LA MARCHE BLEUE
Espagne - Bruxelles
POUR UNE NOUVELLE CULTURE DE L'EAU EN EUROPE BIENTÔT EN FRANCE !
11 Août Delta de l'Ebre - 9 Septembre Bruxelles
organisée par COAGRET et ERN
La «Marche Bleue» a démarré ce week-end, du Delta de l’Ebre en Espagne.
Cette action, soutenue par de nombreuses associations, universitaires et partis politiques, a pour but de bloquer le financement du très controversé Plan Hydrologique National espagnol qui prévoit la construction de 120 nouveaux grands barrages et de gigantesques détournements de l'Ebre vers le sud-est de l’Espagne (1 milliard de m3 /an) et du Rhône vers Barcelone (657 million de m3 /an).
Plus de 500 participants se sont joint aux premières étapes. La Marche Bleue va remonter l’Ebre, traverser les Pyrénées et passer la frontière française le 20 août par le col du Somport.
Les étapes suivantes sont :
20 août: Jaca - Canfranc - Somport - Eslourenties (France)
21 août:: Eslourenties - Saman
22-23 août:: Toulouse
24-25 août:: Larzac - Millau
26 août:: Source de Loire/Bonnefont/Serre de la Fare (Haute-Loire)
27 août:: Serre de la Fare/Le Puy (Haute Loire)
et le 28 août: (matin) Le Puy
28 août: (après-midi) -30 août: Lyon
31 août: - 3 sept.: Paris
4-6 sept: Aachen - Köln (Germany)
7 sept.: Maastricht (Holland)
8 sept.: Arrivée à Bruxelles
9 sept.: MANIFESTATION à Bruxelles
La Marche atteindra son point culminant le 9 septembre où une importante manifestation aura lieu à Bruxelles. On attend 10 000 personnes !
Le programmes des étapes sont disponibles.
SOS Loire vivante
8 Rue Crozatier
F- 43000 Le Puy, France
Tel 04 71 02 08 14, Fax 04 71 02 60 99
E-mail: mailto:ern@ern.org
ou Roberto Epple: 06.08.62.12.67
Website Marchebleu : http://www.rivernet.org/marchebleu
COAGRET Coordinadora de Afectad@s por Grandes Embalses y Trasvases
Zaragoza: C/ Santa Cruz 7, Oficina 3
50003 ZARAGOZA - Aragon (Espagne)
Telefono / Fax +34-976-392004 / 619. 56. 81. 33
E-mail : mailto:coagret@jet.es
Tortosa (Ebro Delta)
Telefono :
+34-977. 51.10.66 / 605.81.90.29
E-mail : mailto:coorbre@binet.fut.es
La marche est co-organisée par
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LOS ANGELES
-- Nargis, the Indian movie star of the1950's who later had a career in politics,
once denounced the great film director Satyajit Ray for making films that
offered
too negative
an image of India. In her own movies, she said, she had always celebrated
the positive. When asked for an example, she replied, "Dams."
Big dams
have long been an essential part of India's technological iconography, and
their role in providing water and power to the nation was for a time unquestioned,
even unquestionable. Lately, however, there has been an increasingly confrontational
debate about the role that large dams have played in development.
One
of the biggest new dams under construction is the Sardar Sarovar Project on
the Narmada River in the State of Gujarat, with a proposed final height of
447 feet. Among its most vocal opponents is the novelist Arundhati Roy. She
and other critics of the project
object to
the displacement of more than 200,000 people by rising waters, to the damage
to the Narmada Valley's fragile ecosystem and to the failure of some big dams
to deliver what they
promise.
(India's Bargi Dam, for example, irrigates only 5 percent of the area promised.)
She points out that while the rural poor are the ones who pay the price for
a dam, it is the urban rich who benefit: 80 percent of rural households in
India have no electricity; 200 million people have no access to safe drinking
water.
The
recent report of the World Commission on Dams, an international agency established
by the World Bank and World Conservation Union, largely supports these conclusions
in its
review of
125 large dams. The report blames big dams for increased flooding, damage
to farmland and the extinction of some freshwater fish.
Many
dams fall short of their targets, and of the 40 million to 80 million people
displaced by worldwide dam building, few have received sufficient compensation.
Ms. Roy and the Narmada Valley campaigners have long argued that alternative
methods are capable of meeting Gujarat's water needs; the world commission
report echoes this view, stressing the need to focus on renewable energy,
recycling, better irrigation and reduction of water
losses.
The
battle over the Narmada Dam has been long and bitter. However, there has been
a surreal new twist. Arundhati Roy and two leading members of the protest
movement, Medha Patkar and Prashant Bhushan, were accused by five lawyers
of having attacked them during a Dec.
13, 2000,
protest outside the Supreme Court in Delhi against the court's decision to
allow building work on the Sardar Sarovar project to proceed. Ms. Roy and
Ms. Patkar allegedly
called on
the crowd to kill the lawyers, and Mr. Bhushan is accused of having grabbed
one of the lawyers and threatened him with death.
Yet
all this happened, the accusers contend, under the noses of a large detachment
of policemen. Any threats passed unrecorded by the filmmaker Sanjay Kak, who
was covering the demonstration with a video camera. And it was subsequently
revealed that Mr. Bhushan had in fact been somewhere else at the time of the
protest.
In
spite of the demonstrable absurdity of these charges, however, the Supreme
Court decided to entertain the lawyers' petition and served the three activists
with criminal contempt notices. In doing so it ignored its own rules and procedures.
After
being summoned to court, Ms. Roy delivered a characteristically trenchant
affidavit in which she said that the court's willingness to haul her and her
colleagues up before it on such flimsy charges "indicates a disquieting
inclination on the part of the court to silence criticism and muzzle dissent,
to harass and intimidate those who disagree with it." Last week, the
Supreme
Court insisted that she withdraw this affidavit; she refused, and the court
is considering new contempt of court charges that could send her to jail.
She
is, as she told The Guardian of London, "now deeper in the soup."
What the Supreme Court of India should realize is that by pursuing Arundhati
Roy, Medha Patkar and Prasant
Bhushan
in this fashion, it places itself before the court of world opinion.
Can
it be that the Supreme Court of the world's largest democracy will reveal
itself to be biased against free speech and be prepared to act at the bidding
of a powerful interest group the coalition of political and financial interests
behind the Narmada Dam? Only by abandoning its pursuit of Arundhati Roy and
the Narmada Valley campaigners can the Supreme Court escape such a judgment.
Salman Rushdie is the author of the forthcoming novel,
"Fury."
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/07/opinion/07RUSH.html?ex=998203674&ei=1&en=014a58d23c758be6