From Huffington Post
By Sasha Chavkin, Ben Hallman, Michael Hudson, Cécile
Schilis-Gallego and Shane Shifflett
With reporting from Musikilu Mojeed, Besar Likmeta, Ciro
Barros, Giulia Afiune, Mar Cabra, Anthony Langat, Jacob Kushner, Jeanne Baron,
Barry Yeoman, Blaž Zgaga and Friedrich Lindenberg.
Read More - http://projects.huffingtonpost.com/worldbank-evicted-abandoned
THURSDAY, APRIL 16, 2015, 12:01 AM EDT
Beneath a gloomy white sky, more than 100 armed police
poured into the slum of Badia East in the teeming megacity of Lagos, Nigeria.
As they advanced, they cracked their batons on the unpaved
streets and against the ramshackle walls of the shanties.
“If you love your life, move out!” the officers shouted.
Thousands of people grabbed what belongings they could carry
and fled.
Then a line of hulking excavators moved in, using their
hydraulic claws to smash homes into pieces. Within hours, the neighborhood was
a ruin.
Bimbo Omowole Osobe briefly lost track of her children in
the chaos. When she returned to the community hours later, her concrete-block
home and two small shops were gone.
“It’s like when a woman goes in for labor, and the baby
comes out dead,” she said. “That’s how it felt to me.”
The Lagos state government flattened Badia East in February
2013 to clear land in an urban renewal zone financed by the World Bank, the
global lender committed to fighting poverty. The neighborhood’s poor residents
were cast out without warning or compensation and left to fend for themselves
in a crowded, dangerous city.
Evictions like the one in Badia East aren’t supposed to
happen in the middle of projects backed by the World Bank.
For more than three decades, the lender has maintained a set
of “safeguard” policies that it claims have brought about a more humane and
democratic system of economic development. Governments that borrow money from
the bank can’t force people from their homes without warning. Families evicted
to make way for dams, power plants or other big projects must be resettled and
their livelihoods restored.
The bank’s commitment, it says, is to “do no harm” to people
or the environment.
The World Bank has broken its promise.
Over the past decade, the bank has regularly failed to
enforce its rules, with devastating consequences for some of the poorest and
most vulnerable people on the planet, an investigation by the International
Consortium of Investigative Journalists, The Huffington Post and other media
partners has found.
The World Bank often neglects to properly review projects
ahead of time to make sure communities are protected, and frequently has no
idea what happens to people after they are removed. In many cases, it has
continued to do business with governments that have abused their citizens,
sending a signal that borrowers have little to fear if they violate the bank’s
rules, according to current and former bank employees.
“There was often no intent on the part of the governments to
comply — and there was often no intent on the part of the bank’s management to
enforce,” said Navin Rai, a former World Bank official who oversaw the bank’s
protections for indigenous peoples from 2000 to 2012. “That was how the game
was played.”
In March, after ICIJ and HuffPost informed World Bank
officials that the news outlets had found “systemic gaps” in the institution’s
protections for displaced families, the bank acknowledged that its oversight
has been poor, and promised reforms.
“We took a hard look at ourselves on resettlement and what
we found caused me deep concern,” Jim Yong Kim, the World Bank’s president,
said in a statement.
The scope of “involuntary resettlement,” as the bank calls
it, is vast. From 2004 to 2013, the bank’s projects physically or economically
displaced an estimated 3.4 million people, forcing them from their homes,
taking their land or damaging their livelihoods, ICIJ’s analysis of World Bank
records reveals.
The true figure is likely higher, because the bank often
fails to count or undercounts the number of people affected by its projects.
A team of more than 50 journalists from 21 countries spent
nearly a year documenting the bank’s failure to protect people moved aside in
the name of progress. The reporting partners analyzed thousands of World Bank
records, interviewed hundreds of people and reported on the ground in Albania,
Brazil, Ethiopia, Honduras, Ghana, Guatemala, India, Kenya, Kosovo, Nigeria,
Peru, Serbia, South Sudan and Uganda.
