Tanintharyi Development Projects Must Not Proceed Without Transparency and Accountability

Press Statement by 313 Civil Society Organiszations | 14 December 2016

We, the undersigned civil society organizations working in Myanmar, are troubled to learn that a, Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed on 13 December 2016 between Noble Prince Company Limited, Sun and Rainbow Company Limited and Power China International Group Limited for the development and implementation of the Mae Tha Mee Khee Industrial Estate Project, Tanintharyi Renewable Energy Power Project for dam construction on the Tanintharyi river, and other related projects such as a small port and Htee Kee – Kanetheyi road construction in Tanintharyi Region. There has been no information provided to the public about these development projects, and no consultation with local Karen communities or civil society. This represents a severe lack of transparency and violation of international human rights principles. The Karen National Union (KNU) seal was on the invitation letter for the MoU signing ceremony, and KNU chairman Mutu Say Poe attended the ceremony in Dawei. However, it is unclear how the KNU is involved in these development projects.

Furthermore, there are complaints from local Karen communities about the negative impacts of otherprojects in the KNU Myeik-Dawei (Mergui-Tavoy) District – such as the Myanmar Stark Prestige Plantation (MSPP) palm oil project and the Ban Chaung coal mine – that have not yet been resolved. The KNU must listen to the Karen people and not proceed with more business interests that harm the environment and human rights. We are greatly disappointed that the KNU chairman rushed to attend the signing ceremony, and we do not accept the MoU signed for these projects because the signing is against the will of Karen people. Investment in large-scale infrastructure projects must not come before sustainable peace and political dialogue. New development projects in Tanintharyi must not move forward without transparency and accountability, including a public consultation process with civil society, and the Free Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) of local communities.

Contact:
· Naw Pe Tha Law (Tarkapaw Youth Group) – 09422207276
· Saw Frankie (Trip Net) – 09459220956
· Saw Koe (CSLD) – 098740172
· Saw San Ngwe (Southern Youth Organization) – 09793958730

Endorsement from civil society:
1. Tanintharyi Friends (TF)
2. Tarkapaw Youth Group (TKP)
3. Southern Youth
4. Candle Light
5. Community Sustainable Livelihood Development (CSLD)
6. Tenasserim River & Indigenous People Networks (Trip Net)
7. Myeik Lawyer Network
8. Kayin Youth Network (KYN)
9. Tavoyan Women’s Union (TWU)
10. Dawei Research Association (DRA)
11. Dawei Development Association (DDA)
12. Dawei Farmer Union
13. Khein Myi Thisa
14. Chaung Ma Gyi
15. Myeik Karen Literature and Cultural Committee
16. Christian Social Service Development Department (CSSDD)
17. Tavoy Youth Organization (TYO)
18. Kachin Peace Network.
19. Karen Rivers Watch
