April 13, 2000
With larger-than-life puppets, placards, and banners, activists and citizens from developing nations held a vigil this evening in front of the World Bank headquarters in downtown Washington. The vigil was held to show solidarity with the millions of poor people displaced from their homes by World Bank dams and other infrastructure projects.
Holding up placards with the numbers of people displaced in various countries, the activists introduced their demands for reparations for victims of forced resettlement, and called for a moratorium on new World Bank projects that would involve displacing people from their homes.
“The World Bank admits that some 3.2 million people are being displacedby its current projects in developing nations,” said Dana Clark of the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL). “In addition, the Bank has said it may have underestimated the number of displaced by as much as forty percent. Yet somehow the projects that result in such mass displacement is rationalized as ‘development.’ We say it’s time to stop.”
Carlos Chen Osorio, a Mayan-Achi man from Guatemala who spoke at the vigil, experienced first hand the brutal repression unleashed on his community following their peaceful opposition to the construction of the World Bank-financed Chixoy dam. More than 400 residents of his village of Rio Negro, including Mr.Chen’s wife and two children, were killed in a series of massacres, by military police contracted as dam security. He said he came to Washington this week to demand reparations on behalf of his community for the harm done in the name of “development.”
In India, some 300,000 poor people have been displaced by the construction of the Singrauli coal-fired power plant, a highly polluting energy project that contaminated air and water with toxic ash. Many of the displaced have languished for years in squalid resettlement camps without adequate drinking water supplies or other basic services.
The World Bank’s former director for Latin America, Shahid Javed Burki said that he has “never seen such misery” as that perpetrated on the 75,000 people affected by the Bank’s Yacyreta dam in Argentina and Paraguay. More could be victimized if the Bank proceeds with its expansion plans.
“Millions of people have been forced to abandon their lands, their only source of livelihood, and have never been adequately compensated,” said Aviva Imhof of the group International Rivers Network. “We are calling on the World Bank to make fair reparations to the victims of its so-called development projects, which have failed miserably at lifting people out of poverty.”