In these countries and others, the investigation found, the
bank’s lapses have hurt urban slum dwellers, hardscrabble farmers, impoverished
fisherfolk, forest dwellers and indigenous groups — leaving them to fight for
their homes, their land and their ways of life, sometimes in the face of
intimidation and violence.
Between 2004 and 2013, the World Bank and its private-sector
lending arm, the International Finance Corp., committed to lend $455 billion to
bankroll nearly 7,200 projects in developing countries.
Over the same span, people affected by World Bank and IFC
investments lodged dozens of complaints with the lenders’ internal review
panels, alleging the lenders and their borrowers failed to live up to World
Bank and IFC safeguard rules.
In Lagos, the World Bank’s ombudsman, the Inspection Panel,
said bank management “fell short of protecting the poor and vulnerable
communities against forceful evictions.” Bank officials should have paid better
attention to what was going on in Badia East, the panel said, given Lagos
authorities’ long history of bulldozing slums and forcing people from their
homes.
One year after the evictions, the bank loaned Lagos
authorities $200 million to support the state government’s budget.
The World Bank said it was “not a party to the demolition”
and that it advised the Lagos government to negotiate with displaced people,
leading to compensation for most of those who said they’d been harmed.
Cases involving evictions have drawn the most attention, but
the most common hardships suffered by people living in the path of World Bank
projects involve lost or diminished income.
On India’s northwest coast, members of a historically
oppressed Muslim community claim that heated water spewing from a coal-fueled
power plant has depleted fish and lobster stocks in the once-fertile gulf where
they make their living. The IFC loaned Tata Power, one of India’s largest
companies, $450 million to help build the plant.
The U.S. and other global powers launched the World Bank at
the end of World War II to promote development in countries torn by war and
poverty. Member countries finance the bank and vote on whether to approve
roughly $65 billion in annual loans, grants and other investments.
In 2014, the bank financed initiatives as varied as training
for chicken farmers in Senegal and sewage system upgrades in the West Bank and
Gaza Strip.
What Is The World Bank?
The World Bank Group is the globe’s most
prestigious development lender, bankrolling hundreds of government projects
each year in pursuit of its high-minded mission: to combat the scourge of
poverty by backing new transit systems, power plants, dams and other projects
it believes will help boost the fortunes of poor people.
1.
IBRD
International
Bank for Reconstruction and Development,
one of the two lending arms
traditionally considered to be the World Bank
Typically
lends to middle-income governments, also some creditworthy low-income
countries
Founded
in 1944
FY
2014 commitments $18.6 billion
Lends
at market rate
Guarantees
loans
2.
IDA
International
Development Association,
one of the two lending arms traditionally
considered to be the World Bank
Typically
lends to low-income governments
Founded
in 1960
FY
2014 commitments $22.2 billion
Lends
at low interest rate
3.
IFC
International
Finance Corporation,
the World Bank's private lending arm
Typically
lends to private firms in developing (low- to middle-income) countries
Founded
in 1956
FY
2014 commitments $17.3 billion
Lends
at market rate
Guarantees
loans
Invests
in private companies
World Bank President Kim said in March that the demand in
struggling regions for infrastructure spending — to provide clean water,
electricity, medical care and other vital needs — will mean the bank will
finance an increasing number of big projects likely to remove people from their
land or disrupt their livelihoods.
The World Bank also put out a 5½-page “action plan” that it
said would improve its oversight of resettlement.
“We must and will do better,” said David Theis, a World Bank
spokesman, in response to the reporting team’s questions.
Yet even as it promised reforms to its procedures, the bank
has proposed sweeping changes to the policies that underlie them. The bank is
now in the middle of a rewrite of its safeguards policy that will set its
course for decades to come.
