August 15, 2000

Demonstrators outside the Pakistani Embassy in Washington protest the Kalabagh Dam project.

Washington (IPS) – Every so often, a group of protestors storm a
foreign embassy in Washington, demanding that some big dam project be
stopped because of the negative consequences it has on local populations.

This week it was the turn of the Pakistani Embassy where a group of
demonstrators blasted the military regime of General Pervez Musharraf for
deciding to go ahead with a 5-billion-dollar Kalabagh Dam project that will
displace 124,000 people.

The project, which was proposed by the military government of General
Zia-ul-Haque in 1984, is expected to receive funding from the World Bank, the
Asian Development Bank, and the Italian and Japanese governments.

Critics of the project call it an environmental nightmare.

The people of Sindh province who live in the affected area will not give up the
protest against the Kalabagh Dam as it ”is a matter of life and death for them,”
says Munawar Laghari director of the Washington-based World Sindhi Institute.

”We chose to protest on the independence day of Pakistan because for us it is a
black day. Our rights do not exist in Pakistan … three provinces rejected the
dam but the military dictatorship decided to continue.”

Sindh is one of three provinces out of Pakistan’s four that are opposed to the
construction of Kalabagh Dam because it is environmentally hazardous and
because it consolidates Punjab’s political and economic grip over Sindh.

The Indus river is one of the longest in the world, winding nearly 3,000
kilometres from its source in Tibet through the slopes of the Himalayas into
Pakistan.

The dispute between Punjab and Sindh over the waters of the Indus date back
to independence in 1947 when central government imposed its control over the
river. Without consulting Sindh, the ruling Punjab province pushed the 1960
Indus Water Treaty, giving India exclusive access to three tributaries of the river.

A coalition of non-governmental organisations including the International Rivers
Network has come out in support of the Kalabagh Dam protestors. In a
memorandum of support, the NGOs note that large dams worldwide have been
shown to be not viable economically ”ecologically catastrophic and socially
devastating”.

The memorandum was signed by watch-groups such as the Save the Narmada
Movement of India, Southeast Asia Rivers Network, Friends of the Earth,
Slovakia and the Philippine Indigenous People’s Links.

Some 45,000 large dams have been built across the world, yet 1.5 billion people
do not have access to clean water, a figure that will double by 2020. Also,
millions of people either do not have adequate water or energy and many live in
more drought-prone, or flood affected areas than before the big-dam era.

According to a report by Peter Meynell of the International Union for
Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the Sindh delta region, on which hundreds of
thousands of native Sindhis living in the coastal areas depend for their livelihood,
has already suffered immense damage because of illegal diversion of Indus water
by Punjab over the decades. Meynell notes that the Indus Delta is ”on the brink
of an ecological disaster”.

The International Rivers Network has also warned that if completed, the dam
would trap an estimated two-thirds of the sediment of the Indus River, which has
the fifth-highest sediment load in the world.

Critics also say that by increasing salinity and water-logging, the project will
further degrade the agricultural productivity of the Indus Basin as well as destroy
mangrove and riverine forests, fisheries and the Indus Delta.

The future of dams such as Kalabagh come under the spotlight in November
when the World Commission on Dams (WCD) releases its final report – from
studies carried out since 1998 when the body was created. An international
conference of dam-affected people held in Curitiba, Brazil in March 1997 set
into motion the initiative to establish an international body to independently
review large dams.

The WCD report is expected to review the development effectiveness of dams,
establish internationally accepted standards and assess alternatives for water
resources. The WCD was created by two sponsoring organisations – the World
Bank and IUCN. It is now independent of its sponsors.

The Curitiba declaration called for an end to large dam-building until a number of
conditions are met. Activists want existing flawed water infrastructure projects to
be corrected, reparations paid to affected communities, ecosystems restored,
and the imposition of international rules of accountability before new dam
projects are embarked on.

A grouping of more than 100 NGOs, which have contributed to the WCD
process, recently endorsed a letter to South African Education Minister Kader
Asmal, who chairs WCD, calling for a bold, groundbreaking report.

In the letter the NGOs says tens of millions of people have been displaced by
large dams, a highly disproportionate number of them are from indigenous, tribal
communities and ethnic minorities. The NGOS say while women have not
shared the benefits of large dams they have suffered the brunt of the effects of
these dams.

Environmental impact assessments have failed as a tool to predict the impacts of
dams and rather than being used as ”a tool to assess, predict and mitigate
impacts of large dams, have become a tool to legitimise them,” notes the
statement from NGOs and people’s movements from around the world.

The NGOs claim that no large dam has reduced inequity in a society. Instead,
dams have benefited consultants, contractors, agro-business corporations and
development bureaucrats.