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Talking
World Bank blues
By
Derek MacCuish The
young gentleman from Ghana sat directly opposite the man from the World Bank at
the conference table, and asked why the World Bank doesn=t engage Ghanaian
expertise in its water projects. He said they opposed the privatization of
water, but wanted to find ways to improve the inefficient system they have. The
problem is that the World Bank is forcing the sale of the water system as a
condition of debt relief and other assistance, and the only possible buyers are
foreign corporations. Why
go to outside people, he asked. They could use the talent to be found within
Ghana, and benefit from local knowledge. The
World Bank official’s response? He described how, in the 1960s, the French
brought their engineers from Paris into Abidjan, Cote d=Ivoire and built the
best water supply system in Africa. He left it to us to draw our own
conclusions. The
next day, in a discussion about Third World debt, another World Bank official
said that maintaining a certain level of indebtedness was a good thing, meaning
that it helped in managing a country=s economy. In
a two hour meeting on the debt crisis attended by dozens of NGO representatives,
another official responded to one speaker after another with a smile and a look
of understanding, saying that the points raised were certainly interesting, and
that we should have a good discussion about it – some other time. Welcome
to the World Bank consultations with civil society that have become part of its
Annual Meetings ritual. Always polite, frequently dismaying, and once in a great
while helpful, these discussions take place in the days prior to the World
Bank’s meetings. Activists of all stripes converge on Washington, lobbying for
debt relief, transparency and information disclosure, and against privatization
and oil and mining projects. I
was there in late September for the Social Justice Committee and the Halifax
Initiative Coalition, as I have often been before, spending several days in
back-to-back discussions on everything from mining operations in Peru to the
privatization of peanuts in Senegal. Many
meetings are with the World Bank and IMF staff, but an equal number are with
partners from around the world, and these are where the inspiration and hope are
to be found. They
include people like the doctor from India who is fighting the privatization of
health care because it robs the poor of basic service, the activist from
Tanzania who is facing the double burden of pushing for debt relief and against
government corruption, and the environmentalist from Nicaragua who wants
Northern NGOs to join the struggle against the Plan Puebla Panama. The
Social Justice Committee will be adapting its advocacy and education activities
to respond to ongoing shifts in global dynamics. We have begun to place a
greater emphasis on the conditions attached to debt relief, especially
privatisation, deregulation and cuts to public service spending, and we are
expanding our work with partners around the world to ensure that we contribute
in a meaningful way to the struggle for social and economic justice. This
includes pushing for information, transparency of process, and the
accountability of the financial institutions, but it mainly means aiming for the
empowerment of affected communities.
Déjà
vu in Guatemala
The
return of brutality and oppression to the haunted land by
Ernie Schibli The
news report was short and brutal. Manuel Garcia de la Cruz, an activist with the
National Coordination of the Widows of Back
in the mid-1980s I made a hurried trip to Manuel
Garcia de la Cruz was not assassinated in the 1980s. He died on Friday,
September 6, 2002. While none of us at the SJC knew him personally, Conavigua is
an organization with which we have worked for many years. In the ‘80s and
‘90s, for example, many people bought Conavigua handicrafts from us as a way
of providing a bit of support for their work. At
the end of July, upon my return from yet another trip to Certainly,
the poverty - or should I say, the misery - is every bit as bad as it was back
then. The virtual collapse of the coffee industry has led the coffee plantation
barons to throw thousands of men, women and children out of their homes and off
of the tiny plots of land on which they sustained themselves. Human rights
workers in This,
in turn, has given rise to land occupations in various parts of the country.
People have to survive and there is unplanted land, land that morally might well
be theirs and so they occupy it. To complete the spiral, the leaders of these
land occupations are themselves threatened and killed. I do not yet know exactly
why Manuel was killed, but his death, notable for its savage cruelty, is only
the latest (at the time of writing) in a string of assassinations of human
rights workers. Was
he active in a land occupation or was he involved in the exhumations of bodies
buried in clandestine graves? Or was it simply an act of intimidation? Does it
really matter? We
were in the car on the way to Huehuetenango when we stopped for a newspaper.