Some current and former World Bank officials warn that the
proposed revisions will further undermine the bank’s commitment to protecting
the people it was created to serve. The latest draft of the new policy,
released in July 2014, would give governments more room to sidestep the bank’s
standards and make decisions about whether local populations need protecting,
they say.
“I am saddened to see now that pioneering policy
achievements of the bank are being dismantled and downgraded,” said Michael
Cernea, a former high-ranking bank official who oversaw the bank resettlement
protections for nearly two decades. “The poorest and most powerless will pay
the price.”
The bank says it has listened to the feedback and will
release a revised draft with “the strongest, most state-of-the-art
environmental and social safeguards.”
Unsettled History
A man-made disaster in eastern Brazil in the late 1970s
helped prompt the World Bank to adopt its first systematic protections for
people living in the footprint of big projects.
Rising waters upstream from the Sobradinho Dam, built with
World Bank financing, forced more than 60,000 people from their homes. Their
relocation was poorly planned and chaotic. Some families fled their villages as
water began pouring into their homes and fields, leaving behind herds of
animals to drown.
The fiasco gave Cernea, the World Bank’s first in-house
sociologist, leverage to convince the bank to approve its first comprehensive
policy for protecting people whose lives are upended by the bank’s projects.
Cernea based the new rules, approved by the bank in 1980, on a simple premise:
People who lose their land, their homes or their jobs should get enough help to
restore, or exceed, their old standard of living.
Under the World Bank’s rules, governments seeking money from
the bank must put together detailed resettlement plans for people who are
physically or economically displaced.
Current and former bank employees say the work of enforcing
these standards has often been undercut by internal pressures to win approval
for big, splashy projects. Many bank managers, insiders say, define success by
the number of deals they fund. They often push back against requirements that
add complications and costs.
Daniel Gross, an anthropologist who worked for the bank for
two decades as a consultant and staff member, said in-house safeguards
watchdogs have “a place at the table” in debates over how much the bank is
required to do to protect people. But amid the push to get projects done,
they’re frequently ignored and pressed to “play ball and get along,” he said.
In an internal survey conducted last year by bank auditors,
77 percent of employees responsible for enforcing the institution’s safeguards
said they think that management “does not value” their work. The bank released
the survey in March, at the same time that it admitted to poor oversight of its
resettlement policy.
“Safeguards are irrelevant for managers,” said one staffer
who was surveyed for the report.
No Consolation
In 2007, residents of Jale, a tiny Albanian beach hamlet on
the Ionian Sea, found themselves in the path of a coastal cleanup effort backed
by a $17.5 million loan from the World Bank. More than a dozen poor families
lived in Jale, many in homes with add-ons and extra floors they rented to
vacationers.
Albanian authorities had other plans for the seaside.
They saw Jale as an ideal spot for a high-end resort to lure
tourists to the country. They decided to use the coastal restoration project —
which was managed by the son-in-law of Sali Berisha, Albania’s prime minister
at the time — as a vehicle for turning the plan into a reality.
Before dawn one April morning, dozens of police officers
streamed into the beach community, heading for structures previously identified
in photos taken during aerial surveys paid for by the World Bank. The police
rousted residents from their beds and forced them from their homes. Demolition
crews leveled entire houses or tore down additions that the government said had
been put up without proper permits.
Sanie Halilaj cried as work crews pulled down half of the
house she had shared with her husband for more than half a century.
“When you lose a loved one, someone consoles you,” the
74-year-old said in a recent interview. “But when you lose your home, there is
no consolation.”
Bank officials initially denied the evictions were connected
to the bank-financed coastal initiative. But a year later, the bank’s
Inspection Panel found “direct links” between the project and the demolitions.
The panel slammed the bank for embarking on a “systematic effort” to obstruct
its investigation, providing answers “at times in total conflict with factual
information which had been long known to management.”
After the panel’s report was released in 2008, then-World
Bank Group President Robert Zoellick called the bank’s actions “appalling.”
