On 30-Dec-04 Michael Pugliese wrote:
Watch for the Q&A w/ Mallaby from the lefty NGO policy wonk and the Tibet activist,
--------
Gotta write up a quick overview Mike. I don't have an audio card...
CG
The first Q&A'er, a fortyish leftish policy wonk laid out the left
orthodoxy against the WB and structural re-adjustment/neo-lib. at some length and w/ empirical data. Mallaby and Meltzer were sarcastic and exasperated. The later Q&A'er, a female Tibet activist w/ a British accent, who had been interviewed by Mallaby's asst. for his book seemed very well informed but Mallaby was even more dismissive claiming she knew little about the PRC and Nepalese geography and demography and a controversial dam project.
From reviews I've gathered that Mallaby thinks Wolfensohn tried to
co-opt lots of liberal NGO critics. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A63755-2004Sep30.html http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_43/b3905036_mz005.htm ...In this, Mallaby himself is guilty of a little NGO-bashing. These "civil society" groups are, after all, not some nefarious conspiracy but usually grassroots organizations whose support grows out of a perceived need among the general public. Sure, some of the rhetoric of Friends of the Earth and its brethren is ill-informed and unscientific, but that's democracy, bro. Mallaby also errs by insisting that "nobody saw what was coming in Seattle" when the World Trade Organization talks collapsed as thousands protested in the streets. In fact, the WTO -- a sister organization to the bank --
had already splintered as developing nations refused to swallow more trade-liberalization nostrums. It wasn't the NGO members in turtle costumes who ended the talks. It was Brazil, Egypt, and India -- leading the poorer nations of the world to outvote Europe and the U.S. http://www.irn.org/programs/finance/index.asp?id=sebastianmallaby/ 041109review.html ...By Peter Bosshard, International Rivers Network http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=2672&page=1 NGOs: Fighting Poverty, Hurting the Poor By Sebastian Mallaby Page 2 of 5
Out, Dam Spot There was nothing apparently controversial when, in April 1999, the World Bank concluded negotiations on a project in Qinghai. China was the bank’s star client at the time, having lifted around 200 million people out of poverty during the previous decade. The Qinghai project was designed to move 58,000 farmers from a hopelessly parched hillside to another part of the province irrigated by a small dam. Farmers’ incomes would rise from around 20 cents a day to a level at which they could actually subsist. China had carried out some 30 such relocation projects in the past. All had reduced poverty.
The day the Qinghai loan negotiations concluded, the bank’s project manager, Petros Aklilu, got a call from the Tibet Information Network in London. Qinghai borders on the Chinese administrative division known as the Tibet Autonomous Region. Because the region covers part of historical Tibet and 1 million of Qinghai’s 5 million inhabitants are Tibetan, the interest of Tibet-watchers was not surprising. Aklilu explained that the scheme would benefit the 3,500 Tibetans who would move to newly irrigated land, and that Tibetans who stayed behind would benefit from reduced population pressure in their area. In sum, although China’s Tibet policy was abominable, the bank’s project would actually help Tibetans. Aklilu put down the phone and forgot about the conversation.
He soon had cause to remember it. Within a few days, the Tibet Information Network published a story in its newsletter about a “controversial” World Bank project that would “dramatically affect the demography” of Qinghai by moving ethnic Chinese into a culturally Tibetan area. This was a strange claim. First, no Tibetans lived in the immediate settlement area: The nearest were 276 nomadic herders (the bank had counted them carefully) who wintered 37 miles south of the project. Second, Qinghai had been part of China for as long as the United States had been independent. It was no more Tibetan than Texas is Mexican. But the Tibet Information Network was not deterred. “Population transfer of Chinese into traditional Tibetan areas has become a major concern for Tibetans,” the group’s newsletter said ominously.
Within a few weeks, the London activists had forged an international coalition. It drew from the various legions of the anti-World Bank army: environmental groups opposed to dams; human rights groups opposed to relocation; other groups opposing cooperation with China. Representatives of 59 organizations—an astonishing worldwide network stretching from Mexico to Thailand—dispatched a long letter to World Bank President Jim Wolfensohn protesting the transfer of “Chinese farmers into a traditionally Tibetan area.”
Campaigners deluged the bank with e-mails and faxes, anti-bank posters appeared around Washington, and Tibet activists set up camp outside the bank’s headquarters. A rap star from the Beastie Boys declared that the bank’s loan would lead to the “destruction of the Tibetan peoples.”
Despite the inaccuracy of this claim, the activists quickly won allies in Hollywood and the U.S. Congress, most notably the actor Richard Gere, who had recently narrated a documentary film about Tibet, and Democratic Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California. On June 15, 1999, a press release announcing a joint appearance by Pelosi and a pro-Tibet musician stated that the bank planned to move “60,000 ethnic Chinese” into Qinghai, even though Han Chinese constituted only 40 percent of the 58,000 settlers, and even though these Han Chinese were not moving into Qinghai, just relocating within the province. Sixty members of congress fired off a complaint to Wolfensohn, and Sen. Jesse Helms, a far-right Republican politician from North Carolina, leapt at the chance to condemn China and the World Bank in a single breath. When a World Bank delegation went to Capitol Hill to mollify the lawmakers, it was confronted with a map that did not even show Qinghai. The entire province had been labeled Tibet, never mind that Tibetans accounted for only one in five people there.
The bank was totally encircled. It was simultaneously up against student protestors and the right wing of the Republican Party, and although the bank’s assailants were flat wrong on the facts, nobody was willing to stick up for the institution. In June 1999, the Clinton administration announced that it would vote against the Qinghai project when it came before the World Bank’s board. The Lilliputian activists had taken on the bank, and they had won the first round.
-- Michael Pugliese