Global Policy Forum

By Abid Aslam

Washington - The World Bank has postponed voting on a politically-prickly project that it believed would dent Chinese poverty - but that Tibetans feared would be a ''death sentence''. The Bank's 24-member executive board was to decide Tuesday on the proposed 'China Western Poverty Reduction Project' but put off a vote until Thursday, amid intense questioning from donor governments, the Dalai Lama's office and non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

The controversy has been driven by Tibetan communities, whose letter to international supporters declared that, if resettlement plans under the project were carried out with World Bank financing, ''then the World Bank will have participated in passing a death sentence on us here.'' It was the second postponement of the vote, first scheduled for June 8. The delay would allow Bank President James Wolfensohn to return from Europe and chair the Bank's board meeting on Thursday, said spokesman Peter Stephens. Board members would use the extra 48 hours to ''sort through...questions raised by NGOs and parliaments,'' Stephens added. At issue was whether the global lender should commit 160 million dollars to a project that ''simply does not meet World Bank standards,'' said Dana Clark, senior attorney at the Washington-based Centre for International Environmental Law.

A 'no' vote could roil relations between the Beijing government, the Bank, and the United States - the agency's largest shareholder, according to diplomatic sources. China has been irked by U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin's recent announcement that Washington was ''inclined to oppose'' the project and has denounced U.S. and other criticism as politically motivated. Bank staff revealed they had been warned that, if the project failed to pass, China would 're-evaluate' its relationship with the agency. Beijing has been a prominent critic of the Bank's decision to raise the charges on its standard loans for middle- income countries - despite unanimous objections from these borrowers.

The Bank proposed using 40 million dollars to move 58,000 Chinese peasants from Qinghai province - an area of eroded hillsides sometimes compared to the moon's surface - to an area traditionally inhabited by Tibetans and Mongolians. Dulan county, the resettlement site, is roughly one-tenth of the Tibetan plateau and the Bank has described it as ''adjacent'' to Tibet - which China annexed in 1959.

Tibetans and their supporters viewed the project as aiding a Chinese policy of diluting Tibetan culture and tipping the ethnic balance in its favour so as ultimately to strip Dulan and other regions of their status as 'autonomous areas'. This status permits for some degree of cultural protection and relaxation of China's 'one-child' population policy, explained Mary Beth Markey, government relations director at the Washington-based International Campaign for Tibet.

By the Bank's own estimates, Dulan's Tibetan population will fall from 22.7 percent to 14 percent as a result of the project and Mongols will see their share dwindle from 14.1 percent to 6.7 percent. The settlers would be from the Han Chinese majority and the Hui, Tu, and Salar minorities.

Bank officials defending the project said it was aimed at helping peasants with average incomes of 60 dollars per year to ''extricate themselves from poverty''and that the Beijing government had promised to respect local rights.

Communities in Dulan feared that the influx of outsiders would double the county's population, placing unprecedented pressure on the environment and threatening them with renewed conflict over resources in an area that already had seen ''many killings over pasture land.'' ''Many of us will die in the conflicts and even if we survive, where do we go?'' villagers asked in a hand-written letter to human rights groups here. ''As it is, we do not have sufficient pasture to support our animals.''

While Markey faulted the Bank for trying to sidestep human rights issues, Clark accused the agency of misrepesenting the project as having no major ecological consequences, in order to skirt environmental rules. Bank proposals included building a dam, extensive irrigation, and a network of roads in ecologically fragile Dulan, Clark notes.

The agency admitted it had failed to make public its environmental impact reports before completing project appraisal and sending it to the executive board and, critics charged, this was in breach of the lender's information disclosure policies.

While executive directors poured over the questions specific to the project, critics continued to blast it as part of a disturbing trend in Bank lending. The project ''is a prime example of how the Bank is funnelling money to projects with devastating environmental and social effects,'' said Andrea Durbin, international programmes director at the environmental group Friends of the Earth. ''We are very concerned about similarly dangerous projects such as an oil pipeline set to go through environmentally sensitive areas in Chad and Cameroon,'' Durbin said.

In African countries as in China, the Bank said its proposals offered the best hope of development for some of the world's most destitute people. Durbin, however, noted that the proposed Chad-Cameroon project for years had been mired in debate over whether it would power development. Critics and some Bank staff contended the effort would fuel corruption, human rights violations and environmental damage - each of which the Bank acknowledges has been a persistent problem. ''The costly trade-offs the Bank appears willing to entertain in the name of poverty reduction are a symptom of a bigger problem,'' Durbin concluded.

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