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	June 23, 1999	atimes.com

China

World Bank nears vote on Tibetan 'death sentence'
By Abid Aslam

WASHINGTON - The World Bank is to decide Tuesday whether to commit money to an anti-poverty project that Tibetans say will be a ''death sentence."

A vote on the China Western Poverty Reduction Project had been scheduled for June 8 but was put off to allow for what bank spokesman Peter Stephens calls ''some of the most intense discussions we've ever had on a single project."

Stirring the controversy is a proposal to use $40 million out of $160 million in Bank project financing to move 58,000 poor Chinese farmers from the severely eroded hillsides of Qinghai province to barren but cultivable land in Dulan county, 450 kilometers to the west.

''In the event the resettlement project is carried out with World Bank financing, then the World Bank will have participated in passing a death sentence on us here,'' Tibetans in Dulan say in a letter to supporters in the United States.

Under the project, settlers from the Han Chinese majority and a number of minorities will make their new homes in an officially designated Tibetan and Mongolian Autonomous Area.

Some U.S. lawmakers fear that the effort will aid a Chinese policy of diluting Tibetan culture and tipping the ethnic balance so heavily against Tibetans and Mongolians that the region's autonomous status ultimately could be stripped.

''As a direct result of population transfers already undertaken, Tibetans are now a numerical minority in many parts of Tibet and their way of life is coming under increasing attack,'' says Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat.

Human rights groups also are concerned that the project will involve prison labor from penal camps some 48 kilometers from the settlement site.

In addition, enviromentalists charge the bank is breaking its own rules in seeking to push through a project with potentially catastrophic ecological consequences.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin has announced that Washington is ''inclined to oppose'' the project. China has condemned criticism of the project as politically motivated and diplomatic analysts here say a vote against the proposal would add to tensions in Sino-U.S. relations.

World Bank-China relations also could suffer a setback, according to Chinese and agency officials. The Beijing government has been a lead critic of the bank's decision to raise loan charges costs for middle-income borrowers in the wake of the Asian financial crisis.

Beijing is counting on the bank for just over half the project's total cost of $311 million. Some $100 million of this financing will come virtually interest-free through the bank's soft-loans window.

To pass, the project needs a simple majority of shareholder votes, of which the United States wields about 20 percent. Officially, the bank says a vote will take place Tuesday but a number of staffers and observers expect executive directors to find a procedural pretext for another delay.

Bank officials say they have received written assurances from local authorities that minority rights will be respected. They add that use of prison labor would be a violation of bank policy and that Chinese officials have promised this will not happen.

But by the agency's own estimates, Dulan's Tibetan population will fall from 22.7 percent to 14 percent as an immediate result of the project and Mongols will see their share dwindle from 14.1 percent to 7.2 percent.

Still, ''none of us ever saw the project as a Tibet issue,'' says Yukon Huang, the Bank's resident representative in Beijing. ''We saw it as moving six or seven different ethnic groups into an area that is largely uninhabited."

Huang, an American, told reporters in Beijing Thursday that the project aims to help some of the poorest people in China and will have a negligible effect on Tibetan culture while taking into account environmental concerns.

However, roads and other infrastructure built under the project will pave the way for mining and industry and, in turn, draw even more non-Tibetans to the region, warns Mary Beth Markey, government relations director at the Washington-based International Campaign for Tibet.

''The area has seen lots of mineral exploration,'' Markey notes.

''The project involves a dam, irrigation, land conversion and intensification of population pressure on fragile lands,'' adds Dana Clark, senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law.

''Yet it has been classified by the bank as a Category B project, hence receiving a minimal environmental assessment. We believe this is a clear violation of World Bank policy,'' Clark asserts. Critics also allege breaches of the bank's rules on resettlement, indigenous peoples and information disclosure.

Privately, some bank staff agree that environmental checks should have been more stringent. Officially, however, the bank admits only that ''we did not make the Environmental Impact Assessment public before appraising the project."

That, critics say, is a violation of Bank regulations and demands a ''no'' vote from Washington's representative on the bank's executive board.

Since 1991, the U.S. executive director has been required by law to abstain or vote against any project likely to have significant environmental impact if it has not been properly assessed or if the assessments have not been made public at least 120 days before a vote.

The World Bank repeatedly has been criticized for secrecy and lax environmental screening.

Government auditors at the U.S. General Accounting Office last September found the agency wanting in its efforts to consult the public on environmental assessments.

This was especially true of projects ''sponsored by the government of China,'' according to the auditors.

(Inter Press Service)

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