"People are being tortured and killed on a mass scale," warns Sai Sai, a member of Burma's Shan ethnic minority, currently living in Thailand as a refugee. "Tens of thousands of people are being forced from their homes at gunpoint, and entire areas made into free-fire zones." For Sai Sai, who escaped from Burma in 1988 and now runs a human-rights group, the Rangoon government's construction of the Ta Sang dam marks a new level of violence and ethnic cleansing against the Shan. "About 400,000 people have been forced from their homes to make way for the dam," says Sai Sai. "The Burmese army has orders to shoot on sight anyone entering the depopulated areas."
Located on the Salween River, the last free-flowing Himalayan river of Burma, Ta Sang will eventually generate an estimated 7100 megawatts of power. Around 90 percent of this will go to Thailand, from where nearly all of the funding is coming. The dam will be massive: almost 750 feet tall, and costing more than USD 6 billion to build; when completed, it will be the largest hydroelectric project in Southeast Asia. For the isolated Burmese junta, Ta Sang will also bring in much-needed hard currency, which many believe will come at the expense of the country's ethnic minorities.
At the moment, not much is known about the Ta Sang project. As with many of the junta's large-scale plans, the construction of the dam is still largely shrouded in secrecy. At present, no one is allowed to visit a large swath of land surrounding the construction site – not foreigners, not journalists, not even the area's locals. The vast majority of what is known has been dug up by a handful of human-rights and environmental organisations, many of which are forced to rely on information provided by the state media and newly fled refugees in Thailand.
The lack of transparency extends right to the junta's own administration: despite the massive place that the Ta Sang project would appear to hold in the country's overall development strategy – as a source of both power and income – the government has released few details on how the dam fits into Burma's larger process of development. Indeed, although some information may be forthcoming from various multilateral lending agencies, a recent report on Burma by the International Monetary Fund dealt extensively with economic issues, but never once mentioned Ta Sang – making it clear that even IMF overseers have little idea as to Rangoon's overall development and energy strategies.