In rush to electrify, Cambodia stirs the living and dead
SREKOR, Cambodia: Nat Sota worries about the spirits of her ancestors. They have been lying in watery graves since Cambodia’s newest hydroelectric dam flooded her village of Srekor, and with it, the nearby burial ground. “We don’t know whether they can swim or not,” she said, sitting under a wooden house on stilts near the dam’s reservoir. Nat Sota has earthly concerns too. Only the red roof of the village primary school is now visible above the water, and she worries for her two young grandchildren if they are unable to get an education.
She is among 62 of the village’s ethnic Kreung, Bunong and Lao minority families who have refused the government’s offer to move them to a newly-built village. Instead they have decamped to a settlement near the reservoir that flooded their homes, and are now stuck in limbo. They say the government’s proposed site to is too far from the Sesan River, where their people have fished for generations, and the cash offer not enough to cover the loss of property and crops.
The plight of this community in a remote corner of northern Stung Treng province highlights the human cost of Cambodia’s push to bring power to the entire country. “By 2020, all villages have to have access to the electricity supply,” said Victor Jona, a spokesman for the department of energy at the Ministry of Mines and Energy. The Southeast Asian nation is well on its way, according to World Bank statistics. In 2000, only 16 percent of Cambodians had access to electricity. That increased to 31 percent by 2010, and almost half the population was connected to the grid by 2016. Much of that progress has been driven by dams. Between 2010 and 2014, hydropower’s contribution to the energy mix jumped from 3 to 61 percent, the World Bank said. Cambodia is considering two new dams, both of which would dwarf the Lower Sesan 2 in terms of size and output, as well as the impact on land and fisheries. The government has provided fair compensation to those who had to make way for seven dams built so far, Jona said, citing the Lower Sesan 2 as a “good example.”
He noted that most of the 860 families in villages affected by the dam have relocated to new sites, where authorities have built schools and health centres, as well as providing houses and farmland. “Some people are not happy with the compensation,” he conceded. In a letter to provincial authorities, the 62 families holding out in Srekor asked the government to recognize their new settlement as an “indigenous community” with rights to the land. The government should provide cash compensation for their lost homes and crops, they said, and build infrastructure including a well, school and a health center.