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The
International Day of Action for Rivers ( former titel International
Day against Dams, for Rivers, Water, and Life) was inspired
and mandated by the participants of the First International
Meeting of People Affected by Dams that took place in March,
1997 in Curitiba, Brazil. ( Curitiba
Declaration ).
Origin
The
International Day of Action Against Dams: For Rivers, Water,
and Life was inspired
and mandated by the participants of the First
International Meeting of People Affected by Dams
that took place in March, 1997 in Curitiba, Brazil. Representatives
from twenty countries including
Taiwan, Brazil, Chile, Lesotho, Argentina, Thailand, Russia,
France, Switzerland, and the United States
decided that the International Day of Action would fall on
14 March, Brazil's Day of Action Against
Large Dams. One of the goals for the Day of Action is to build
and strengthen regional and international networks within
the international anti-dam movement. The idea for the First
International Meeting of People Affected by Dams originated
during an annual meeting of Brazil's Movement of People Affected
by Large Dams (MAB).
In
September, 1995 a preparatory meeting was held in Brazil and
an international organizing committee was formed headed by
MAB and including International
Rivers Network (IRN),
India's Save the Narmada Movement (NBA), Chile's Biobío
Action Group (GABB), and
European Rivers Network (ERN).
The First International Meeting of People Affected by Dams
was a successful first step in building and strengthening
a global network of the dam-affected. Many of the participants
reported an end to their feelings of isolation in their regional
fights against governments, lending agencies, and corporations,
as well as a renewed strength that they could carry back to
their communities. The International Day of Action Against
Dams: For Rivers, Water, and Life is the next step in strengthening
the international movement. Our aim is to raise our voices
in unison against destructive water development projects,
reclaim the health of our rivers and watersheds, and demand
the equitable and sustainable management of our waterways.
By acting together, we will demonstrate that these issues
are not merely local, but global in scope.
The
International Anti-Dam Movement
Excerpted from Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Politics of
Large Dams by Patrick McCully.
Zed Books, London, 1996.
We Will Not Move: The International Anti-Dam Movement
Koi nahi hatega, bandh nahi banega (No one will move,
the dam will not be built) Doobenge par hatenge nahin (We
will drown but we will not move) Slogans of the Narmada Bachao
Andolan
The decade since the mid-1980s has seen the emergence of an
international movement against current dam-building practices.
The movement is comprised of thousands of environmental, human
rights, and social activist groups on all the world's continents
except Antarctica. It coalesced from a multitude of local,
regional and national anti-dam campaigns and a smaller number
of support groups working at an international level. Dam builders
recognize and bemoan its effectiveness. ICOLD President Wolfgang
Pircher warned the British Dam Society in 1992 that the industry
faced 'a serious general counter-movement that has already
succeeded in reducing the prestige of dam engineering in the
public eye, and it is starting to make work difficult for
our profession.' The earliest successful anti-dam campaigns
were mostly led by conservationists trying to preserve wilderness
areas. Until recently, resistance from those directly impacted
by dams was usually defeated.
Since the 1970s, however, directly affected people have gained
the power to stop dams, mostly because they have built alliances
with sympathetic outsiders - environmentalists, human rights
and democracy activists, peasants' and indigenous peoples'
organizations, fishers and recreationists. The rise of environmentalism
has greatly helped the opponents of dams - and anti-dam campaigns
have in many countries played an important role in the growth
of national environmental movements. Other factors contributing
to the emergence of the international movement have been the
overthrow of authoritarian regimes and the spread of modern
communication technologies.
Dam opponents are not just 'antis', but are advocates for
what they see as more sustainable, equitable and efficient
technologies and management practices. Political changes which
would best encourage the preservation or adoption of these
technologies and practices have been a central demand of many
anti-dam campaigns. Struggles that have started with the aim
of improving resettlement terms or of stopping an individual
dam have matured into movements advocating an entirely different
model of political and economic development. That decision
making be transparent and democratic is now seen by many dam
opponents as being as important as the decisions themselves.
The clearest illustration of the wider political importance
of anti-dam movements is the crucial role that dam struggles
played in the pro-democracy movements of the 1980s in Eastern
Europe and South America... Activists working at the local,
national and international levels have together managed to
seriously tarnish the lure of large dams as icons of progress
and plenty.
To many people, large dams have instead become symbols of
the destruction of the natural world and of the corruption
and arrogance of over-powerful and secretive corporations,
bureaucracies and governments. Although hundreds of large
dams are still under construction and many more are on the
engineers' drawing boards, aid funds and other public sector
sources of financing are drying up, and public protests are
provoked by just about every large dam that is now proposed
in a democratic country. The international dam industry appears
to be entering a recession from which it may never escape.
In
remembrance of Fulgêncio Manoel da Silva
(by IRN Internayional Rivers Neywork, San Francisco)
Fulgêncio Manoel da Silva was murdered on 16 October,
1997 in Santa Maria da Boa Vista in the backlands of Pernambuco
state in northeast Brazil. Da Silva was a farmer, a poet,
and a passionate fighter for dam-affected people. He was also
the person responsible for the addition of the words "For
Rivers, Water and Life" to the International Day of Action
Against Dams. In an interview at the First International Meeting
of People Affected by Dams, held in Curitiba, Brazil in March
1997, da Silva told IRN : My goal is that the world, not just
Brazil, study ways to produce electricity without flooding
lands, rivers, the environment; and without affecting the
life of the people... We are supporting the proposal for an
international day of struggle for the rivers, water, and life
because we support life - of people, of animals, and the rivers
and water.
Da Silva was one of 40,000 people forced to make way for the
Itaparica Dam, built on the São Francisco River on
the border of Pernambuco and Bahia states. Not long after
he learned his family would lose their land, he met a family
of beggars living under a bridge who had been displaced by
a dam but were once farmers like him. It was this experience,
he said, that moved him to organize the Itaparica families.
Da Silva says there were many devastating impacts from the
project. It halted agricultural production for seven years,
and after that time, the production was not half of what is
was before the dam. This has had a great impact on the area
and the people. The native vegetation and crop trees such
as bananas, coconut, oranges and mangoes were submerged, rotting
along with the barrels of agrotoxins that weren't removed
before inundation. The cultural effects of the dam have been
devastating. According to da Silva, the customs and cultures
of the people were drowned with the rivers and waterfalls.
"I don't feel any dam has yet provided fair compensation for
the affected people," he said. "Just compensation will never
take place because the destruction of the environment, the
destruction of the history of the people and of their lives,
the history of where they were born and lived - there is not
enough money in the world to pay for this." It is suspected
that the killing of da Silva was ordered by drug traffickers
operating in the resettlement communities. The Brazilian Movement
of Dam-Affected People (MAB), blames his murder on the deplorable
social conditions resulting from inadequate compensation for
the dam oustees. "This," said MAB, "generated the conditions
which led to this type of criminality, where families plant
marijuana as a means of survival. Money from the World Bank
never reached the small farmers, but instead was used to irrigate
drug plantations." "Political action," said Aurelio Vianna
of the Brazil Network on Multilateral Financial Institutions,
"was not merely an ideological question for Fulgêncio,
but a question of honor." In one of his poems, Fulgêncio
wrote "The river is our life-water. What we do with it affects
the life of the people, the life of the animals, the life
of the river, and the life of the waters. This is true for
the world, not just for Brazil." His work has not been in
vain. On 14 March, for the International Day of Action Against
Dams and FOR RIVERS, WATER, AND LIFE, we hold his spirit and
his beliefs in a place of honor in our actions and in our
hearts
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