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Mekong Nations Promise Cooperation But Skip Disputes Over Damming The River

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South Korea embraced the five Southeast Asian nations on the Mekong River in a seemingly bold plan for developing the river in the interests of “people, peace and prosperity” but glossed over the dangers facing its existence.

Yes, South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in declared “the development of Mekong is that of Korea.” No, neither he nor leaders of the five Mekong nations, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos and Myanmar, said a word about the issues that threaten the mighty river and the millions who depend on it for survival.

China was conspicuous not only by its absence from any role in the gabfest in Busan but also by the failure of any of the participants to mention their concerns about China, whose power and influence deeply affects all of them.

Instead Moon sought to bond the interests of South Korea with those of the Mekong by fashioning “the Mekong-Han River Declaration”–an allusion to South Korea’s Han River that waters and drains much of the country before emptying on the west coast on the line with North Korea.

The declaration, announced the day after Moon hosted a “summit” of leaders of the ten member nations of ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, calls for “cooperation” on just about everything from agriculture and infrastructure to environment and security issues.

While Moon looked for common cause with the five Mekong River nations, neither he nor the others recognized publicly, in the upbeat setting of the ASEAN confab, the implications of damming the river far upstream, notably near its origins in China.

By coincidence, Moon and the others joined in their declaration on the Mekong on the day of publication of a critical report summarizing the problems facing all the countries through which the river pours on the way through the Mekong Delta in Vietnam’s southern provinces and into the South China Sea.

“Dams and Climate Change Kill the Mekong” is the title of the Yale Global analysis that begins ominously, “The swirling currents of the once mighty Mekong, shrunk by drought and increasingly crippled by dams point towards an unprecedented crisis of water governance along the more than 4,900 kilometers of southeast Asia’s longest river.”

The report, by Tom Fawthrop, director of a documentary, “Killing the Mekong Dam by Dam,” goes on to quote Chainarong Setthachua, natural resources expert at Thailand’s Maha Sarakham University, saying flatly, “This is the worst ecological disaster in history of the Mekong...a massive wakeup call for policymakers and leaders of the region.”

The leaders of the Mekong countries presumably are aware of the problems, but the overwhelming desire not to offend China, at least in the multilateral setting of the ASEAN confab, no doubt persuaded them not to bring up controversies surrounding a series of dams in China that are slowing the flow of the river. Laos, Thailand and Cambodia have also constructed dams that are blocking the waters from getting through Cambodia to Vietnam.

Brian Eyler, author of “Last Days of the Mighty Mekong,” sees building all those dams in China and Laos as “causing the Mekong to die a death of a thousand cuts.”

Eyler, who is Southeast Asia program director at the Stimson Center in Washington, sees the impact on Cambodia as particularly critical. “A severely low fish catch this year could cause a major food crisis in Cambodia,” he said in an interview with Malis Tum for Voice of America. “The kingdom has little resources to replace the loss in fish catch with other protein sources. The crisis could play out during the winter months.”

At the ASEAN summit, however, such concerns went unmentioned. Instead, Joo Hyung-chul, one of Moon’s economic advisers, said the summit had “made achievements beyond what we aimed and expected.” South Korea, he promised, would “push more strongly for cooperation with ASEAN countries” based “on the foundation of their trust” in Korea’s “new southern policy.”

For Moon, the Mekong presented a terrific opportunity for South Korean construction and engineering firms eager for contracts in the region. On that basis, he saw “the miracle of the Han River”–a term often used to describe South Korea’s rise as an industrial power since the Korean War–as setting a precedent for “dynamic” development of the Mekong.

In a separate meeting with Vietnam’s Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, Moon also bypassed the problems of the Mekong, whose brnaches through the delta are drying and dying.

He hoped, he said, “to upgrade synergy between Vietnam's industrial country vision and South Korea's New Southern Policy to another dimension”–no mention of the Mekong, much less the suffering inflicted by reckless exploitation of its resources.

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