20. US Campaign for Burma.
21. International Karen Organization.
22. Karen American Organization.
23. Australia Karen Organization.
24. Karen Community of Minnesota.
25. Karen Community Development Foundation, USA.
26. Kachin State Urban Rural Mission
27. Kachin Biblical Baptist Church (KBBC)
28. NamkyioParahita Foundation
29. SHAIT Social Development Foundation
30. Humanity Institute
31. Spectrum ( Kachin Office )
32. Farmers Networking Group ေတာင္သူလယ္သမားကြန္ယက္အဖြဲ႕
33. Mingalar Foundation မဂၤလာေဖာင္ေဒးရွင္း
34. Laur Waw Literature and Culture
35. Christian Social Service Group (Putao)
36. C.C.F.C/CBA
37. Community Health and Development (CHAD)
38. Kachin Literature and Culture Association
39. Kachin Women Union ကခ်င္အမ်ဳိးသမီးအစည္းအရံုး
40. Community Development Department (Kachin Baptist Convention)
41. K.B.B.C (Hpakant)
42. Taing Kan Ti Literature and Culture တိုင္းမ္ခမ္းတီး စာေပႏွင့္ယဥ္ေက်းမူ
43. Taing Law Gyi Literature and Culture တိုင္းမ္ခမ္းၾကီး စာေပႏွင့္ယဥ္ေက်းမူ
44. Shan Youth Parahita ရွမ္းလူငယ္ ပရဟိတ
45. Wun Pawng Ninghtoi
46. SHINGNIP(Kachin Legal Aid Network Group)
47. Kachin Lawyer’s Group
48. Union of Karenni State Youth ( UKSY ) ကရင္နီလူငယ္မ်ားအစည္းအရံုး
49. Kayah Myae Witness ကယားေျမသက္ေသ
50. Kayah Phoo ကယားဖူး
51. Kayah Women Center (KYWO)
52. ThanLwin Lover သံလြင္ခ်စ္သူ
53. 88 Peace and Open Society/Maw Chee Region Watch Group ၈၈ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးႏွင့္ပြင့္လင္းလူ႕အဖြဲ႕အစည္း၊ ေမာ္ခ်ီေဒသ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေရးအဖြဲ႕
54. Bawlakae Watch Group ေဘာလခဲေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေရးအဖြဲ႕
55. Farmer Seminarian Association ( FSA ) Kanote Pan Social Aid ကႏုတ္ပန္းလူမူကူညီေရးအသင္း
56. Karenni Civil Society Network ( KCSN ) ကရင္နီအရပ္ဖက္လူမူအဖြဲ႕အစည္းကြန္ယက္
57. Women Galaxy
58. Sa ShawShay Phroshu Maw Chee, Kae Ma Phyu ေမာ္ခ်ီး၊ ခဲမျဖဴ
59. Kayah State Youth Network (KSYN) ကယားျပည္နယ္လူငယ္ကြန္ယက္
60. MyitZuMa Heart မဇၹိဳမႏွလံုးသား
61. Youth Life Formation Centre (YLFC)
62. Nway Htway Thaw Lat Myar ေႏြးေထြးေသာလက္မ်ား
63. Pay Sat Alin Tan ေပးဆပ္အလင္းတန္း
64. Kho Lay Su Shee Farmer Association ခိုေလးဆူခ်ီေတာင္သူလယ္သမားအသင္း
65. Garu Na ဂရုဏာ(ကယားျပည္နယ္)
66. Student Association ေက်ာင္းသားလူငယ္အသင္း
67. Earth Rights Action Network(Kayah)
68. Nyein Foundation ျငိမ္းေဖာင္းေဒးရွင္း
69. Myittar ေမတၱာဖြံ႕ျဖိဳးေရးေဖာင္းေဒးရွင္း
70. Safe House လံုျခံဳေသာအိမ္
71. Karenni Nationalities People Liberation Front ( KNPLF-Youth )
72. Kayan New Generation Youth ကယားမ်ဳိးဆက္သစ္လူငယ္မ်ားအသင္း
73. Farmer Network (Karenni State) ေတာင္သူလယ္သမားကြန္ယက္အဖြဲ႕
74. Karenni Social Welfare and Development Centre (KSWDC) ကရင္နီ အရပ္ဖက္လူမူဖူလံုေရးႏွင့္ဖြံ႕ျဖိဳးေရးအဖြဲ႕ခ်ဳပ္
75. Mawchi Youth ေမာ္ခ်ီးလူငယ္
76. Kayah (Karenni) State Students Union ကယားျပည္နယ္ေက်ာင္းသားမ်ားသမဂၢ
77. KAC (Karen Affairs Committee)
78. Hsar Mu Htaw ဆာမူေထာ
79. Thwee Community Based Group
80. Western Than Lwin အေနာက္သံလြင္
81. Hoo Pho Kapaw ဟူးဖိုးကေပၚ
82. KDN
83. Karen Monk Association
84. The 88 Generation Peace & Open Society
85. Eh Sae Phoe Roe
