Dialogue | Cover
From the World Bank's creation until the late 1960s, the Bank was a relatively conservative institution that primarily funded infrastructure and other basics. In 1968, former Pentagon chief Robert McNamara became Bank President and dedicated the Bank to continually rising loan levels. Between 1968 and 1981, when McNamara resigned, the Bank loan levels increased twelve fold, from $883 million to $12 billion, and have continued soaring since McNamara's time. The World Bank is helping Third World governments cripple their economies, maul their environments, and oppress their people. Though the Bank was started with the highest ideals 70 years ago, the Bank now consistently does more harm than good for the world's poorest. The Bank now exists largely to maximize the transfer of resources to Third World governments. And, by doing this, the Bank has greatly increased political and bureaucratic control over the lives of the poorest of the poor. The World Bank has a long and dismal record of getting involved in human rights atrocities. Despite the Bank's moral self-righteousness, the Bank often shows little or no concern for the welfare of poor citizens. When McNamara took over and began boosting lending in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Bank's standards for its loan nosedived. McNamara's favorite foreign leader was Julius Nyerere, ruler of Tanzania. Tanzania has received more Bank aid per capita than any other country. And the Bank's unconditional support of the dictatorial regime of Julius Nyerere is a major cause of Tanzanian people's current misery. In the early 1970s, with Bank aid and advice, Nyerere implemented his ujamaa, or villagization program. Nyerere sent the Tanzanian army to drive the peasants off their land, burn down their huts, load them onto trucks, and take them where government thought they should live - where they were ordered to build themselves new homes "in neat rows staked our for them by government officials." Nyerere wanted to curb the people's individualistic and capitalistic tendencies and make them easier to control. He even outlawed people sleeping in their own gardens at night which meant monkeys were free to help themselves. In many cases, the new government villages were far away from the farmers' lands, so the farmers imply quit tilling the land. The Bank helped finance brutal policies of the government of Vietnam in the late 1970s that contributed to tens of thousands of boat people dying in the South China Sea. After North Vietnam invaded and conquered South Vietnam, there was widespread dissent in the south against the new government's forced collectivization policy. In
August 1978, the Bank loaned $60 million to the government of Vietnam - even after widely circulated reports in the West of massive concentration camps and brutal repression. The Bank announced the loan would finance "an irrigation project that will boost rice production." But, a confidential Bank report admitted, "The main effort to deal with the employment problem (in the south) consists of the creation of New Economic Zones - agricultural settlements that are intended to resettle 4 or 5 million people by the end of 1980." The report conceded that the project was risky because of the possibility of rebellion among farmers. Farmers who resisted the government's "reorganization" were sent out in leaky boats and thousands drowned in the South China Sea. The Bank was planning on giving five more loans to Vietnam until the U.S. Congress raised a ruckus. The Bank loaned the government of Indonesia over $600 million to remove - sometimes forcibly several million people from the densely populated island of Java and resettle them on comparatively barren islands in Indonesia. Despite widespread reports of violence, the Bank continues lauding the project as "the largest voluntary migration" in recent history. The Indonesian government simultaneously resettled Javanese on the island of East Timor - which the army seized in 1975. The army's butcheries and forced starvation policies killed an estimated 150,000 of the island's 600,000 inhabitants. The World Bank provided massive assistance to the Ethiopian Marxist regime of Mengistu Haile-Mariam. In the midst of the 1984-85 famine, when starvation reportedly threatened 7 million Ethiopians, the government launched a massive "resettlement" program to deport hundreds of thousands of people in the north of the country and forcibly move them to the south. According to Doctors Without Borders, a French medical assistance group, the resettlement program may have killed more people than the famine itself. The Economist cited Ethiopia in 1986 for the worst human rights record in the world. Yet, the Bank kept open its money-spigots for the oppressive regime. Bank commitments to Ethiopia in 1985 equaled roughly 16% of the government's budget. A May, 1987 $39 million handout went for "Ministry of Agriculture institutional development", among other things, even though the Agriculture Ministry was heavily involved in the brutal villigization program (The Bank continues to finance violent, oppressive resettlement programs in Ethiopia, as evinced by the 2012 Human Rights Report, “Waiting Here for Death: Displacement and ‘Villagization’ in Ethiopia’s Gambella Region”). Throughout India, South America, and elsewhere, the Bank has created thousands of "development refugees," as
Dialogue by KCL Politics Society ————————————————————- Page 5 of 46