Tibet Groups Keep Pressure On World Bank

WASHINGTON, (Aug. 18) IPS - The Chinese government and Tibet support groups are intensifying their tug-of-war over a World Bank-funded resettlement project that officials claim will combat poverty but which the groups say amounts to cultural genocide for Tibetans.

The effort would involve resettling some 58,000 Chinese peasants to a Tibetan and Mongolian autonomous area bordering Tibet, annexed by China in 1959.

The Chinese government argues the move is needed because peasants have no hope of improving their lot where they live now -- on overpopulated and eroded hillsides, sometimes compared to the moon's surface.

To illustrate their point, Beijing officials have led journalists and foreign observers on official tours of the project site.

Participants have confirmed that the peasants live in crushing poverty but also acknowledge nagging questions remain about the government's ability to protect the rights of ethnic and religious minorities. Those doubts have spurred project opponents to plan a rally outside World Bank headquarters here on

Aug. 30.

Rock musician Adam Yauch and members of the US Congress are expected to headline the event, say the organizers.

Groups sponsoring the event include the US Tibet Committee, Students for a Free Tibet, the Milarepa Fund, the International Committee of Lawyers for Tibet, the International Campaign for Tibet, Friends of the Earth and the Washington-based Center for International Environmental Law.

The proposed transmigration also has generated intense criticism from the Dalai Lama's office and a number of leading Bank shareholders. And Tibetans in Qinghai province, site of the mass relocation, declared in a recent letter to international supporters that the proposal was tantamount to a "death sentence" against them because it would yield further marginalisation and conflict over natural resources.

The World Bank itself has admitted that the Tibetan's share of the local population in the "move-in" area would fall from 22.7 percent to 14 percent and that Mongolians would dwindle from 14.1 percent to 6.7 percent.

Nevertheless, say agency officials, Chinese authorities have offered written assurances that they will protect minorities' rights.

Meanwhile, environmentalists have alleged that the global lender skirted environmental assessment rules by wrongly describing project plans - which feature a dam, roads and irrigation -- as ecologically insignificant.

It then hid its findings from the public until the project appraisal was complete, said critics. Bank officials acknowledged shortcomings in project preparation but said these could be corrected after approval.

They asked the agency's executive board to clear the plan as part of the "China Western Poverty Reduction Project," a $160-million, six-year endeavour to lead 1.7 million people from destitution to food self-sufficiency and bigger incomes.

Instead, the 24 representatives of the Bank's shareholder governments opted in June to clear the anti-poverty project but freeze the resettlement funds.

That move was meant to allow the Bank's independent Inspection Panel to investigate allegations that the lender, in pursuing the plan, broke its own rules designed to safeguard communities, the environment and the public's right to know.

Bank officials had sought to block the Panel probe on the grounds that the groups filing the complaints did not live in the project area -- only to be rebuffed by executive directors, who said they would sponsor the complaints if necessary.

Their commitment to a full accounting will be tested early next month, officials say.

When board members return from their summer recess they will; find the Inspection Panel's preliminary assessment of whether the complaints are eligible for investigation.

Sources privy to the document will not say whether the complaints, filed by US-based groups, meet the board's strict eligibility criteria, under which the right to file charges is restricted to groups directly affected by a project.

They note, however, that the prevailing assumption among executive directors was that an investigation should proceed. That was before the directors went on holiday, and project critics say they must keep up pressure for an investigation and against the project.

"If Tibetans, Mongolians and the international community hadn't raised objections to this project, then certainly the (executive) board would have approved the project not knowing the (Bank) management's policy violations and threats to the local people and environment," according to a statement from the US Tibet Committee.

Political battle lines over the project date back to China's absorption of Tibet beginning in 1950 and culminating in the crushing of a revolt there in 1959. In the process, portions of Tibetan territory were parceled out to Qinghai province.

If the resettlement project goes through, it will dilute the Tibetan presence on lands covering one-tenth of the Tibetan plateau, according to Mary Beth Markey, government relations director at the International Campaign for Tibet.

Markey echoes local fears that the influx of non-Tibetans will imperil the region's status as an "autonomous area." This classification permits some degree of cultural protection and relaxation of China's 'one-child' population policy, she says.

Those fears have taken World Bank staffers by surprise, according to Yukon Huang, the lending agency's representative in Beijing.

"None of us ever saw the project as a 'Tibet issue'," Huang, an American, told reporters earlier this year. "We saw it as moving six or seven different ethnic groups into an area that is largely uninhabited."

Even participants in the government-sponsored project tours have questioned that assessment, however. "You have to look at the bigger picture," one University of Melbourne researcher told journalists.

"Is there a solid pattern of China encouraging migration into arid areas to effectively colonize them?"