86. Karen Environmental and Social Action
87. သံလြင္ကြန္ယက္အရပ္ဖက္လူအဖြဲ႕အစည္း
88. Matupi Youth Association (Chin) မတူပီလူငယ္အသင္း
89. Tonzang Youth Association တြန္ဇံလူငယ္အသင္း
90. Sami Youth Region Association ဆမီးေဒသလူငယ္မ်ားအသင္း
91. CNRWG(Chinland Natural Resource Watch Group သယံဇာတေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေရးအဖြဲ႕
92. CGN-Hakha
93. Green Eden Eco Mission (Chin)
94. Hakha Eco Activist
95. Kumi Youth Association (Chin) ခူမီး လူငယ္မ်ားအသင္း
96. Cho Chin Development Association ခ်ဳိးခ်ဥ္ဖြံ႕ျဖိဳးေရးအသင္း
97. Zozuun Organization
98. Thantlang Youth Association ထန္တလန္ လူငယ္အသင္း
99. Rih&Lentlang Youth Association ရိဒ္လင္သန္လူငယ္အသင္း
100. Rizua Youth Fellowship ေရရြာလူငယ္အစည္းအရံုး
101. Cikha Youth Association က်ီးခါးလူငယ္အသင္း
102. Tuithang Students Family (Thithang Siamsin Innkuan)
103. Lawknu Land Development Network ေလာက္ႏူးေဒသဖြံ႕ျဖိဳးတုိးတက္ေရးကြန္ယက္
104. Yamanya Peace Foundation ရာမညျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးေဖာင္ေဒးရွင္း
105. Mon Civil Society Organization’s Network မြန္အရပ္ဖက္လူမူအဖြဲ႕အစည္းမ်ားကြန္ယက္
106. Personal Civil Society Development
107. Jeepyah Civil Social Development Organization
108. Kyone Ma Ku Chaung Network က်ဴံမကူးေခ်ာင္းကြန္ယက္
109. Mon Region Social Development Network မြန္ေဒသ လူမူဖြံ႕ျဖိဳးေရးကြန္ရက္
110. Zinn Kyaik social Association ဇင္းက်ဳိက္လူမူအဖြဲ႕
111. Mon Women Organization (MWO) မြန္အမ်ဳိးသမီးအဖြဲ႕
112. Township Supporting Committee ျမိဳ႕နယ္ဖြံ႕ျဖိဳးတိုးတက္ေရးအေထာက္အကူျပဳေကာ္မတီ
113. Township Peace Committee ျမိဳ႕နယ္ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးေကာ္မတီ
114. Taw Koo Village ေတာ္ကူးေက်းရြာ
115. Taung Pa Village ေတာ္ပေက်းရြာ
116. Ehn Din Village အံဒင္ေက်းရြာ
117. Mon Youth Group မြန္လူငယ္ေက်းရြာ
118. Guiding Star Media Group
119. Paung See Arr Marn Social Development Group ေပါင္းစည္းအားမာန္လူမူဖြံ႕ျဖိဳးေရးအဖြဲ႕
120. Millennium Centre
121. Nyein Faundation ျငိမ္းေဖာင္းေဒးရွင္း
122. South Tha Dahna Association ေတာင္သာသနာေရးအသင္း
123. Myanmar Writer Association (MLM) ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံစာေရးဆရာအသင္း(ေမာ္လျမိဳင္)
124. Shin Saw Pu Mon Women empowerment Association ရွင္ေစာပုမြန္အမ်ဳိးသမီးစြမ္းေဆာင္ရွင္အသင္း
125. Mon Saytana Foundation မြန္ေစတနာေဖာင္ေဒးရွင္း
126. Mawlamyine Lawyers Association ေမာ္လျမိဳင္ေရွ႕ေနမ်ားအသင္း
127. Myanmar Positive Women Network ျမန္မာေပါ့စတစ္အမ်ဳိးသမီးမ်ားကြန္ယက္
128. Na lone hla Youths Association ႏွလံုးလွလူငယ္မ်ားအသင္း
129. Mon Youth Progressive Organization (MYPO)
130. Na lone hla Youths Association
131. Mon Youth Progressive Organization (MYPO)
132. Ma Ga free funeral Social Service Association (Tha Yat Kone)
133. Village Livelihood Committee (9)Village
134. Basic Health Care Association (7)Village
135. Mon Youth Group (Mu Done)
136. Arr Man Thit Youth Association
137. Naung Kyo Mae
138. Alin World
139. La Yee Anal Got Yamanya Parahita Foundation
140. Nyi Nyunt Thaw Mon Youth Association
141. Summer School Mon Teacher Group
142. Mon Women Group (Chaung Son)
143. free funeral Social Service Association (Than Phyu Zayat)
