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INDIGENOUS PEOPLES: Partnership with World Bank Follows a Rocky Road

Marty Logan

UNITED NATIONS, May 20 2004 (IPS) - The 2004 session of the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues has demonstrated again how far the planet’s native peoples and World Bank officials must still travel before they become full allies in development.

While representatives of the two groups sat together during the past two weeks in various meetings and discussions, the results were often mixed.

The Forum, set up three years ago as the only full-time body advising the United Nations on indigenous issues, ends Friday, just weeks before the World Bank’s policy committee is to consider a revised draft of its policy on indigenous peoples.

A meeting Wednesday on the sidelines of the U.N. event was intended to discuss indigenous peoples’ concerns about legal issues, particularly the Bank’s performance in following international human rights law.

But it took a wrong turn before participants even entered the room, with many indigenous leaders receiving just a few days notice of the event before they left their homes at the beginning of May for the Forum gathering at U.N. headquarters in New York, leaving them no time to consult with their constituents.

Then, the meeting’s date was changed. Bank staff also failed to distribute documents for the gathering early enough so they could be reviewed, said one attendee.

“This meeting, really, failed to meet any of the criteria” that indigenous people laid out for a legal roundtable at an earlier meeting with the Bank in 2002, including that they would help organise the event, said Alexandra Page of the Indian Law Resource Centre.

She told IPS that earlier this week Bank officials distributed copies of the revised draft policy on indigenous peoples to certain individuals and expected they would have detailed comments on the lengthy document by Wednesday’s meeting.

“The expectation of the Bank that people would review it in 24 hours is a really unreasonable request,” according to Page.

Officials told Wednesday’s gathering of more than a dozen indigenous representatives that they needed to submit the draft policy to the Bank’s committee on development effectiveness (CODE) by Friday, so it could be considered at a Jun. 7 meeting, leaving just a few days for input from indigenous peoples.

Plus, the Bank is no longer promising a 90-day consultation period on the draft policy following the CODE meeting, Page added.

Relations between indigenous people and the World Bank appeared more promising at the 2003 Forum meeting.

Bank Vice-President Ian Johnson announced the institution’s Global Fund for Indigenous Peoples, which would have three parts: training for indigenous leaders in Latin America, direct funding for small-scale development projects by indigenous peoples, and 150,000 dollars to help the fledgling Forum operate.

But one year later, the Forum has yet to receive the money, due to a squabble over auditing practices, and some indigenous people say the project funding, known as the Global Facility, will only divide indigenous peoples.

“We didn’t designate those people to be on the (Facility’s) interim board. They are operating without authority … we are furious,” one Latin American representative told a Permanent Forum caucus meeting last week.

“We as indigenous peoples must not be split by the Global Facility,” added another delegate, Rosalia Gutierrez. “Right now in Argentina the World Bank is organising meetings with indigenous peoples, but we are not interested in meeting with them. We, in fact, are organising a march against them. We would rather be poor but united.”

But one indigenous person appointed to the Global Facility’s interim board by the Bank is challenging indigenous people to not throw away the chance of working with and changing how the world’s largest public lender treats indigenous people.

“This is a programme to provide alternatives, but at the same time I invite indigenous peoples to say ‘no, I don’t want anything to do with the World Bank’ – because that is self-determination,” said Viktor Kaisiepo, chairman of the Facility’s interim board.

But, he added in an interview, “I would hate to see an opportunity being missed because of principles … I understand the right to self-determination, but we have to realise what we throw overboard and what we keep in the boat.”

The Facility’s interim board is composed of six indigenous people – one representing the U.N. Forum – and two World Bank staff. Bank officials told last week’s meeting it will be replaced by a full-time board, with a majority of indigenous members, by Jan. 1, 2005. That body will be completely independent of the Bank by June 2006, they added.

To date, the interim board has awarded 21 grants worth 357,000 dollars, and the Bank is trying to attract funding partners, starting with Norway and Canada, added officials.

Kaisiepo says he has heard charges that he has “sold out” by serving on the interim board, but responds, “we are not owned by the Bank. I preserve the right to criticise the Bank whenever I feel like it (but) I am not here to fight the Bank – I am here to facilitate indigenous peoples at the grassroots.”

For example, he says the interim board awarded one grant to Pygmy people in the Democratic Republic of Congo to work with honey bees, in the same area where World Bank funding of extractive industries has violated the Pygmy peoples’ rights to their land and resources.

“This (Grants Facility) should also function as a mirror to the Bank – to see if it lives up to its own principles,” argues Kaisiepo.

Many indigenous people are also waiting to see if the Bank fulfills the principles laid out in something called the Extractive Industries Review, an independent report commissioned by the Bank that recommends that the institution stop funding extractive industries, including oil, gas and mining, by 2008 and switch its backing to alternative energy sources.

The report, which is scheduled to also go to the CODE in June, recommends, among other things, that the Bank “ensure that borrowers and clients engage in consent processes with indigenous peoples and local communities directly affected by oil, gas, and mining projects, to obtain their free, prior and informed consent.”

“For indigenous peoples this is an internationally guaranteed right; for local communities it is an essential part of obtaining social licence and demonstrable public acceptance for the project,” says a March letter from a number of indigenous peoples’ organisations to Bank President James Wolfensohn.

Yet, adds the letter, “we are deeply concerned that Bank management (in a draft response to the EIR) has rejected” that recommendation.

But despite these recent setbacks, indigenous peoples have made enormous gains at the World Bank in the 13 years since its indigenous policy was adopted, says one advocate.

“In fact, they’ve prevented a weakening of their policy at the World Bank and are now engaged in very high-level discussions, where, when they come to these meetings, they meet with Ian Johnson … and discuss with him what they mean by ‘free, prior and informed consent’, says Melina Selverston Scher of the Washington-based Bank Information Centre.

Adds Kaisiepo, “if you’ve been discriminated in your national situation, been denied access to all services, been looked upon as second, third-class citizens or as ‘noble wilds’, being recognised by the World Bank as a distinct entity is something.”