From greaves@bucknell.edu Fri Apr 3 14:02:24 1998 Received: from mxu2.u.washington.edu (mxu2.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.9]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.8.4+UW97.07/8.8.4+UW97.05) with ESMTP id OAA19036 for ; Fri, 3 Apr 1998 14:02:23 -0800 Received: from mail.bucknell.edu (marge.bucknell.edu [134.82.7.249]) by mxu2.u.washington.edu (8.8.4+UW97.07/8.8.4+UW97.09) with ESMTP id OAA03942 for ; Fri, 3 Apr 1998 14:02:21 -0800 Received: from [134.82.62.71] (greaves.bucknell.edu [134.82.62.71]) by mail.bucknell.edu (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id RAA17298 for ; Fri, 3 Apr 1998 17:02:17 -0500 (EST) X-Sender: greaves@mail.bucknell.edu Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Date: Fri, 3 Apr 1998 17:02:20 -0500 To: indknow@u.washington.edu From: TOM Subject: Letter to World Bank Regretfully I neglected to attach the AAA's letter to the president of the World Bank in the Pehuenche matter. Here it is. Tom Greaves, Chair Committee for Human Rights March 19 , 1998 Mr. James D. Wolfensohn, President The World Bank Group 2121 Pennsylvania Ave, NW Washington, D.C. 20433 Dear Mr. Wolfensohn, I write as president of the American Anthropological Association, with a membership of nearly 11,000 professional anthropologists working in the United States and elsewhere. With this letter I convey to you a copy of an extensive report, prepared by the Association's Committee for Human Rights, concerning IFC-financed hydroelectric development on the B=EDo-B=EDo river i= n southern Chile. You will be well acquainted with the project, involving the Pangue Dam, the prospect of further dams upstream, and the protest lodged by IFC consultant Theodore Downing. I point out that Dr. Downing, a former president of the Society for Applied Anthropology, is a distinguished member of my profession. The IFC and its project partners placed Dr. Downing in a profound conflict of professional ethics that he had specifically sought to preclude through the insertion of special language in his contractual agreement with the IFC. I protest this. Dr. Downing is owed an apology and reinstatement of his working relationship with the Bank Group. The conduct of the Pangue project violated in several ways the human rights of an indigenous people, the Pehuenche. The Pehuenche were not adequately informed of the impending project's ramifications for them. The IFC poorly monitored the Pehuen Foundation, a promising creation for linking the project and the Pehuenche; this allowed the Foundation to fail in its purpose, leaving the Pehuenche unprotected. Timber on Pehuenche lands has been appropriated; the Pehuenche have thereby effectively financed the assault on their own lifeway and culture. Still worse, the IFC appears to have turned a blind eye to the engineered linkage between the Pangue Dam and the second, upstream Ralco Dam which will soon be built. Ralco will displace as many as 1,000 Pehuenche to lands clearly unsuitable, even dangerous, to their cultural survival. And there are still other failings detailed in the report. IFC and the World Bank Group responded to this case by drafting new guidelines for disclosure of environmental and social impacts. This is helpful but insufficient. I call upon the entire World Bank Group to take the following actions: (a) adopt a uniform and uniformly binding commitment to guarantee the human rights of all groups impacted by its development projects, (b) institute organizational changes that will prevent project-level implementation from ignoring the Bank Group's human rights directives on human rights, resettlement and participation by local populations, and (c) assure that the Bank Group's project information flow and accountability for human rights, moves fully from bottom to top of the Bank Group's structure, and is distributed beyond the Bank to public groups and to the peoples affected by those projects. Recommendation 6 of Part IV of the enclosed report speaks directly to this point. I call upon you to direct the IFC to return to the B=EDo-B=EDo and remedy th= e Pehuenches' violated rights. I reject the proposition that IFC's obligations ended when its loan was repaid. I and this Association stand ready to work with you to fashion a Bank Group-wide policy on the protection of human rights within the development process, and to propagate that policy to private lenders, to governments, and to development contractors. As Third World development increasingly privatizes, the Bank has an historic opportunity. I ask you to lead the effort to entrench the honoring of human rights in the development process at all levels, by all participants. The American Anthropological Association stands ready to join you in this critically important effort, and I propose meeting to begin this work. Yours truly, Jane H. Hill, President American Anthropological Association ec: http://www.ameranthassn.org/chrhome.htm (report and letter) .