144. Pon Nya Tha Har Youth Group
145. Mon Youth Group (Than Phyu Zayat)
146. Say Da Na free funeral Social Service Association (Kyone Ka Dat)
147. Hla Tha Kaw Inn Conservation Committee
148. Myat Parami Group (Than Phyu Zayat)
149. Blood Donor Group (Kyaik Kha Mi)
150. Karu Na Yat Khi Ta Foundation (Than Phyu Zayat)
151. Oate Ta Ya Alin (Than Phyu Zayat)
152. Youth Takhun Social Aid Association (Sat Se)
153. Myat Thaw Lan (Sat Se)
154. Khit Thit Youth Group
155. Labour Association
156. Mon Regional Development Association
157. Kuk Duwt Mon Youth Group
158. Social Aid Network (La Mine Khwe)
159. Kywae Chan Youth Parahita
160. Freedom Group Formation Initiative
161. Wan Lark Rural Development Foundation
162. Rakhine Women Association
163. Kyauk Phyu Social Network
164. Action Based Community Development (ABCD)
165. Rakhine Women Network (STW)
166. SKY Youth (KPU)
167. Arakan National Network (ANN)
168. Ah Linn Tagar Library (STW)
169. AD 2030 Vision (STW)
170. AD2030 Vision (RTD)
171. Environmental protection Group (PNG)
172. Environmental protection Group (KTW)
173. Environmental Protection Group (MU)
174. Yaung Chi Thit Group (MB)
175. Megawady Social Network (MA)
176. Ko Yan Taung Gawpaga Group (RB)
177. Rakhine Social Network(PTW)
178. Taung Goat Social Network (TG)
179. Rakhine Women Association (Taung Goat)
180. Than Dwae Beach Social Network (TDW)
181. Rakhine Coastal Association (GWA)
182. Rural Development (KPU)
183. Environment Conservation and Regional Development
184. People Resource Group Regional Development (Maung Taw)
185. Thazin Legal Aid
186. Social Program Aid for Civil Education
187. Aung Thu Kha Foundation
188. 88 Rakhine Generation Social Development Organization
189. Arakan Ray Central Organization (A.R.O
190. မူစဲကြန္ယက္စံုဖြံ႕ျဖိဳးတိုးတက္ေရးအသင္း
191. ေစာမူကြန္ယက္
192. People for People
193. ေမယုရင္သြီးလူမွဳဖြံ႕ျဖိဳးေရးအဖြဲ႕ ရေသ့ေတာင္
194. လူငယ္မ်ဳိးဆက္သစ္အင္အားစု စစ္ေတြ
195. ရမ္းျဗဲျမိဳ႕နယ္ေက်းလက္ေဒသဖြံ႕ျဖိဳးေရးအဖြဲ႕
196. ရကၡအားမာန္လူငယ္အဖြဲ႕ ေက်ာက္ျဖဴ
197. ေက်ာက္ျဖဴျမိဳ႕နယ္ေက်းလက္ေဒသဖြံ႕ျဖိဳးေရးအဖြဲ႕
198. ရခိုင္အမ်ဳိးသမီးအစည္းအရံုး
199. ပိုက္လုိင္းေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေရးအဖြဲ႕အမ္းေက်ာက္ျဖဴ
200. နာေရးကူညီမႈေဖာင္ေဒးရွန္းေျမာက္ဦး
201. ေစတီျပင္လူငယ္မ်ားအဖြဲ႕ ရေသ့ေတာင္
202. ဦးရာဇ္ေျမလူမႈကူညီေရးအဖြဲ႕ ပုဏၰားကၽြန္း
203. ပရဟိတလူငယ္မ်ားအဖြဲ႕ ပုဏၰားကၽြန္း
204. ရခုိင္ေဒသ တရားမွ်တေရးႏွင့္ စိမ္းလန္းစိုေျပေရး အစီအစဥ္ ေက်ာက္ျဖဴ
205. Ta Ang Student Youth Union (TSYU)
206. New Generation Shan State
207. Shan Literature and Culture Association
208. 88 Peace and Open Society(Shan South)
209. Sein Yaung Soe ( Kyaut Mae )
210. Paoh Youth Organization
211. DEMO
212. Shan State Youth (TGI)
213. Justice Watch Group
214. Farmers and Land Association
215. Integrated Development Executive Association
216. Shan Literature and Culture Association
217. Theinni Environmental Protection Group
218. Shwe Leinmaw Social Network
219. Kutkhaing Environmental Protection
220. Northern Shan Youth Group/Shan Literature and Culture Association
221. Shan Literacy and Cultural Association (Panlong)
