The Chinese company devastated Tara under the veil of secrecy and negligence

 

Written by: Irena Rašović and Dragana Šćepanović

 

Even after two years since the completion of the works on the Bar-Boljare highway, the "tears of Europe" have not been able to wash away the traces of destruction, which were left on it by the construction machines of the contractor China Road and Bridge Corporation (CRBC) and numerous subcontractors. Extracting gravel, depositing garbage, moving and concreting the riverbed, as well as many others, for the protected area, impermissible actions, have made the once emerald beauty, which has been on the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage list since 1977, unrecognizable. Under the pretext of building the "project of the century", all domestic and international regulations fell into place, and an unprecedented lack of control was visible on the construction site.

 

And while CRBC, the company responsible for the damage caused to the trough, is late with its rehabilitation, the expert public indicates that Tara will "suffer" from the consequences of the works for a long time. Part of the damage is irreparable, says Mile Lazerević, the founder of the Sports Fishing Fly Fishing Club (SRFFK) "Maniro", which has long managed the waters in the area of the Kolasin municipality.

 

"Plant and animal life was destroyed. Biodiversity was not only destroyed in the section where the works were carried out, but in a much larger part of the river. This was felt as far as Kolašin and towards Mojkovac. "During the summer, the silt, triggered by the works, goes down the river, settles, covers the living organisms in the river, and the fish, quite simply, are left without food, and the river without fish", explains Lazarevic.

 

He, however, believes that the sinking of the water, caused by the construction machines, is a much bigger problem. Namely, "the bed of the Tara is gravelly and silt, which settled over the centuries, closed the "gaps" in that gravelly substrate. The machines started that, a kind of "protective" layer, so the water sinks in," explains the founder of SRFFK. Such a situation, he claims, led to a "reduction of the Tara watercourse, which is visible to the naked eye". This damage, he explains, cannot be compensated by any rehabilitation measures.

 

From the Environmental Protection Agency, they explained to us that the biggest damage is reflected in the fact that during the realization of the project in the "Tara 2" bridge area, the CRBC company physically displaced the river from its bed, which in the future may affect the morphological characteristics of the bed. In addition to the diversion of the bed and erosion of the left bank, the Agency cites the deepening of the bed to a depth of about two meters, as well as the disruption of the geological foundation and the impact on biodiversity, as three key problems.

 

Remediation of the damage is prescribed by the Proposal for remediation measures and the program for monitoring the state of the environment after the implementation of the measures, and out of a total of eight foreseen, CRBC fulfilled five remediation measures. They refer to the restoration of part of the Tara bed and the surrounding terrain near the "Mateševo" interchange to its original state. The remaining ones, the Agency claims, refer to "the construction method of leveling thalwegs, or filling depressions with alluvial materials from the raised parts of the valley floor of the river, greening the areas along the road".

 

"In the conclusion of the report on monitoring the biodiversity of the Tara River for 2023, which was submitted to the Agency by an accredited company, it was stated that the state of the ecosystem of the Tara River is still recovering, that is, it is much better than it was in 2022. There was an increase in the number of individuals, and what particularly indicates an improvement is the presence of a larger number of younger populations. This is a sign of successful spawning and the establishment of stable populations in this ecosystem," the Agency said.

 

From the ecological inspection, which is in charge of monitoring the implementation of rehabilitation measures, they told us that it is similar with the state of the benthos fauna, "which all in all shows that the ecosystem of the Tara River will reach its natural state very soon, within two years at the latest". The next monitoring will be carried out next year.

 

The authorities were silent about the destruction of the river

 

Controversies due to the devastation of the bed and banks of the Tara River followed the construction of the priority section from Podgorica to Kolašin from the very beginning of the works. Representatives of the civil sector and the professional public accused the Chinese company of continuously destroying the river, which is under the protection of UNESCO, while they blamed the competent institutions for the poor monitoring of the works.

 

In November 2018, representatives of UNESCO expressed concern about the construction of a highway on the bed of the Tara River. After visiting the part of Tara where the highway works were being carried out, they submitted a report in which they stated that the area is "full of landfill and discarded material", and that it is clear that the effects on the environment will remain visible even after the completion of the highway construction. Such conclusions are followed by the reports of the European Commission and the European Parliament, which demanded urgent measures to rehabilitate the riverbed.

 

At the same time, then Prime Minister Duško Marković and Minister of Sustainable Development Pavle Radulović claimed that the river was not completely endangered. The official acknowledgment of the devastation came in October 2020, when an environmental inspection found that the CRBC had deepened and shifted part of the river bed and undermined the left bank in a length of 500 meters. Since then, several requests have been filed against the Chinese company to initiate misdemeanor proceedings.

