Why Are We Funding Abuse in Ethiopia?
<
http://www.nybooks.com/contributors/helen-epstein-2/#tab-blog> Helen
Epstein
March 15, 2013, 10:15 a.m.
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/mar/14/why-are-we-funding-abuse-et
hiopia/?utm_source=feedburner
<
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thiopia/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+nybooks+
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In 2010, the Ethiopian government began moving thousands of people out of
the rural villages where they had lived for centuries to other areas several
hours' walk away. The Ethiopian government calls this program the "Commune
Center Development Plan and Livelihood Strategy" and claims it is designed
to bring scattered rural populations closer to schools, health clinics,
roads, and other public services. But the Commune Center program has been
marked by a string of human rights abuses linked to government attempts to
clear huge tracts of land for foreign investors. According to testimony
collected by <
http://www.hrw.org/reports/2012/01/16/waiting-here-death>
Human Rights Watch and other groups over the past two years, the relocations
have involved beatings, imprisonment, torture, rape, and even murder. In
many of the new "villages" the program has created, the promised services do
not exist. Deprived of the farms, rivers, and forests that once provided
their livelihoods, many people fear starvation, and thousands have fled to
refugee camps in Kenya and South Sudan.
Such mistreatment by the government is
<
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/may/13/cruel-ethiopia/>
nothing new in Ethiopia, an essentially one-party state of roughly 90
million people, in which virtually all human rights activity and independent
media is banned. But what makes this case particularly outrageous is that
the Ethiopian government may be using World Bank money-some of which comes
from US taxpayers-to finance it. If so, this violates the Bank's own rules
concerning the protection of indigenous peoples and involuntary
resettlement. In response to complaints from human rights groups, the Bank's
internal watchdog recently conducted its own review of the Commune Center
program-commonly known as villagization in Ethiopia-which confirmed the
human rights allegations and recommended that the Bank carry out a full
investigation of its activities in Ethiopia.
However, it's unclear whether the Bank's executives are prepared to accept
these findings. After all, this impoverished country-which has received some
$15 billion in foreign aid over the past decade is now being held up as an
international development success story, and it also happens to be an
important US military ally.
The World Bank is the world's largest development organization, with an
annual budget of over $30 billion provided by Western governments and Wall
Street investors. Ethiopia, which hosts a US drone base and has US backed
fighters in Somalia, has been a particular target of the Bank's largesse.
Since 2006 the Bank has spent more than $1.5 billion alone on a program
known as Protection of Basic Services to pay the salaries of schoolteachers,
health workers, and other civil servants throughout rural Ethiopia. Bank
managers involved with the Protection of Basic Services project deny that it
has anything to do with villagization. They also maintain that villagization
is voluntary and that there's no evidence of coercion.
But refugees who recently fled Ethiopia say that many of the very same civil
servants who are supported by the Bank are now being forced to round-up and
move people under the government's villagization program. Soldiers have also
used beatings and threats to make people move. "Anybody and everybody on the
payroll of the government have to do their part,"-even teachers-one
informant told the human rights group Inclusive Development International
last year. "And people who are opposing it, they will be detained. They will
be jailed or taken to the military camp."
One man who refused to relocate to the new "village" explained in a letter
to the World Bank Country Director for Ethiopia in 2012 that the soldiers
who beat him knocked out two of his upper front teeth. "My brother was
beaten to death by the soldiers for refusing to go to the new village," he
wrote. "My second brother was detained and I don't know where he was taken
by the soldiers." A woman reported that because the promised services
weren't available in the new village, she and her daughter returned to their
old village to get food. "One of my relatives was also there retrieving the
maize he was forced to leave behind when we moved. Suddenly soldiers came
and accused us of feeding rebels and shot our relative dead. They beat me
and my daughter and raped us both."
The human rights groups' investigations have focused on Ethiopia's Anuak,
Nuer, and other ethnic groups, who reside in the sultry, fertile region of
Gambella, and now number several hundred thousand people. The Anuak in
particular have long had a tense relationship with other ethnic groups
favored by the government, and many Anuak have vivid memories of the
December 2003 massacre in which Ethiopian military killed more than 400
Anuak men, women and children and destroyed hundreds of homes. Breaking up
existing villages might be part of a government strategy to uproot
clandestine Anuak rebel groups.