222. Shan Literacy and Cultural Association (Pone Inn)
223. Shan Literacy and Cultural Association (Loilen)
224. Shan North Development Association (Nan Ma Tu)
225. Ta Ang Student Youth Union (TSYU)
226. Ta’ung Youth Union
227. Inn Sein Myay Environment Sein Lan So Pyay Yay (Naung Cho)
228. Ta Ang (Pa Laung )Sa/Ya Committee
229. 25 Kwut Khine Ta Ang Youth
230. 26 Farmer Association
231. Htar Wara Garu Na Shin Group
232. Ta’ang Women’s Organization (TWO)
233. Environment Conservation Committee
234. 88 Generation Nyein/Pwint (Shan/North)
235. 88 Generation Nyein/Pwint (Shan/East)
236. ရွမ္းစာေပယဥ္ေက်းမူအသင္း
237. ဝုန္းေမတၱာ
238. လီဆူစာေပႏွင့္ ရိုးရာယဥ္ေက်းမူဖြံ႕ျဖိဳးေရးအသင္း
239. အႏႈိင္းမဲ့လူမူညီေရးအသင္း
240. Green Rights Organization
241. ဓႏုစာေပယဥ္ေက်းမူေဒသဖြံ႕ျဖိဳးေရးအသင္း
242. မ်ဳိးဆက္သစ္ သထံုေလး
243. ေတာင္သူလယ္သမားမ်ားႏွင့္ ေျမယာလုပ္သားမ်ားသမဂၢ
244. Upper Chindwin Youth Network(Kalay)
245. S & K Mining Watch Group , Kan Kone
246. Sein Yaung So (Kathar
247. Thuriya Sandar
248. G.B.P(Grow Back for Posterity
249. Upper Chindwin Youth Network (Kalay Wa)
250. Tamoo Youth Network
251. Maw Lait
252. Upper Chindwin Youth Network
253. Green Land FPPS
254. Htee Chaint Network
255. New Generation Youth ,
256. Won Tho (New generation)
257. Naga Youth Network
258. NaSaDuWa Education
259. New Generation (Ban Mauk)
260. Sein Yaung So (Inn Taw)
261. Upper Chindwin Youth Network (Min Kin)
262. Inn Thar Committee Group
263. BG Byaha Wehari
264. Thu Kha ဝန္သုခ
265. ASein Yaung Lwin Pyin (Kalay)
266. Tuang Kone Region Guard
267. ေနရဥၹရာလူငယ္ကြန္ယက္
268. ေတာင္တြင္းလူမူဖြံ႕ျဖိဳးေရးအသင္း
269. Upper Chindwin Youth Network (Kalaywa)
270. ေတာင္တြင္းလူမူဖြံ႕ျဖိဳးေရးအသင္း
271. Civil & Political Rights Campaign Group – CPRCG
272. Sein Lan (Pyin Oo Lwin)
273. Popa Lovers Association ပုပၸါးခ်စ္သူအသင္း
274. Green For All (Myin Chan)
275. Mya Sein Yaung ျမစိမ္းေရာင္
276. Upper Lawyer Network
277. ByaHaSo Association
278. Shining Star
279. Green For All (Taung Thar)
280. Green For All (Na Hto Gyi)
281. Farmer Association (Kyauk Se)
282. Farmer Network (Pyin Oo Lwin)
283. MCPWC (Myanmar China Pipeline Watch Group)
284. Mu De Tar (Kyauk Pa Daung)
285. Peace and Justice (Mate Hti Lar)
286. လယ္သမားသမဂၢ (မေကြး)
287. အလုပ္သမားသမဂၢ(ေထာက္ရွာပင္ေရနံေျမ)
288. သစ္ပင္ခ်စ္သူမ်ားအဖြဲ႕(ေထာက္ရွာပင္ေရနံေျမ)
289. ေစတုတၳရာဖြံ႕ျဖိဳးတိုးတက္ေရးအဖြဲ႕
290.လြတ္လပ္ေသာအရိႈခ်င္းမ်ားအင္အားစု
291. AWDO (ngaphe)
292. Simple smile (ပခုကၠဴ)
293. ကိုၾကည္သာ(ပုဂၢလိက၊ ျမိဳင္)
294. ေက်းလက္လူငယ္ကြန္ယက္(ေစတုတၳရာ)
295. အလုပ္သမားသမဂၢ(ေရႊေရာင္မ်ဳိးဆက္၊ မန္းေရနံ)
296. Yae Kyee Sann
297. Youth Development Network
298. Lut Lat Pwint Lin Social Association
299. Myat Won Thit
300. Myint Ma Kha Guard
301. Public Network
302. ရိုးရာမခ်စ္သူလူငယ္မ်ားကြန္ယက္
303. EDU Wave
304. Kyauk Gyi Development Watch
305. East Light Development Group
306. Myanmar Youth Star
307. Bago Youth Network
308. Greem Equations
309. အလင္းသီတံ
310. ျမိဳ႕နယ္လူငယ္အဖြဲ႕ခ်ဳပ္ သဲကုန္းျမိဳ႕နယ္
311. မိုင္းကြန္ရက္
312. Human Rights Documentation
313. Association of Human Rights Defenders and Promoters (HRDP)