What we read was unbelievable. The extreme right-wing government announced that
it would be indemnifying thousands of former civil patrol (PACs) members for
service during the country’s civil war. Do
you remember them? They were the civilians, recruited or coerced by the army to
fight against the guerrillas. Both the Catholic Church and the United Nations,
in their respective reports, declared these patrols and the military, under
which they served, responsible for over 90% of the human rights violations
during the war. (You may recall that Bishop Juan Gerardi was brutally murdered
just days after he released the church report.) Now patrol members will be paid
for their work, either through a special tax or international loans. Either way,
the victims will end up paying those who persecuted them! Meanwhile the civil
patrols are reorganizing, quite illegally, to serve at the beck and call of the
government that is paying them off. The
re-emergence of the PACs is in violation of the Peace Accords signed a little
more than five years ago. In many instances, it is people connected with the
PACs who threaten people involved in the exhumations of bodies buried in
clandestine graves throughout The
people are poorer. There is no land reform. The army is stronger. The PACs are
reorganizing. And Manuel Garcia de la Cruz is tortured and murdered. What
year is it, anyway?
Supreme
Court of Mexico upholds flawed law on Indigenous
rights
By
Karen Rothschild The
law on indigenous rights has been the subject of 320 legal complaints presented
to the Background: The
COCOPA bill, drawn up by, is a legislative proposal for the constitutional
reforms needed in order to put the San Andres Accords on Indigenous Rights and
Culture into effect. The Accords were signed by the Mexican government and the
EZLN (the Zapatistas) during the Zedillo administration in 1996. Having signed
the Accords, the government took no steps to put them into effect. The
multi-party congressional mediating body, the Comission for Agreement and
Peace-making (COCOPA), attempted to break the impasse by submitting a proposal
for the constitutional reforms needed for the Accords to become a reality. Despite
reservations - it falls somewhat short of the San Andres Accords - the Zapatista
accepted the COCOPA proposal. The Zedillo government rejected the proposal and
made an (unsuccessful) attempt to have the Congress pass its own, much weaker,
counter-proposal. When
President Fox took office, he raised the hopes of indigenous Mexicans by
submitting the COCOPA proposal for congressional approval. However, in the face
of strong congressional opposition, particularly from within the ranks of his
own party, his defence of the proposal was lukewarm. The bill that was finally
passed by the Congress is not only inconsistent with the San Andres Accords but
is in contradiction with Many
analysts believe that the inadequacies of the new law reveal the Mexican
state’s unwillingness to honour Article 25 of Covenant 169, which stipulates
that “Indigenous peoples have the right to own, develop, control and use the
lands and territories, including the total environment of the lands, airs,
waters, coastal seas, sea-ice, flora and fauna and other resources which they
have traditionally owned or otherwise occupied or used ...” as well as Article
26, which stipulates that States must obtain the “free and informed consent”
of indigenous peoples “prior to the approval of any project affecting their
lands, territories, and other resources...” The
contradictions between the Articles and the Mexican government’s
mega-development programme the Plan Puebla The
previous Mayor of Mexico City and former presidential candidate for the left-of-centre
Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, commented in
the newspaper La Jornada on September 10 that the judges (who are known as
ministros - ministers) of the Supreme Court did not want to have a confrontation
with the heads of the regime of which they are a part, and whose interests and
visions they share. Indigenous
spokespeople and representatives of social organizations continue to express
their concern over the Supreme Court decision. A meeting in Chilpancingo,
Guerrero, was convoked September 11 by organizations from twelve Mexican states
and The
Mexican Demonstrations
against the Plan “The historical reality of
Mexican indigenous peoples has been one of poverty, eviction from their land,
political violence, mistreatment at the hands of the police and army, and
exclusion from government policies. Nevertheless, because of their ability not
only to resist but to make suggestions for change, the indigenous peoples of President Fox presented the
COCOPA bill to Congress, but he did not defend it in the same way that he had
defended his other bills, such as the GST bill and now his proposals for the
privatization of the electrical industry. The members of Congress distorted the
COCOPA bill, making it a hostage to their party interests and inter-party
negotiations. In spite of the negative reactions to the (final) text of the bill
and of the fact that (when sent to the state legislatures for approval) it was
rejected by the states with the largest percentage of indigenous citizens,
Congress approved the bill a year ago. They did not ascribe importance to the
fact that in so doing they wre closing the door to the possibility of a
