[Dialogue] If you served overseas....

[jim rippey]

>From Jim Rippey in Bellevue, NE
The May 2 issue of The Nation had an article portraying the World Bank as exercising a frightening new form of colonial exploitation. I posted excerpts of the article (listed at the end of this) and said I'd very much appreciate hearing the reaction of those colleagues who have struggled to implement ICA good works in foreign lands. Was the article accurate or overblown?

So far I got one response from an ICA person (quoted just below) and another response from a non ICA source I contacted.  I'd still like to get reactions from others who been there and seen what goes on.

-------------------This from an ICA member who sent it to my personal email-------------------

I am just home from a week away and I did not go out and read the whole article. (I have over 100 messages to clear.)  What you have excerpted is utterly accurate and has been true for a long time.  In some countries where I worked there was at least contact between those highly paid consultants and ex-pats like those of us from the Institute.  In other locations their gated communities and chauffer driven vehicles cut them off completely from any contact with the locals except for their maids and manservents.  Your ability to "permeate" was also greatly dependent upon your team and their willingness to be open about what we were doing in-country.  Sadly, in many locations, the institutional church was almost as bad as the quasi-governmental organizations.  In one location it was their story that they were teaching farming skills, and they had created a whole agricultural scenario around having locals doing the backbreaking work of providing the "missionaries" with a western diet complete with broccoli and asparagus.  There was nothing I could see of their operation that anyone working for them could take back to their village and more successfully produce.  This does not even address the multi-national business people (often with housing provided) who were living high locally and also having an equivalent salary deposited in a bank account back home.  Debt relief would go a long way toward undermining the "local" corruption and there would go your power and control.

I could rant on for a long time, but it is too, too depressing.

Just one perspective    

(At this stage, I am not identifying individuals or countries, and won't without permission.  My original goal was to verify if the horrors in the Nation were overblown or not.  --jRip)
----------------------------These responses were from the non ICA source I contacted-------------------------

xxxxxxxx (& I) read the complete article and unfortunately, it is 100% true.  However, in some Western countries (unlike yours)  it is very hard for politicians to champion & promote private companies.

xxxxxxxx said that in all his years (in responsible positions), he always resisted getting in debt or accepting grants from the World Bank, the IMF or foreign countries because he was very aware of the attached strings.

He told the story of an offer from America to turn the little two lane road from (one city to another) into a four lane highway & how they insisted on an expensive feasibility study and having a certain company doing the job for a high price.  He turned them down & later, thru contacts in the Arab Fund, he negotiated a loan to this country to finance the project and they had a local company do the job.  A lot of money was saved, local people got employment and the road is well-built.   

He also adds that it isn't possible for these things to happen without the boot licking & cooperation of the locals.  Of course, when it is a disaster situation, people desperate for assistance feel they are at the mercy of those who offer any kind of help.  Luckily our country has never yet been in that position.

I also can tell you that my years working for UNICEF made me more cynical of even the UN agencies - and UNICEF is better than most.  My boss was more interested in all the perks of his job than in actually doing anything good for his country (and he was a native). 

----------------------------------------------------What I sent to Dialogue originally-------------
The article is The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, by Naomi Klein, Nation, 0502-05. You can access it at http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050502&s=klein

Following are some excerpts I pulled out of it:

.... colonialism is dead, or so we are told; there are no new places to discover.... There is, however, plenty of destruction--countries smashed to rubble, whether by so-called Acts of God or by Acts of Bush (on orders from God). And where there is destruction there is reconstruction, a chance to grab hold of "the terrible barrenness," as a UN official recently described the devastation in Aceh, and fill it with the most perfect, beautiful plans. "We used to have vulgar colonialism," says Shalmali Guttal, a Bangalore-based researcher with Focus on the Global South. "Now we have sophisticated colonialism, and they call it 'reconstruction.'" Foreign consultants live high on cost-plus expense accounts and thousand- dollar-a-day salaries, while locals are shut out of much-needed jobs, training and decision-making. 

.... Three months after the tsunami hit Aceh, the New York Times ran a distressing story reporting that "almost nothing seems to have been done to begin repairs and rebuilding." .... But if the reconstruction industry is stunningly inept at rebuilding, that may be because rebuilding is not its primary purpose. According to Guttal, "It's not reconstruction at all--it's about reshaping everything." If anything, the stories of corruption and incompetence serve to mask this deeper scandal: the rise of a predatory form of disaster capitalism that uses the desperation and fear created by catastrophe to engage in radical social and economic engineering. And on this front, the reconstruction industry works so quickly and efficiently that the privatizations and land grabs are usually locked in before the local population knows what hit them

.... researcher Ben Moxham writes, "In one government department, a single international consultant earns in one month the same as his twenty Timorese colleagues earn together in an entire year").... Now the bank is using the December 26 tsunami to push through its cookie-cutter policies. The most devastated countries have seen almost no debt relief, and most of the World Bank's emergency aid has come in the form of loans, not grants. Rather than emphasizing the need to help the small fishing communities--more than 80 percent of the wave's victims--the bank is pushing for expansion of the tourism sector and industrial fish farms. 

.... In January Condoleezza Rice sparked a small controversy by describing the tsunami as "a wonderful opportunity" that "has paid great dividends for us." Many were horrified at the idea of treating a massive human tragedy as a chance to seek advantage. But, if anything, Rice was understating the case. A group calling itself Thailand Tsunami Survivors and Supporters says that for "businessmen-politicians, the tsunami was the answer to their prayers, since it literally wiped these coastal areas clean of the communities which had previously stood in the way of their plans for resorts, hotels, casinos and shrimp farms. To them, all these coastal areas are now open land!"