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Road to Dawei paved with anguish
Spectrum, Piyaporn Wongruang, Published on 02/03/2014
» From the Tenasserim mountains which form the Thai border to the bright blue Andaman waters of Myanmar’s west coast, a swathe is being cut through communities sitting in the way of progress.
Voices of the dammed
Spectrum, Piyaporn Wongruang, Published on 17/11/2013
» Thong feels lost in both senses of the word. After being told the plan to build a dam on the nearby Mae Wong stream had been revived, the cassava farmer, who preferred to use a pseudonym, feels defeated in his campaign to oppose the project. He is also unsure of which direction his life will take in the wake of the decision.
Paving a piece of paradise
Spectrum, Piyaporn Wongruang, Published on 27/10/2013
» Dech Khieonarong is one of many residents of Tak's Umphang district who cheered when the government announced it was reviving a plan to construct a new road from Khlong Lan to the remote town in the midst of a protected wilderness. Weary of traversing the 164km of arduous road with, by his count, more than 1,000 hairpin curves, he volunteered to head a committee of locals to push for the construction of the ''new'' Khlong Lan-Umphang road, a large part of which was actually constructed more than 40 years ago by the military as part of its efforts to suppress communist insurgents. The military managed to cut 115km of road through the deep forest inside Mae Wong National Park, 30km from Umphang in the 1970s. The military backed off on completing the road to Umphang because of objections that it would compromise the Western Forest Complex. Over the years the military road fell into disuse and is now overgrown and impassable in some places.