resumption in the peace talks between the government and EZLN. (SJC These talks
were broken off in 1996 not long after the signing of the San Andres Accords,
which had marked the successful conclusion of the first stage in what were to
have been multi-part discussions.) Thus the Executive and Legislative Powers
turned their backs on the agreements signed with the indigenous peoples. Faced with this situation, the
indigenous peoples, represented by 330 indigenous municipalities, approached the
Supreme Court in the expectation that the Court would show that there are
institutional mechanisms for responding to violations of the Constitution on the
part of the legislative and executive branches of the government.. (in the
Spanish text “governmental organs”.) The aim (of the 330 municipalities) was
the legal enforcement of Covenant 169 and of the rights - such as the right to
be consulted - that are recognized in that Covenant. Yesterday, the Supreme Court
announced their negative decision ... thus dismissing the demands for guarantees
of due process and for a judicial system that takes account of the collective
rights of the indigenous peoples ... Today, through the media, we learn that the
Court in plenary decided to declare inadmissible the 322 legal complaints,
arguing that it (the Court) has no legal authority over the so-called reforming
body of the Constitution (Congress and the state legislatures). In so doing,
they give to the members of the (federal) legislature a potentially unlimited
power to distort the Constitution ... and to disregard the fundamental rights
that are inscribed in the Constitution and in international agreements. (SJC
comment: In a newspaper interview published after this statement was written,
Chief Justice Genaro David Góngora Pimentel stated that the Supreme Court had
not addressed the question of whether or not there had been irregularities in
the manner in which the indigenous law had been voted upon by the state
legislatures. In the opinion of the Court, it was up to the federal Congress to
decide whether or not there had been irregularities, and Congress had already
indicated its approval of the procedures used by the state legislatures.) A decision such as the one that
is being reported today only demonstrates the Court’s incapacity and
unwillingness to be the true protector of the Constitution. It shows a lack of
independence with regard to the other branches of government that leaves the
actions of these branches with no counterweight ... Today’s news release
represents an attack on the indigenous peoples of The path of legality has ended.
The doors of the
Harassment
a feature of daily life in Chiapas
Excerpts
from a report issued September 4, 2002 by the Network of Community Defenders, A
convoy of forty soldiers from the Tonina military base arrived at the road
junction to the ejidal community of Sasamtic (in the Although
they had Sr. López’ authorization to use his land parcel, the army had not
sought permission from the ejidal authorities to build their camp within the
ejidal community.. When the authorities attempted to discuss this with Sr. López,
he informed them that the soldiers had told him that he should not be fearful;
he had military support and good firearms, and nobody could do anything to the
army because it was under the command of the President of the Republic.
According to Sr. López, the soldiers also stated that more than 7,000 troops
were on their way to the area and that a number of camps would be installed in
different places. On
August 6th, a woman bus passenger, waiting to change buses at the Sasamtic road
junction was forcibly detained for three days in the military camp. Homes
in Sasamtic do not have piped water. Residents used to get their household water
from a local spring. This has now become impossible. Their water source is being
fouled by the soldiers, who are using it for bathing and washing as well as
throwing garbage into it. Without
consulting either the ejidal authorities or the owner of the woodlot in
question, the soldiers are proceeding to chop down trees in order to get wood
for building their huts. They are also going from house to house in the
community looking for women to work for them as domestic servants. However, the
women in the communities, most of whom are indigenous women, are unaccustomed to
being with soldiers or to domestic service. People
in the communities, men, women, children, and old people, feel intimidated by
the army’s presence. They do not feel able to go about freely to do their
daily work. They fear the ills that have befallen other communities where there
are military bases: prostitution; rifts within the community; the strengthening
of the paramilitary group members who have begun to be active in the region;
harassment by army patrols, overflights by military planes and helicopters...
The men are reluctant to leave the women alone while they go off to work in the
cornfields, and the children are afraid to go to school. Local people are not
used to living with strangers. They feel that the army has no business in the
area. They state that they, the indigenous communities, know how to look after
themselves and to ensure their own protection. ö
The
continuing crisis of impoverished countries’ debt
By
Derek MacCuish In
impoverished countries, the struggle for a living takes place close to the edge.
