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The World Bank and the Triumph of Third World Statism
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14624 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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5 / 1988 |
2,350 Words |
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James Bovard
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The World Bank is probably the most powerful multilateral institution in the world. Each year, the World Bank distributes more than $15 billion to Third World and Eastern European governments. Unfortunately, the Bank has been almost uniformly a force for statism and increased political control of the economy around the globe. World Bank loans have often made life more miserable for the poorest of the poor.
The Bank is now seeking a 60 percent increase in its general capital in order to finance a large increase in its lending. But before Western governments and taxpayers approve an increase in Bank lending, it is important to better understand how the Bank is currently using the capital it now has.
The World Bank's raison d'etre in its early years was to encourage development. Now, the Bank exists largely to maximize the transfer of resources to Third World governments. Bank officials are leading a rhetorical crusade in favor of the private sector. But every time the Bank loudly praises the private sector, it silently damns its own record.
The World Bank has shown little or no concern for human rights in the distribution of its billions. In the late 1970s, the Bank helped finance the government of Vietnam's brutal collectivization policy that contributed to the deaths of tens of thousands of boat people in the South China Sea.
The World Bank has loaned the government of Indonesia over $600 million to remove--sometimes forcibly--several million people from the heavily populated island of Java and resettle them on comparatively barren islands. One Australian newspaper columnist denounced the program as "the Javanese version of Nazi Germany's Lebensraum." The London-based Anti-Slavery Society for Human Rights reported that at least one supposedly vacant island given to the migrants was already inhabited and that the Indonesian army cleared the island by setting fire to the original inhabitants' crops. The World Bank is still actively supporting Indonesia's resettlement policy.
In Ethiopia, the regime of Mengistu Haile Marian was denounced by the Economist for having the worst human rights record in the world. The Ethiopian government is forcibly resettling people from the northern highlands to the southern part of Ethiopia--with a reported 100,000 deaths in the process.
Even though the Ethiopian government is destroying the Ethiopian people, the World Bank is providing massive amounts of aid to the government. In 1985, World Bank commitments comprised roughly 16 percent of the government's budget. In May 1987, the Bank gave $39 million for "ministry agriculture institutional development," even though the agriculture ministry is heavily involved in the brutal resettlement campaign.
Development refugees
Throughout India, South America, and elsewhere, the Bank is creating hundreds of thousands of "development refugees," as Environmental Defense Fund attorney Bruce Rich calls them. In a Bank-financed project in Singrauli, India, according to Rich "200,000 to 300,000 of the rural poor have been subject to forced relocation twice, three times and in some cases, four or five times in 25 years--each time with little or no compensation.
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