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 Scandal on the Nile
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Scandal on the Nile
Jim Giles
February 20, 2007
The Guardian / Comment Is Free
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/jim_giles/2007/02/a...e_stories_about.html
Amid all the stories about the extraordinary investments that China is
making in Africa, the shooting earlier this month in Abu Hamad seemed a
minor incident. Security forces fired on a group of protestors, scuffles
broke out and a car was set alight. No one was hurt. Only the
English-language Sudan Tribune noted the events.
The protestors came from the Manasir people. Abu Hamad, which sits on the
banks of the Nile north of Khartoum, is their land. It is also close to
the site of one of China's ugliest projects in Africa. The seven-kilometre
wall of the Merowe dam will be 65 metres tall when it is complete, high
enough to create a reservoir that will stretch over 170 kilometres
upstream. The homes of many Manasir will be lost.
As the protestors already knew, the Sudanese authorities have limited
sympathy for the 10,000 families that will be displaced. Western human
rights groups say the resettlement plans are brutal: in some cases
river-dwelling people will be moved to isolated desert sites. When leaders
of the Manasir and other affected tribes complain they have sometimes
found themselves arbitrarily imprisoned.
Only a certain group of financiers could have got away with such a
project. China's Export Import Bank has stumped up €240 million. Around
€600 million more comes from a consortium of banks from Arab oil states.
These are organisations that act in ethics-free zones. The World Bank is
often criticised for funding damaging projects, but it lives by
environmental and social rules that make it look like Greenpeace in
comparison to these funders.
The banks also have willing accomplices in Europe. Engineering firms from
France and Germany are helping build Merowe and must know what they are
involved in. One firm, Lahmeyer International, was asked to complete the
only substantial environmental impact assessment that has been produced on
the dam. As engineering consultants for the project, they were hardly
going to throw a spanner in the works. No surprise then that the impact
assessment was derided by the Swiss scientists who examined it at the
request of a US environmental pressure group.
I interviewed one of the Sudanese officials working on the project last
year. The conversation ended badly; I was told angrily that I was must be
unaware of Sudan's need to develop, of its need to supply electricity to
its people. But Merowe is not a simple clash between the necessities of
modernisation and the associated social and environmental costs. The
tragedy is that a dam could have been built there without harming the
region's people and lands so severely.
A halfway-decent impact assessment would have considered the possibility
of building a smaller dam, for example. Far more importantly, it would
also have involved talking in detail with the people affected. The Manasir
may well have accepted some displacement, provided they were in control
and earned a genuine improvement in living conditions.
Even if a big dam were built, the funders could have learnt from years of
mistakes made by hydropower projects elsewhere. More thought would have
been given to the problem of sediment. This builds up behind dam walls,
depriving downstream life of nutrients and accelerating erosion. The
builders might also made sure that water from deep in the reservoir does
not flow through the turbine: deep water is low in oxygen and can wreck
downstream ecosystems.
But none of these things happened, because projects like Merowe take place
in a social and environmental vacuum. What matters is the grandiose plans
of the Sudanese leaders and the returns expected by the banks. Those and
the profits that firms like Lahmeyer will make.
I spoke to an executive director at Lahmeyer when I first found out about
the project. He knew all about the problems with resettlement. The firm's
impact assessment, published just a year before construction began in
2003, admitted that things were not working properly. Like the Sudanese
official, he said that the country needed electricity. By focusing on the
need for Sudan to develop, he could overlook the problems. I doubt if it
seems that simple to the Manasir.
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/jim_giles/2007/02/a...e_stories_about.html
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Asskouri
abubakr
Tragie Mustafa
نادر محمد الراضي
عبد الواحد أبراهيم
فيس بوك
تويتر
انستقرام
يوتيوب
بنتيريست