We could have gone straight along the Sesan for 15 minutes and then cross the river with a small boat to reach Tan Kathe. Instead our translator took us left, over the bridge in Andong Meas on a 1 hour trip by car on tracks just very recently scraped through the hills and on another 50 minutes walk through the forest to reach this Jarai settlement. It was flooded three times in the recent past by the waters released from the Yali dam in Vietnam, causing severe damage and killing livestock. Unlike seasonal flooding, these water surges occur in 12 hours, leaving the people little or no time to save their belongings. They are also three to four meters higher than the floods during rainy season. The community is now dwindling. People are afraid and move to higher ground. To make things worse, the Sesan5 dam will be built nearby soon, and the communal land that the people from Tan Kathe are using for farming is now targeted by agro-industrial companies.
See also here, here, here, here, and here…
Cassava: you see it everywhere on the last 100km to Banlung. White patches neatly spread out for drying along the road, whole families peeling and chopping the roots, mountains of bags stuffed with the dry chunks waiting to be loaded on trucks, bald hills after harvest when the thin stems were cut and the root dug out. I couldn’t imagine that we needed that much starch and tapioca. Anyhow, it seems cassava is yet another product the agro-industry needs the soil of Cambodia for. Yet another product, like palm oil trees in other parts of the country, which is grown but not processed or even consumed by Cambodia. It just generates relatively fast money, with no added value which could have been created by a processing plant, and triggers land speculation on what is left of the forest. Vast patches of land next to the reservoirs of the planned dams are earmarked by investors already, whether it belongs to the indigenous communities or not.
No posts in the next few days: I am on my way to Stung Treng for a ceremony by the indigenous people related to the construction of the dams.
See also here, here, here, and here…
Just before Bar Kaev, not that far from Banlung on the smooth tarmac road to Vietnam: take a left on the dirt road, then a second left. There is a cashew nut plantation there. It is not big. It covers just a very small part of the thousands of hectares of cashew nut trees or rubber trees which have replaced thousands of hectares of forest (30% of Cambodia’s primary forest was lost between 2000 and 2005 -check this Global Witness report on illegal logging in Cambodia). Underneath the shadow of the cashew nut trees people are digging narrow one meter wide pits, hauling buckets full of red soil supposed to conceal rubies and sapphire. Most of the miners are landless, coming from various parts of Cambodia, trying their luck at a job where the work is hard and the rewards are meager. They dig. Find what is to be found, which is not much, and when the soil is empty they move somewhere else and dig more. Always on someone else’s land. They either pay the landowner a fee or they have to sell him what they found.
There doesn’t seem to be a direct connection between the gem miners and the Three Rivers Dams. But it all fits into a global scheme of development and its after shocks, as it is the reckless development which often renders people landless. Even though the social impact of populations migrating to Ratanakkiri province is less obvious than the construction of the dams themselves or the economical land concessions granted to companies (check out this interactive map put together by LICADHO here or download this .pdf report about land concessions put together by LICADHO and ‘The Cambodia Daily’ here), it certainly contributes to an overall change in the structure of society, as it augments the vulnerability of the indigenous populations even more.
See also here, here and here…
Taveang Leu, still on the banks of the Sesan river. Cambodia being Cambodia, crossing a rickety and dancing suspended bridge not just takes us across a small river. It projects us into another world. The indigenous Brao of the village had finished a ceremony to appease the spirits menacing a member of their community hospitalised in Phnom Penh. A buffalo had been sacrificed, its head cut off and exposed on an altar, its body tossed in a fire to burn off the hair.
The 30,000 Brao of Cambodia are just one of the indigenous communities, montagnards or hilltribes who are living in the areas which will be affected by the construction of the dams along the Sesan, Srepok and Sekong rivers. The refuge from assimilation by their Indianized Khmer cousins offered years ago by the hills and mountains of the Ratanakkiri, Stung Treng and Mondulkiri provinces is not sufficient anymore. The indigenous communities will face a hard time maintaining their customs, social structure and traditional food supplies.