But the government may have another motive in pursuing the villagization
strategy against them. Over the past four years, the government has leased
or marketed some 3.5 million hectares of fertile land across Ethiopia-an
area equivalent in size to that of the Netherlands-to investors from Saudi
Arabia, India, and other countries to grow food for their own populations
and for the global market. In all, the government plans to relocate some 1.5
million people across Ethiopia by 2015, and the regions affected are the
same ones in which huge tracts of land have been designated for investment.
These disturbing revelations have caused an internal battle among the World
Bank's leadership, according to Bank documents. In internal reports on the
Gambella controversy, the Bank's managers dismiss the human rights groups'
findings, claiming, for example, that the villagization program isn't
"synchronized" with its own program, Protection of Basic Services, even
though the official objectives of the programs are the same and the people
carrying them out appear to be identical and are being paid by the same
budget. The managers also maintain that while the villagization program has
faced "implementation challenges" it's not abusive. They cite the findings
of a group of officials from the UN, the US Agency for International
Development and other organizations who have visited the new villages twice
in the past two years. They say they found no evidence of coercion. However,
the human rights groups point out that these officials gathered their
information through group interviews. Although no government officials were
present at the meetings, I know from my own experience interviewing people
in rural Ethiopia that government informants were almost certainly there,
monitoring everything that was said and who said it.
The Bank's staff have never visited the Anuak refugees in the camps outside
of Ethiopia where people can generally speak more openly. But in September,
Human Rights Watch arranged for five refugees to visit the managers in their
offices in Nairobi. During the meeting, according to people who were
present, a World Bank official asked one of the refugees, who had been a
teacher before he fled Ethiopia, whether he would prefer that the Bank not
pay his salary. "Would that solve the problems with the villagization
program?" she asked. The man reminded the official that he was no longer a
teacher, but a refugee, and that there were no teachers at all in some of
the villages where the Anuak people were now being forced to live.
Last fall, the California-based human rights group Inclusive Development
International submitted a complaint on behalf of a group of Ethiopian Anuak
refugees to the Bank's Inspection Panel, an internal watchdog group that
determines whether Bank projects violate its own regulations. Following this
complaint, the Inspection Panel members carried out a preliminary review to
determine whether a full investigation was warranted. They interviewed
refugees in Kenya and South Sudan as well as officials of the Ethiopian
government and the World Bank itself. In February, the Inspection Panel
issued its findings, confirming that there was sufficient evidence to be
concerned about abuses in the villagization campaign and about the overlap
between it and the Bank's Protection of Basic Services program. Now the
Executive Board of the World Bank must decide whether to follow these
recommendations and conduct a full investigation, or continue to do nothing.
The Board is scheduled to make a decision about the Inspection Panel's
report at a meeting on March 19.
During the past decade, the US and other Western donors have supported many
fine projects in the developing world with inspiring goals like saving
lives, educating children and ending poverty. Since Ethiopia's Protection of
Basic Services project began, for example, independent surveys have found
improvements in some crucial measures of development such as child mortality
(though it's worth noting that the improvements have been most pronounced in
Ethiopia's three major cities, and in Tigray, the region that happens to be
home to the ethnic group of the nation's highly autocratic and repressive
leadership).
But in twenty years working in this field, I have long since lost count of
the number of projects I've visited that turned out not to be doing what
their project documents claimed they were doing. The only way to find out
whether development funds are being spent as they should be is to listen to
the intended beneficiaries or-in repressive countries like Ethiopia where
people are often afraid to speak out-the human rights advocates who
represent them. That the World Bank managers have until now ignored these
voices does not inspire confidence in their willingness to ensure that our
tax dollars are being properly spent.
If anyone has the wisdom to figure out what to do about this mess, it is Jim
Yong Kim, who succeeded Robert Zoellick as president of the World Bank in
2012. A medical doctor, former Harvard public health professor, and World
Health Organization director, Kim is considered a kind of hero by some.
Dying for Growth, a 2001 essay collection he edited,
<
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2001/apr/12/time-of-indifference/?
pagination=false> described in great detail how the World Bank's past
economic policies had harmed the health of the poor throughout the
developing world. It should be obvious to him that the Bank's support for
politically repressive regimes may do the same. Kim and the other Bank
executives finally have a chance to restore the organization's reputation by
showing that all human rights abuses are impermissible in its programs, even
those committed by governments their most generous donors happen to favor.
AFP/Getty Images
Workers at a Saudi-owned rice farm in Gambella, Ethiopia, March 22, 2012
AFP/Getty Images
A man on his plot of land in Kir, a resettlement village in Gambella,
Ethiopia, March 22, 2012
Received on Fri Mar 15 2013 - 13:04:23 EDT