 

From the environmental inspectorate, which has been carrying out inspections since the beginning of the project, you told us that, considering the extreme sensitivity of the area of the highway route and the importance of the Tara River watercourse, they submitted as many as eleven requests to the Agency for Nature and Environmental Protection to start the procedure for determining the damage in the environment or immediate danger of damage to the contractor of the construction of the highway Bar - Boljare. Due to the irregularities they noted on the ground, which primarily relate to the implementation of environmental protection measures, against the contractor CRBC and the responsible persons, they submitted as many as 27 requests to the competent courts to initiate misdemeanor proceedings.

 

The Network for the Affirmation of the Non-Governmental Sector (MANS), which has been dealing with this case since the beginning of the construction of the highway, explains that the authorities have been hiding the truth from the citizens for years.

 

"From the very beginning of the construction of the section that goes along the canyon of the Tara River, the Montenegrin public was assured that the Chinese company CRBC was not doing anything out of the ordinary, that there was no talk of devastation, that the river bed had not been moved, that everything that we could see with our eyes, which are illegal dumps of construction materials in the river and on the river bank, that this is something that is normal and that has been agreed upon. Later, especially after 2020, we realize that these are not isolated incidents, but that the Government of Montenegro, first of all, the then Ministry of Environmental Protection and Spatial Planning had full information about what the CRBC company was doing, that inspections were going out into the field , that there were certain fines, that no one was ever held criminally responsible, in a country that calls itself an "ecological state", and that the Constitution explicitly states that "the citizens of Montenegro have the right to full information about the state environment", Dejan Milovac points out.

 

"As far as it went, the best information is that a precedent was set that had not been recorded for any project before, which is that the Ministry and the complete inspection supervision, all their findings, records were declared secret, which is a violation of both the Constitution and the provision that I mentioned, as well as a violation of the Law on Inspection Supervision, which guarantees that this type of supervision must be public".

 

MANS filed several criminal charges and carried out numerous surveys and recordings of the terrain, which showed that devastation took place on Tara, and that biodiversity and entire habitats were significantly damaged.

 

Complaints against CRBC mostly dismissed

 

In October 2018, MANS, together with environmental organizations, filed a criminal complaint against the responsible persons in the Government of Montenegro and the environmental inspection, as well as against the CRBC and the members of the highway works supervision commission, accusing them of not reacting to the devastation of Tara. Although they also submitted photographs of the devastated area in addition to the reports, the Supreme State Prosecutor's Office rejected the reports.

 

The Chinese company was also sued by the "Tara i Morača" Sports Fishing Association, which signed a contract with the Ministry of Agriculture in April 2018 on the use and management of that natural resource in the area of the municipality of Kolašin. The basic court in Podgorica in November 2021 asked the CRBC to pay about 200,000 euros in compensation to the fishermen. After the appeal of the Chinese company, the decision of the High Court overturned that verdict. In the verdict, however, it was stated that the company is guilty because in 2019, it started building facilities, without previously submitting an application and documentation for that work, which contributed to the destruction of fish and other living things in the Tara River.

 

We could not get a comment on this verdict from the members and lawyers of the SRD "Tara i Morač" because, as they told us, they do not want to comment on the case at this moment. They do not explain why they suddenly stopped giving statements about the court process, the course of which they were previously dissatisfied with.

 

Officially, they say that "the public will find out what it's all about when the time comes."

 

"According to the agreement with my clients, I do not want, at this moment, to make statements to the public about the court process. The public will know what it is about when the time is right. Our decision is not to talk to journalists on this topic for the time being," said SDT lawyer Vladimir Čađenović.

 

The Basic State Prosecutor's Office (ODT) initiated two criminal proceedings against CRBC and the responsible person in that company before the Basic Court in Kolašin. One indictment referred to the excavation of gravel material from Tara, as well as the construction of the embankment on the right side of the Tara River bed, which, as it was written in the indictment, were carried out without a previously submitted application for construction and prescribed documentation.

 

In the indictment, it is also written that the construction of the buildings was started "without a previously submitted application and documentation for construction beyond the revised main project, without previously established environmental protection measures". This, according to the ODT, "caused damage to the environment to a greater extent and over a wider area".

 

CRBC was found guilty by a trial judge. The person responsible was given a suspended sentence, and the Chinese company was fined only nine thousand euros. However, the appeal procedure is still ongoing, because ODT appealed the amount of the fine, and the defense argued that CRBC was not responsible.