The
participants bear the weight of a thousand physical, spiritual and emotional
burdens, none of which are reflected adequately in the statistics of disease and
mortality that we use to reference poverty. Childhood friends lost to diarrhea,
teenage friends lost to AIDS, mothers broken by labour and fathers lost to the
city or to the mines or to despair and its chemical manifestations. The scale of
tragedy we allow is beyond comprehension. There
are obvious beginnings to solutions available now. Reducing poverty will require
action in health and nutrition, conflict and the arms trade, governance and
corruption, technology transfer and Western protectionism. For any of these to
be successful, we will have to understand that the fight against poverty to mean
more than increased income, that it has to be a fight for empowerment of the
people affected. The
severe indebtedness of impoverished countries has been recognized for years as
one of the main obstacles to economic growth, and some level of social
improvement, since the 1980s or 1990s (depending on whether one understood
“debt crisis” to refer to banks or to people). People overwhelmingly agree
that regions like sub-Sahara Public
support of debt cancellation grew stronger throughout the 1990s, and in 1996 the
World Bank and IMF - at the request of the G7 group of rich countries - launched
the Heavily Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) Initiative. Since then, the financial
institutions and the wealthy country that direct them have been tacking against
the current of opinion, postponing and minimizing actual relief while arguing
that their movements to and fro are proof of progress. If
the goal is a resolution to the debt crisis in impoverished countries, the
Heavily Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) Initiative program has meant little in the
short term, and will mean nothing at all in the long. More damaging still, the
conditions attached to the program are designed to dis-empower the state while
enhancing private sector capacity, regardless of the impact on vulnerable
communities. Criticism
of current debt relief program can be considered in three levels. The first
looks at the speed and depth of the relief. Only six countries have reached the
“completion point” since the 1996 launch of the HIPC Initiative. Relief
given is insignificant, based as it is on unrealistic IMF export growth
predictions that no one ever took seriously. There
is no indication that G7 leaders are willing to push for deeper and faster
action and so, even at this first level, there is a disheartening failure of
political will. The
second level of criticism targets the World Bank. Any reduction in World Bank
debts that does take place is actually being covered by the rich countries. The
Bank itself refuses to write off debts. This debt is about a third of what
impoverished countries are scheduled to pay each year. About 30% of the payments
to the World Bank are interest payments on old, unproductive debt that provides
no ongoing benefit to the economy. Meanwhile, levels of indebtedness are too
high for productive new funding. The
World Bank has sufficient resources to manage full cancellation of these debts,
including substantial loan loss provisions and the resources of its main
division, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, without
harm to its operations. The Bank sometimes argues that debt cancellation would
affect its future lending capacity, an interesting position to take in that it
reveals its priority (similar to too many other institutions): to ensure that it
continue to exist, no matter the need or the cost. The
reason for the failure to adequately cancel debts of impoverished countries can
be found at the third level of criticism, which targets the conditions attached
to relief. The
lynchpin of the major debt relief programs, including those of individual
creditor countries, is the HIPC Initiative directed by the World Bank and IMF.
Central to the design of this program is the requirement that countries complete
the structural adjustment conditions set by the Bank and Fund. The HIPC
Initiative has strengthened the hand of the Bank and Fund in demanding
compliance in the three main aspects of market system adjustment -
privatization, deregulation, and cutbacks in public service spending. For
example, it is common practice for the Bank and Fund to delay or deny debt
relief when countries are deemed reluctant to privatize public services like
electricity, telecommunications or water, and natural resources like oil, gas
and mining. In
other words, the World Bank and IMF are refusing full debt cancellation because
they are using the crisis to force compliance with expanded private ownership
and exploitation of resources. The
need for cancellation has been recognized for years. There is capacity to do so.
In the final analysis, the reason it hasn’t been done is because of continuing
dynamics of exploitive power and impoverishment. ö
Interview:
Fighting water privatization in Pakistan
Aly
Ercelawn of Citizens’ Water
is one of the most basic needs of people, yet clean piped water only reaches a
fraction of To
briefly fill you in on the past few years: when we got to know the details and
made a public fuss about water privatization, the Bank and the government backed
off. But very recently we were leaked a memo by a visiting Asian Development
bank mission that called again for water privatization as a condition for
extending further financial assistance to What
the government is doing with oil and gas drilling shows how reckless it is. It
has given a long term concession to multinationals to drill for oil and gas.