Zoellick vowed that the institution would swiftly “strengthen oversight,
improve procedures and help the families who had their buildings demolished.”
“The bank cannot let this happen again,” he said.
Seven years later, little has changed. In Jale, most
residents still haven’t received payment from the government for what they
lost, even though the World Bank has covered their legal costs. At the bank,
oversight remains weak.
A 2014 internal World Bank review found that in 60 percent
of sampled cases, bank staffers failed to document what happened to people
after they were forced from their land or homes.
Seventy percent of the cases sampled in the 2014 report
lacked required information about whether anyone had complained and whether
complaints were resolved, indicating the bank’s mechanisms for dealing with
grievances were “box-checking” exercises that “existed on paper but not in
practice,” the in-house reviewers wrote.
These “sizeable gaps in information” indicate “significant
potential failures in the bank’s system for dealing with resettlement,” the
report said. “The inability to confirm that resettlement has been
satisfactorily completed poses a reputational risk for the World Bank.”
‘They Abandoned Us’
Most World Bank investments do not require evictions or damage
people’s ability to earn a living or feed their families. But the percentage of
those that do has increased sharply in recent years.
A 2012 internal audit found that projects in the bank’s
pipeline triggered the bank’s resettlement policy 40 percent of the time —
twice as often as projects the bank had already completed.
The World Bank and IFC have also been boosting support for
mega-projects, such as oil pipelines and dams, that the lenders acknowledge are
most likely to cause “irreversible” social or environmental harm, an analysis
by HuffPost and ICIJ found.
A big project can upend the lives of tens of thousands of
people.
Since 2004, World Bank estimates indicate that at least a
dozen bank-supported projects physically or economically displaced more than
50,000 people each.
Studies show that forced relocations can rip apart kinship
networks and increase risks of illness and disease. Resettled populations are
more likely to suffer unemployment and hunger, and mortality rates are higher.
The World Bank acknowledges that resettlement is difficult,
but says it’s often impossible to build roads, power plants and other
much-needed projects without moving people from their homes.
“We stand by the need to continue financing infrastructure
projects, including those that entail land acquisition and involuntary
resettlement,” said Theis, the World Bank spokesman.
The bank says it strives to make sure its borrowers provide
real help to people pushed aside by big projects. In Laos, the bank says,
authorities built more than 1,300 new homes with electricity and toilets, 32
schools and two health centers for thousands of people forced to move to make
way for a World Bank-financed dam.
“Through careful project design and proper implementation,
land acquisition and involuntary resettlement have resulted in people’s lives
improving significantly,” Theis said in a statement.
In a drought-haunted region of Brazil, farm families pushed
aside by another World Bank-backed dam say that their lives haven’t been
improved.
Thirty-five families live in a tiny, government-built
relocation village called Gameleira, named after the dam and reservoir that
forced them to leave their homes along the Mundaú River.
In their old homes, they could take water from wells and the
river itself, but the relocation village has no fresh water source. A World
Bank report acknowledged a delay in getting water access for the new village,
but said the village’s water issues had been solved by late 2012.
The villagers say that’s not true. They are still waiting,
four years after they were forced to relocate, for local authorities to keep
their promise to build a small pipeline to draw water from the new reservoir to
the relocation village. Meanwhile, water from the reservoir is being piped to
urban areas.
A well in the village produces salty water and, even with
desalination equipment, each family is limited to 36 liters of water a day.
Families supplement their supply by buying from commercial vendors, sometimes
spending as much as a third of their modest incomes.
These purchases provide them enough water to irrigate small
gardens of yuca, beans and corn. If they want to plant cash crops — such as
cashews — they have to wait for rain, which hardly ever comes.
“We feel that we are suffering so that people from the city
can have water,” 39-year-old Francisco Venílson dos Santos, a farmer and father
of four boys and two girls, said. “They abandoned us here.”
