More indigenous lands condemned.

• Author: Roodman, David
• Position: Malaysia

The Malaysian government is pressing ahead with plans to build one of the largest dams on the globe in one of its remotest spots. The Bakun dam, sited on the Balui River in Sarawak (in heavily logged Malaysian Borneo), will be built to a height of 204 meters - making it higher than the Washington Monument. It will submerge 690 square kilometers (267 square miles) of forest and agricultural land, a Singapore-sized area that is home to 9,400 indigenous Kenyahs, Kayans, Penans, and Ukits, and more than 100 species of fauna listed as "protected." Most of the beneficiaries of the estimated 14,000 gigawatt-hours of power to be generated each year, by contrast, live on Peninsular Malaysia, 1,335 kilometers away from the dam - a distance that will be spanned by the world's longest underwater power line.

The government first proposed the Bakun dam in 1983, but dropped the plans in 1990 amid protests from environmentalists and indigenous residents. At the time, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad called the decision "Malaysia's contribution towards preserving the global ecology and environment." In mid-1993, however, he reversed himself, announcing that the dam was "a project whose time has come." Since then, the government has combined such facile and often contradictory public statements with secrecy about important details, in order to speed up the project and perhaps hide the intermingling of money and politics that seems in part to be propelling it.

Malaysia has classified as official secrets all 26 of the studies done since 1983 on the economic, environmental, and social effects of the dam. It argues that releasing such detailed information to the public is not standard practice anywhere in the world. The selection of a company called Ekran Bhd as prime contractor - a company controlled by a Malaysian timber tycoon, Tan Sri Ting Pek Khiing, who has close ties to Prime Minister Mahathir - was subject neither to competitive bidding nor public scrutiny. In late 1994, before an environmental impact assessment (EIA) had even been filed, much less approved and released to the public, Mahathir personally drove a bulldozer at the launching ceremony for dam site construction work.

The following April, the federal government shocked dam opponents by announcing not only that it had delegated EIA approval power to the State Government of Sarawak - an unprecedented move now facing court challenges - but that the State had already endorsed the first part of the...