This concession is smack in the middle of a protective natural park, protected
in the sense that is on the list of parks that the United Nations had been
notified of. By law, nothing is supposed to happen in terms of commercial
activity inside the park. When CREED, amongst others, went to court against
Shell and other companies involved in this and the government, the government
simply changed the law. The judicial system did not respond to this infraction
by saying ‘no- no you do not do this sort of thing, you don’t change things
in midstream’. The government doesn’t care really, despite protests from the
ICU, protests from other environmental agencies. Why
I say this is an illustration of a reckless obsession with privatization is
perhaps best seen from yet another example: fisheries. The government recently
decided that they would open the coasts again. The wastage from industrial
fishing is enormously high; they’ll keep a kilo and throw away four kilos of
perfectly edible fish, well suited for the local market. The government has
decided that it wants to earn foreign exchange and industrial fishing is all
multinational fishing. Local fisherfolk don’t have those sort of boats or that
capacity to ravage the seas. Unfortunately,
all of this is done behind closed doors, without public debate. We’ll have to
heat things up again, but now with a military regime there are many more
restrictions on progressive action than there were a few years ago. We still
have a relatively free press but assembly is totally banned which means that we
can’t have demonstrations against what is happening. CREED still managed to
raise a bit of a fuss at a recent so-called consultative meeting organized by
the World Bank on The
government points to the massive losses that the public sector makes; and the
World Bank stresses quite correctly that it is the poor who bear the burden of
these public sector losses because we have a very regressive taxation system. So
far so good. But I don’t believe in the next step of their logic: that the
only thing that we can do is to bring in the private sector, and basically
substitute private profit for public corruption. We have a military government,
and the army believes that all civilians are totally corrupt. I don’t know why
they don’t extend the same argument to people who speak a different language.
I mean a French firm, or a Brit firm, or a Canadian firm is somehow thought to
have a degree of honesty working in Pakistan that Pakistanis never could have. I
don’t believe that anyone is more honest or less honest, it is just the
environment that people have to work in. In the absence of any kind of political
or economic accountability to the citizens, anyone who comes in behaves the same
way. We’ll
end up with fake privatization. Privatization is supposed to give more choices
and reduce prices. Think again about the water privatization proposal. The World
Bank proposed that the government guarantee a profit to a private company to do
the job. If you guarantee profits, you are not creating an efficient private
sector, you are just rewarding a monopoly. The World Bank consultant said that
no one would come to Pakistan unless you promised them a profit, so the
government agreed. Now if you guarantee those kind of profits and salaries to
the public sector, they would do very well too. Our main problem is a lack of
public funding and the reason for that is that an enormous share of the budget,
over 1/3 of it, goes to the military. Another 1/3 or more goes to debt servicing
and of course what you have left is for running the government. Here’s where
the bank’s logic comes in: if you need money, the only way you can get that
money is through the private sector. To
summarize what’s involved here, there is the government, which is very
insecure about it’s own capacity for reform, and the citizens, who are
incredibly cynical about the public sector. A lot of poor people whom we wanted
to join us would say ‘well things couldn’t get worse under privatization,’
referring to how corrupt the private sector was. That degree of cynicism comes
from dealing daily with massive injustice, and I use that word very carefully
because I have been working on understanding the scale and the intensity of
forced labor in Pakistan. I have spent almost an entire year working with people
who were chained and abused in various ways and this has been happening to
millions of people for decades. All these injustices in Pakistan make people
cynical about reform, which is a challenge for us and makes working for CREED
interesting. I’m
glad to talk with you because you represent the social justice movement and we
are very much with you. Social justice if not today, then tomorrow. If not
tomorrow, then for our grandchildren. ö
“Development”
- a weapon against the poor?