In a written statement, the World Bank said it is satisfied
the village was provided an adequate supply of water “both in terms of quantity
and quality.” The bank said it is helping Brazilian authorities deal with
northeast Brazil’s prolonged drought by helping “to increase the resilience of
small rural communities,” giving them advice on drilling emergency groundwater
wells and creating “drought preparedness plans.”
Shortcuts
In July 2012, an unconventional leader took over as the
World Bank’s new president. Jim Yong Kim, a Korean-American physician known for
his work fighting AIDS in Africa, became the first World Bank president whose
background wasn’t in finance or politics.
Two decades before, Kim had joined protests in Washington,
D.C., calling for the World Bank to be shut down altogether for valuing
indicators like economic growth over assistance to poor people.
Human rights advocates and bank staffers working on
safeguards hoped that Kim’s appointment would signal a shift toward greater
protections for people affected by World Bank projects.
In March, Kim said he was concerned about “major problems”
in the bank’s oversight of its resettlement policies. He announced an action
plan calling for greater independence for the bank’s safeguards watchdogs and a
15 percent funding boost for safeguards enforcement.
But while Kim and other bank officials have acknowledged general
shortcomings, they have consistently denied that the bank shares blame for
violent or wrongful evictions carried out by its borrowers.
In Ethiopia, the World Bank’s Inspection Panel found the
bank had violated its own rules by failing to acknowledge an “operational link”
between a bank-funded health and education initiative and a mass relocation
campaign carried out by the Ethiopian government. In 2011, soldiers carrying
out the evictions targeted some villagers for beatings and rapes, killing at least
seven, according to a report by Human Rights Watch and ICIJ’s interviews with
people who were evicted.
Kim said that while “we could have done more” to help the
evicted communities, the bank was ultimately not at fault.
In India, the IFC’s internal ombudsman found that the lender
had breached its policies by not doing enough to protect the large fishing
community living in the shadow of the coal power plant it financed on the Gulf
of Kutch. With Kim’s approval, IFC’s management rejected many of the
ombudsman’s findings and defended the actions of its corporate client.
In both Ethiopia and India, the World Bank Group declined to
direct its clients to fully compensate the affected communities.
In response to complaints about the Badia East evictions in
Nigeria, the World Bank embraced a shortcut that fell short of its promise that
people affected by projects will be fully compensated for their losses.
Typically, a community that claims it has been harmed by a
bank project can file a complaint that will trigger an investigation by the
bank’s Inspection Panel.
But when three Badia East residents submitted a complaint,
panel staffers held off launching an investigation. Instead, they guided the
residents into a new pilot program for handling disputes. The program put the
community into direct negotiations with the Lagos state government.
Megan Chapman, then a lawyer for the Social and Economic
Rights Action Center and now a co-founder of Justice & Empowerment
Initiatives, represented the evicted residents. The Inspection Panel promised
Chapman that the Badia East community could demand an investigation at any time
if it wasn’t satisfied with the outcome, according to emails reviewed by ICIJ.
Negotiations didn’t go well for the evicted residents. The
Lagos government insisted they had been illegal squatters, even though some of
them had lived there for decades. It gave the group an ultimatum: Accept a
small payment and sign away any legal rights, or get nothing.
Chapman believed that the government’s offer violated the
bank’s resettlement policy because it didn’t provide new homes for the
displaced or compensation equal to what they’d lost. The payments that Lagos
authorities offered for larger demolished structures, for example, were 31
percent lower than what the World Bank’s own consultants said they were worth.
“It was like David and Goliath. There were these little
people fighting against this giant,” Chapman said. The bank “really left
vulnerable people on their own.”
The government’s ultimatum divided the community. The leader
of Chapman’s organization said it was the best offer the evicted people were
going to get. He said he was satisfied with the deal. Many residents and their
advocates — including Chapman — objected.
But they had nowhere to turn for help.
Internal emails obtained by ICIJ indicate that by early
2014, the Inspection Panel’s chair, Eimi Watanabe, was already pushing to make
sure that the panel would not investigate the World Bank’s role in the case.
