Victims of World Bank Policies Remembered

By Robert Jensen, AlterNet. Posted April 23, 2004.

For tourists interested in democracy, Washington, D.C. holds a number of attractions this weekend. In addition to the March for Women's Lives on Sunday, visitors and residents alike might want to visit the World Bank at 1818 H St. NW.

It's not what is inside the building that is worth the stop, but the three people who will be across the street on a symbolic hunger strike for four days "to commemorate the forgotten people in the Bank's 60-year history, those whose right to development has been violated by the very institution that claims to listen to the voices of the poor."

The action, April 23-26, will coincide with the Bank's and International Monetary Fund's annual meetings, and is at odds with the Bank's campaign to cast itself as the new champion of the downtrodden. "The global imbalance between rich and poor countries must be urgently addressed if the world is to prosper into the 21st century," reads the news release.

Beyond the slick statements of Bank officials, we should look to the experience of the people who deal directly with the Bank. As Indian activist Medha Patkar put it in an interview this fall: "The existing development process is skewed; in the name of development, it leaves a large majority of our population out of the real benefits of this growth model." Instead of promoting a more democratic system, "institutions like the World Bank undermine the process of community participation within the country," Patkar said.

Angana Chatterji (anthropology professor, California Institute of Integral Studies), Dana Clark (president, International Accountability Project, Berkeley, CA) and Dickson Mundia (founder, Basilwizi Trust, Zimbabwe) hope their strike will inject some reality into the Bank's publicity campaign by highlighting the devastating effects on people evicted from their lands and homes as a result of projects financed by the Bank.

Their statement, excerpted below, deserves close study and consideration by those engaged in the global justice and anti-empire movements in the United States. (The full version includes the list of demands and a place to endorse.

Why Are We Fasting?

We are here to commemorate the forgotten people in the Bank's 60-year history, those whose right to development has been violated by the very institution that claims to listen to the voices of the poor. We are bearing witness to situations across the globe where the Bank's lending has violated its mandate and its policy framework, and we are undertaking a fast to call attention to this aspect of the Bank's legacy. We stand in solidarity with those who have suffered devastating impacts after having been evicted from their lands and their homes to make way for Bank-financed projects.

We are here to call on the Bank to abandon its indifference to the plight of people who are suffering from the effects of these failures, and instead to respect the rights of project-affected people, and to support the right to development for those marginalized and impoverished communities that have borne the brunt of 60 years of lending dangerously.

Over the past sixty years, the Bank has supported projects that, in the name of development, have led to the displacement of tens of millions of people. Nobody knows exactly how many people have been displaced by Bank projects over time, because the Bank has been negligent in keeping track. However, the reality is that World Bank-financed dam projects alone have displaced ten million people over the years. The World Bank's own research has shown that most people who are involuntarily resettled do not easily regain their previous standard of living, much less benefit from the project and have their standard of living improved, as called for by Bank policy.

We are gravely concerned by the role played by the World Bank in funding and legitimizing many projects that have come to represent a legacy of implementation difficulties, of underestimated and under-resourced externalities and costs, costs which are borne by those least able to bear them. The Kariba dam in Zimbabwe and Zambia, built during a time of British colonial occupation in the 1950s, has been an enduring source of misery for 50 years for the Tonga people. The Singrauli coal-fired plants in India, financed by the Bank from the mid-70s to the early 90s, have wreaked havoc on the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. The Yacyretá dam in Paraguay and Argentina, financed in the 1980s and early 1990s by the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank, has been the subject of multiple inspection panel claims and yet problems persist and effective remedial measures remain elusive.

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