Potential Impacts of a Proposed Amazon Hydroelectric Project

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The Tehri Dam, India - Stumbling Toward Catastrophe

For the last 12 years construction has continued unabated on India's Tehri Dam amidst staunch opposition, massive environmental degradation and social upheaval. Even lack of sufficient funds has not stopped this monstrous, concrete Juggernaut; it has been moving along in stages, with money acquired from state and national budgets.

The Real Victims of the Iran-Iraq War

On 22 March 1988, the hitherto obscure Kurdish town of Halabja in the northeastern mountains of Iraq suddenly skyrocketed to prominence in the Western press as the site of the most recent and perhaps most grievous atrocity of the Iran-Iraq war.

The Hidden Costs of Hydroelectric Dams

One of the greatest dangers in development policy lies in the tendency to give more material aspects of growth an overriding disproportionate emphasis. The end may be forgotten in preoccupation with the means. Human rights may be submerged and human beings seen only as instruments of production rather than as free entities [in] whose welfare and cultural advance the project is intended.

Sudan's Secret Slaughter

This report compiles information from a wide range of sources and groups in order to shed some much-needed light on the conflict in southern Sudan.

Stopping the Flood of Damages from Cochiti Dam

The 1,000 members of the Cochiti Pueblo, New Mexico, have always welcomed those visitors who respectfully observe the corn and buffalo dances. The US Army Corps of Engineers, however, is a guest who controls and sometimes floods up to 11,000 acres of the 50,000-acre reservation behind Cochiti Dam.

Rebels Create Havoc in Mozambique

In December 1987, Robert Gersony was engaged by the Department of State's Bureau for Refugee Programs to undertake an assessment of designated Mozambican refugee matters. The bureau's director, Ambassador Jonathan Moore, decided to have the assessment conducted as a result of the bureau's perception of a mounting refugee crisis in southern Africa.

Inuit Youth in a Changing World

The rapid social changes that have taken place in the Canadian Arctic over the past 20 to 30 years have created a host of challenges and dilemmas for young Inuit. The members of this younger generation are coming of age during a period of fundamental change in northern society.

For the Taking: The Garrison Dam and the Tribal Taking Area

The Garrison Dam, conceived in the 1940s and constructed in the 1950s, has had the greatest impact on the Indians of Fort Berthold, North Dakota, since the nineteenth-century smallpox epidemics reduced their numbers to near cultural extinction.

China's Three Gorges Project: Whose Dam Business Is It?

A great wall of secrecy stands around China's proposal to dam the mighty Yangtze River and build the largest hydroelectric complex in the world. The project's feasibility study, financed by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), an arm of the Canadian government, is now nearing completion.

Indians in Brazil

During the past year Brazil has been in the throes of writing a new constitution-a process that has permitted, if not encouraged, more massive violations of Indian rights than have been seen in the country for decades.

Famine Returns to Ethiopia

It is 1988 and Ethiopians are starving again. Some 7 million people are at risk from the current famine. Some officials in Washington even believe that conditions are such in Ethiopia that the figure could reach 14 million, or one-third of the country's population.

Another Defeat for the Nam Choan Dam, Thailand

On 18 March 1988 the committee chaired by Gen. Thienchai Sirisamphan, Thailand's deputy prime minister, to consider the controversial Nam Choan Dam in western Thailand decided that the project should be "shelved"; the recommendation was submitted to the government on 25 March.