yunnan that can serve as an alternative."
Osborne agrees from his historical perspective. Nature did not design to
make the Mekong an major navigation route and France accepted this fact
more than a century ago by dropping its plan to navigate from Saigon to
Yunnan.
"The Mekong never makes it easy to move up and down [its course]," Osborne
stresses. "The French more or less accepted this fact and [that's why] they
built a road from Vietnam to Laos. The fact that there are more bridges
across the Mekong now is a reflection of easier nature of transportation on
road rather than using the river."
To Osborne, the river of contradiction is not something that will be easily
overcome without irreversible consequences to nature and people.
"Only a supreme optimist can feel confident that the problems of the
present will be readily overcome or think of the Mekong's future without a
heavy measure of foreboding," he asserts.[End]