Link to ‘Peuples d’en Haut’ a book about people with a strong cultural identity leaving in mountaineous areas…
See also here and here…
Cambodia is developing fast. Very fast. It needs ever increasing numbers of Megawatts to feed its growth (and its neighbours’). Cambodia has rivers. Particularly in the more varied terrain of the Stung Treng and Ratanakkiri provinces. The solution to provide for more energy by building hydropower dams might seem obvious. Unfortunately this is a country where accountability is not yet the norm, and the plans to build a whole series of dams along the Mekong tributaries in the northeastern province are well under way, with the populations living there (at least not those living upstream and downstream), mostly indigenous communities, not having been thoroughly consulted about the impact the dams will have on their life and the ecosystem they are living in. And when they have been consulted, the recommendations they give are rarely taken into account as a bigger monetary profit is favoured to the well-being of the Brao, Phnong, Jarai, Kreung, Lao, Krung, Tampuon and others thriving on the riches of the Sesan, Srepok and Sekong rivers.
This second of several more future posts takes us to the village Sreh Kor in Stung Treng province. Located along the Lower Sesan, it will be impacted directly by the construction of the 400MW (100MW during the dry season) Lower Sesan2 dam. It will be built at a cost of US$816 million by a joint venture of Electricity of Vietnam and the Cambodian Royal Group. The reservoir waters will flood the village and the inhabitants will have to move 12Km from here, to a relocation site far from the shores of the future lake. 30,000ha of forest land will be destroyed. 66% of the river’s fish species migrate both ways through the planned dam site and as there is no fish ladder planned along the dam, several fish species will disappear upstream, impacting the 40,000 people depending on these fish for their daily ration of protein.
Sorry for the absence… I was out in the bushes this past weeks. Well… in what is left of the bushes, as most of the forest in Ratanakkiri province seems to have been replaced by rubber trees, cashew nut trees or cassava. In what might be the most interesting (and tragic) story about land issues yet in Cambodia, I started the ‘Three Rivers Dams’ story.
Here is a first teaser.
More on this later…
CAMBODIA. Veun Sai (Ratanakkiri). 21/02/2013: Volleyball field submerged by the Sesan river. The river is subject to rather unpredictable daily surges because of water released by the Vietnam located Yali dam. A massive water release in 2009 caused considerable damage to several villages, destroying houses and killing livestock.
CAMBODIA. Taveang Leu (Ratanakkiri). 19/02/2013: Indigenous Brao cutting up a buffalo sacrificed for a relative hospitalised in Phnom Penh. The community is under threat of being displaced to make way for the reservoir of the Sesan3 dam.
CAMBODIA. Kahchen (Ratanakkiri). 21/02/2013: Water levels meters on the Sesan river. The water released by the Yali dam in Vietnam strongly influences the levels, making land cultivation on the shores of the Sesan practically impossible. In 2009 a flash flood submerged vast tracts of land and washed away numerous houses, killed hundreds of livestock. of livestock.
I am happy to announce that the first two titles of ‘Mono’, my series of e-books for the iPad, are now available on the iBookstore for the price of a hamburger (last time I checked in the Western world they were at 3,99$).
The first e-book is ‘Same Saᴟe’. It contains a set of paired photographs, taken at least 10 years apart. A reflection on predestination in photography. It can be obtained at this link here.
The second one is ‘Royal Silence’. This ebook contains a photo-essay around the death of King Father Norodom Sihanouk, with photographs of the King in 1991 upon his return to Cambodia from exile in China, and the funeral ceremonies in Phnom Penh, held in October 2012, January and February 2013. With texts by Pierre Gillette and Abby Seiff. It can be obtained at this link here.
A dedicated website is to be found at this link here.
Sincere congratulations to the winners of the World Press Photo. The Olympic Games for photographers?
Pierre de Coubertin said ‘The important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle, the essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.’
So here is one of the contributions I sent to ‘our’ Olympics (you have seen most of it here over the past year). It didn’t win but I think I fought well. That is OK with me. I can live with not winning a photo-contest.
But I am sure the people in these photographs will not be satisfied just with the struggle or the fight (see here or here)…
Photographs? They are about the people we photograph, less about the photographer.