After hearing that the leader of Chapman’s group was
satisfied with the outcome of the negotiations, Watanabe urged her staff to
issue a formal notice shutting down the possibility of any investigation before
the fragile agreement fell apart, according to internal emails obtained by
ICIJ.
“Pl[ease] issue notice soonest before it unravels,” Watanabe
wrote on Feb. 6, 2014.
Watanabe’s directive didn’t immediately kill the
investigation, but over the following months the panel made it clear that it
didn’t want to dig deeper into the World Bank’s actions.
In July 2014, two of the three residents who had filed the
complaint told the panel they were unhappy with the deal and that they wanted
to go forward with an investigation. The panel rejected their request and shut
the case down with an official notice that said, as an aside, that the bank had
fallen short of its own resettlement standards.
Chapman and other advocates say the bank misled them about
how the pilot program would work and abandoned the people of Badia East.
Watanabe did not respond to ICIJ’s questions about the Lagos
case.
Gonzalo Castro de la Mata, the Inspection Panel’s current
chair, said the panel “deliberated carefully at every stage of the case” and
did not seek to arbitrarily shut down the investigation before it could start.
He said that although the Lagos government had agreed to
follow World Bank rules for resettlement in Badia East and other neighborhoods,
the evictions weren’t done under the official umbrella of the bank’s urban
renewal initiative. Because of this and other factors, he said, the panel
determined that “a lengthy process of investigation would not at the end of day
necessarily yield better outcomes” for residents who lost their homes.
An Uncertain Future
As it enters its eighth decade, the World Bank faces an
identity crisis.
It is no longer the only lender willing to venture into
struggling nations and finance huge projects. It is being challenged by new
competition from other development banks that don’t have the same social
standards — and are rapidly drawing support from the World Bank’s traditional
backers.
China has launched a new development bank and persuaded
Britain, Germany and other American allies to join, despite open U.S.
opposition.
These geopolitical shifts have fueled doubts about whether
the World Bank still has the clout — or the desire — to impose strong
protections for people living in the way of development.
United Nations human rights officials have written World
Bank President Kim to say they’re concerned that the growing ability of
borrowers to access other financing has spurred the bank to join a “race to the
bottom” and push its standards for protecting people even lower.
The bank’s proposed changes to its safeguard rules would
grant many borrowers greater authority to police themselves. In the current
draft, governments would be allowed to hold off on preparing resettlement plans
until after the bank greenlights projects. They would also be permitted to use
their own environmental and social policies instead of the bank’s safeguards,
as long as the bank determines these policies are consistent with its own.
Some current and former bank officials say these changes
would spell disaster for the people living in the growing footprint of the
bank’s projects — allowing governments to abide by weaker national standards
and decide whether vulnerable populations need protecting after they have already
received financing.
In December, the World Bank’s biggest patron, the U.S.
Congress, approved a measure directing the American representative on the World
Bank board to vote against any future project that would be subject to weaker
safeguards than the ones currently in place.
The bank says that the new rules would strengthen the
protections for populations affected by its projects.
Theis, the bank spokesman, said that under the proposed
rules, “a rigorous upfront scoping of the project is always required” and
borrowers still must prepare plans to address resettlement and other adverse
impacts of projects “well in advance of any construction activities.”
World Bank officials are now writing a new version of the
safeguards that they say will take into account the criticisms of their
previous draft. They expect to release the new draft in the late spring or
summer.
In the meantime, the bank continues to ramp up its
investment in large infrastructure projects, like the one that claimed Bimbo
Osobe’s home in Badia East.
Osobe spent months after her eviction sleeping under only a
net for shelter, she said.
As of mid-March, she was staying in a medical clinic,
sleeping in the reception area after the clinic closes at night. She’s been
forced to send three of her children away to stay with relatives, she said.
“It is not a good thing for a family to be divided,” Osobe
said.
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