How a Nonprofit Group Sought to Help the Poor

To the Editor:

Your October 14 issue highlighted an article in the September-October issue of Foreign Policy by Sebastian Mallaby (Press Clippings) where he asserts that some nongovernmental organizations purporting to represent the poor actually hurt them.

His argument is that social and environmental safeguards at the World Bank are costly and that organizations that hold the bank accountable to its own policies delay or stop funds from going to the needy.

While not named in the article, our organization, the International Campaign for Tibet, was at the forefront of an effort to stop the World Bank from resettling about 50,000 Chinese farmers onto traditionally Tibetan and Mongolian land.

The campaign supports the World Bank assisting poor Chinese farmers but not at the expense of Tibetans who have lived on and worked the Tibetan plateau for generations. Hundreds of thousands of Tibetans have died under the Chinese occupation of Tibet as a result of torture, starvation, and execution.

Luckily, the World Bank had a viable Inspection Panel, something that the Asian Development Bank and other multinational lending institutions have been slow to adopt. The panel was created in 1993 to provide an independent forum to private citizens who believe that they have been or could be directly harmed by a project financed by the World Bank. Our organization helped Tibetans to petition the panel, and the panel found such egregious and systematic violations of bank policy that ultimately the project was scrapped.

But it was not just the inspection panel and the nongovernmental organizations that acted to fix the problems with this project. The Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader and a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, found it terribly flawed. Moreover, scores of World Bank employees opposed the project for numerous technical, social, and human-rights reasons, and without their support, this project may have gone forward.

Sebastian Mallaby interviewed many like-minded World Bank officials, but interviewed hardly any of the principal players at nongovernmental organizations for his article. His focus was narrow, and he distorted the facts.

The defeat of that resettlement project was a victory for the people of Tibet and for all poor and persecuted people who get lost in international development projects, which often favor political agendas of governments first, and the poor second. We demonstrated that mega-institutions like the World Bank can be held accountable by an effective citizens’ movement.

John Ackerly
President
International Campaign for Tibet
Washington