 

Tara pays the toll behind the scenes

 

That the Chinese highway contractor will dump the construction waste generated by drilling the tunnel on the bank of the protected river, endangering its bed, and that the institutions have allowed the load-bearing pillars of the Tara 1 and Tara 2 bridges, as well as the Mateševo interchange, to be placed in the same bed , the public could not know until the moment the works were carried out, because the projects were declared secret by the then Ministry of Sustainable Development and Tourism. For everything that happened to the river after that, Mile Lazerević from SRFFK considers the state of Montenegro responsible.

 

"The contractor tried to build with the lowest possible cost, there was no responsible supervision and control from the investor, and so Tara paid the price. In the west, it is regulated by the fact that without special permits, construction machines are not allowed to approach the river within 300 meters. Also, when the river is bridged, it is done in the shortest possible way. We made it possible for about two kilometers of highway to run along the bed of the Tara, a river that is under UNESCO protection. According to my deep conviction, then corruption or ignorance entered the scene, and most likely, a combination of both caused the river to collapse," says Lazerević.

 

According to him, the fact that "we have the most expensive kilometer of road in the world" is also problematic, as well as the duration of construction. Lazarevic says that the Chinese "built a 4,000 km long railway through the Himalayas in four years, and they worked on our 40 km roads for seven years".

 

For the director of the MANS Research Center, Dejan Milovac, the most important question at the moment is - "what next".

"The highway is finished, the disputed section has been put into traffic, and no one mentions the damage that occurred, nor the remediation, nor what is the big "question mark" - who will pay and whether the site will ever be returned to previous state".

 

"When we talk about the costs of building the highway, few people think about how much damage there was from the devastation of the area itself. Such an analysis has never been done, even though we had promises from the former opposition, and the current government, and all three administrations, starting with the administrations of Krivokapic, Abazović and Spajić. They don't talk about the devastation, about relations with Chinese investors, probably for several reasons. According to the knowledge of MANS, there are still open disputes between CRBC and our Government, that is, the Ministry of Transport, which represented the investor".

 

Milovac emphasizes that no government wants to open the issues of devastation, extension of deadlines, contract annexes, never-paid penalties and the fact that the highway, whose construction was planned for four years, was built twice as long. "The administrations after 2020 do not want to open this issue, precisely because of the disputes that exist with the Chinese side, through which we cannot claim that one side is to blame, but that there is also a great responsibility on the other side, that is, the Government of Montenegro."

 

Milovac emphasizes that in this case we had the absence of any control at the highway construction sites, and the public interest was completely unprotected.

 

The Chinese company started the construction of the first section from Smokovac to Mateševo in 2015, and it was opened on July 13, 2022, after a two-year delay. For the construction of the first section, Montenegro raised a loan of 809 million dollars for a period of twenty years from the Chinese EXIM Bank.

 

We could not get a comment on this topic from the Chinese company.

 

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CONCLUSION

The damage caused to the Tara Riverbed, which is under UNESCO protection, by the Chinese company CRBC while building the Bar-Boljare highway section in Montenegro, is another example of the non-transparent and illegal work of companies from China in the Western Balkans. In this case, it is a matter of non-compliance with Montenegrin and international legislation when it comes to environmental regulations related to protected areas, as well as the fact that although there are court rulings in this particular case, the enforcement of court rulings is delayed. Violation of the law was also reflected in the refusal of the competent institutions in Montenegro to publish contracts with the Chinese company, and the initially announced deadline for the construction of the highway section was not met, so the construction took twice as long as the announced deadline.

The fact that Montenegro was threatened with bankruptcy and falling into a Chinese debt trap precisely because of the debt for the construction of the Bar-Boljare highway section, and there was public talk of a Chinese creditor taking over the management of the Port of Bar, which was prevented at the last moment by the intervention of European banks, indicates a certain pattern of behavior of Chinese companies, whether investors or creditors, when it comes to doing business in the Western Balkan countries. Unfortunately, in such business, Chinese companies also have some support from the domestic authorities of the Western Balkan countries. Illegal and non-transparent business is mainly warned about by non-governmental organizations and the media, which often come under attack from the authorities as “enemies of progress” of their own countries. In order to avoid such and similar events in the future that result in damage to the environment, and often to the health of citizens of these countries, it is necessary to change the government's approach to negotiating loans and investments with companies from China, to make the process transparent, to include the public in the process of accepting and implementing projects, and to enable the competent institutions to use the mechanisms at their disposal to protect business in accordance with the positive legal regulations of the Western Balkan countries.