By
Karen Rothschild Mexican
journalist Hermann Bellinghausen has commented that the “war against
poverty” is all too often a war against the poor. It is possible to take his
comment one step further and to suggest that what has been called
“development” has been one of the principle weapons in the war against the
poor. In the literature on international development, there is no shortage of
examples of failed projects. Almost all of these projects have in common the
fact that the price of their failure has been paid by the poor - or by those
whom the projects have impoverished. Frequently these victims of development are
the people who were supposed to have been its beneficiaries. In
his “History of Development," Swiss anthropologist Gilbert Rist shows how
the failures of development have not led its promoters to lose faith or to
question the notion of development. Rather, they have led to a call for a
Reformation, for a continued effort to find the right path to development, the
right kind of development. As
many have pointed out, the concept of development is based on an evolutionary
view of human society, and the conviction that there is but one path for social
change, the path taken by the industrialized societies of the North. From this
Northern evolutionary perspective, this path represents progress; there can be
no deviation. Those who criticize are romantics or luddites. Even criticism
itself is a Northern luxury. The benighted populations of the South are waiting
to be saved by genetically modified foods, open pit gold mines, oversized
hydroelectric dams and the like. Wolfgang
Sachs makes a distinction between a dignified poverty and misery. Often, it is
the process of development that turns poverty into misery. This can happen in
many ways. Poor fishermen can lose their livelihood to the construction of a
luxury tourist resort, as happened in The
writings of Indian environmentalist Vandana Shiva and novelist Arundhati Roy
contain many examples of how the poor become the victims of development.
Arundhati Roy has documented the displacement of millions of poor peasants
caused by the building of dams of very doubtful benefit to anyone (except their
designers and builders including Western companies and experts). Vandana Shiva
has described how the building of a modern milk-processing plant provides
luxuries, such as ice-cream and yoghurt, for the middle class while depriving
the poor of the very low cost buttermilk that was a by-product of the
small-scale processing of refined butter (before the dairy industry was revamped
in order to provide milk for the modern plants).. She has also shown how the
green revolution has led to less food for the poor. Not only has the green
revolution's emphasis on high-yielding varieties of rice and wheat caused a
decline in the cultivation of less expensive cereals and pulses consumed by the
poor, but, with the advent of high yield varieties and modern farming methods,
it has become impossible for the poor to glean the fields after the harvest. The
real objective of development is either to take advantage of something the poor
have, for instance land that is rich in bio-diversity or in sub-soil resources,
or to integrate them more fully into the market.. Rather than the juice of local
fruit or tea from local plants, they should drink coca-cola or even tisane from
Québec. A subsistence farmer who saves his seeds from one growing season to the
next may be very poor but he has a certain degree of independence. If he
switches to Aimproved" seeds, he will probably, at least for a while, have
higher yields, and he may have more income. But he will have become dependent
not only on the seed companies but on the cash needed to purchase their
products. Should he have a poor harvest or should there be a decline in the
price of his marketable surplus, he is likely to become even poorer than he was
when he saved his own seeds; he may even of lose his land. (He may in fact have
used his land as collateral in order to get a loan to buy his seeds.) More
and more voices from North and South are questioning the development model in
which we are all, willingly or unwillingly, ensnared. A meeting of campesinos in
Chiapas is very likely to include not only a call for the withdrawal of the army
and the disbanding of the paramilitary groups, but also a refusal to accept
genetically-modified corn, an attack on chemical farming, a rejection of the
maquila factories, and, most importantly, an affirmation of indigenous cultural
traditions. In The
campesino organizations belonging to the international coalition Via Campesina
are taking the lead in challenging the globalization of agriculture - insisting
that agricultural production should be primarily for the domestic market, and
that agro-exports should play a role that is only secondary and that is always
respectful of the domestic agriculture of the importing country. We are all
aware of organizations in Canada, including Via Campesina affiliates the
National Farmers Union and the Union paysanne, that are challenging the logic of
development - a logic in which every part of life is reduced to its marketable
terms. It
goes without saying that there are indeed countless numbers of people living in
intolerable conditions. To question development is not to suggest that their
condition should remain unchanged. It is rather to say that the people concerned
must themselves define the kind of social change that they need and how it can
be brought about. ö You
are invited to respond. Send
your thoughts to: Editor,
Upstream Journal The
Social Justice Committee 1857
deMaisonneuve ouest Montreal
QC H3H 1J9 Canada editor@upstreamjournal.org |
