World Bank projects dealing with everything from “carbon credits” and “development policies” to crony capitalist “business” deals have forcibly evicted and ruined the livelihoods of millions of people around the world, according to an investigation into the globalist organization’s own documents. A comprehensive review of World Bank records by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and various media outlets revealed that close to 3.5 million of the planet’s poorest people, many of them already struggling just to survive, have been forced off their land and relocated as a direct consequence of policies and projects pursued by the government-backed global lender over the last 10 years. The real figures are probably even higher.
Incredibly, due to poor oversight and record keeping, it is often “impossible” to determine how many people were compensated properly — if at all — after being left homeless and destitute by the World Bank, according to researchers. The data compiled by the ICIJ, though, revealed that Asians and Africans were the most likely to be victimized. In Asia, close to three million people were left homeless or re-settled, with more than one million each in Communist China and Communist Vietnam. In Africa, close to half of a million victims were displaced by World Bank schemes — at least if its own dubious records are to be believed. Tens of thousands of victims were also identified in South America. Others came from Europe, Oceania, and North America.
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The 11-month review by ICIJ identified a total of 3,350,449 victims — more than the population of Uruguay, Chicago, or Madrid — who were “physically or economically displaced” by a World Bank scheme. However, even the media partners involved in the investigation acknowledged that the true figures were almost certainly much higher. That is because, according to the Huffington Post and other sources, “the bank often fails to count or undercounts the number of people affected by its projects.” Especially harmed were some of the poorest people on the planet: slum dwellers, impoverished farmers, fishermen, forest dwellers, and indigenous tribal communities with little access to the media or even the outside world.
According to investigators, many of the victims also faced violence and intimidation as governments and World Bank-funded goons terrorized them and destroyed their lives. Some suffered worse than others, of course, with the damage ranging from having a portion of their land seized to losing basically everything. The World Bank’s policy on the issue states that, when “possible,” seizing property and forcibly relocating victims should be avoided. Those suffering forced evictions, meanwhile, “should be assisted in their efforts to improve their livelihoods and standards of living or at least to restore them … to pre-displacement levels,” the policy continues.
However, according to the documents and World Bank officials interviewed for media reports, even those lax “standards” for how to deal with victims of the World Bank and their “partners” were not followed. “There was often no intent on the part of the governments to comply, and there was often no intent on the part of the bank’s management to enforce,” former World Bank official Navin Rai, who oversaw the outfit’s alleged “protection” for indigenous people between 2000 and 2012, was quoted as saying in media reports around the world. “That was how the game was played.”
After being confronted with the research ICIJ was able to compile and analyze, World Bank officials did acknowledge the obvious — that there is a problem. “We took a hard look at ourselves on resettlement and what we found caused me deep concern,” claimed World Bank President Jim Yong Kim in a March statement about the mass displacements caused by the bank’s schemes. “One is that we haven’t done a good enough job in overseeing projects involving resettlement.” In response, the World Bank put together an “action plan” that it claimed would help in ensuring that victims of future projects are documented and properly compensated.
Critics say worrying about the future is not enough, however. “After the World Bank has done its own review, it hasn’t gone back and worked to identify these people, and find out how they were harmed and work for these people to properly remedy the harm,” Jessica Evans, a senior researcher on international financial institutions at Human Rights Watch (HRW), was quoted as saying in a German press report. “But they can’t just promise to not make these mistakes in the future. It needs to go back and fix the mistakes that it’s made in the past.” Other activists also noted that the World Bank has been unable to even track down how many victims its scheming has destroyed.
Some of the examples, though, are tragic. In an investigative report by the leftist Huffington Post, the in-depth article begins in Lagos, Nigeria, with over 100 armed police pouring into a slum to forcibly evict the already desperately poor residents. “If you love your life, move out!” the officers reportedly shouted at the bewildered, fleeing masses while menacingly cracking their batons against people’s shacks. Then the heavy machinery moved in and demolished all of the homes, with people’s belongings still inside, leaving the neighborhood in ruins within hours. There was no warning for the terrified residents — and no compensation for losing everything. And it was all to make way for an “urban renewal” scheme funded by the World Bank. Often, the tragedies take place under the guise of promoting “conservation” or “progress” of some sort or another.
As The New American has been reporting for years, World Bank- and United Nations-backed “carbon credit” schemes to enrich cronies while purportedly dealing with alleged “global warming” have led to numerous well-documented atrocities against the poorest Africans, Latin Americans, and people worldwide. Last summer, for example, UN and World Bank carbon projects in Kenya resulted in ancient Sengwer communities having their homes torched by troops to make way for trees that would allow Westerners to purchase carbon offsets to assuage their misplaced guilt about CO2 emissions. A coalition of more than 65 non-profit organizations denounced the tragedy as “genocide.” The brutal forced evictions were “a direct result” of the World Bank plot and were “effectively funded by the World Bank,” according to a formal Sengwer complaint filed with the globalist organization.
Separately, in Kenya’s Mau forests, the Ogiek people, described as one of Africa’s last remaining hunter-gatherer tribes, were being hunted down and in some cases murdered by World Bank-backed officials, again for a carbon-credits scheme. Experts and activists warned that the nomadic people might be permanently exterminated if serious measures to restrain globalist organization-funded officials and their “climate projects” were not put in place. “The devastating plight of Kenya’s indigenous peoples is symptomatic of the flawed approach to conservation on the part of international agencies,” explained journalist Nafeez Ahmed in an explosive article at the time for the U.K. Guardian, one of the leading cheerleaders for climate hysteria and totalitarian so-called “solutions” to alleged man-made warming.
Despite efforts to downplay what more than a few critics described as “genocide” and massive land grabs funded by the World Bank, the atrocities had already been going on for years. As The New American reported in 2011, for example, a UN-accredited carbon-credit “company” funded by the World Bank and the EU was exposed in 2011 brutally evicting tens of thousands of Ugandan farmers to plant trees — again for carbon credits. Homes were burned to the ground, at least one with an eight-year-old child inside who burned to death, as residents were terrorized and threatened with execution if they refused to make way for the World Bank-backed carbon schemes. Authorities and the crony “company” involved in the atrocities said it was all for a good cause — fighting global warming — the New York Times reported at the time.
“The cause and effect is perfectly clear; the Bank in its highly controversial role as both carbon credit financier and broker is aiding and abetting the forced relocation of an entire Indigenous People through its Natural Resource Management Plan (NRMP) which includes REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation),” noted the No REDD in Africa Network (NRAN), an alliance of 66 human-rights organizations that opposes the vicious carbon scheming — a scam aimed at enriching Western globalists such as Al Gore and bankers at Goldman Sachs. Most disturbing about the World Bank response, the network said, was the outfit’s offer to help the Kenyan government in matters of “involuntary” resettlement.
“The World Bank is both admitting its complicity in the forced relocation of the Sengwer People as well as offering to collude with the Kenyan government to cover-up cultural genocide,” the alliance explained, adding that the Sengwer were now “facing complete annihilation under the guise of ‘conservation’ under REDD.” The No REDD network also blasted the developments as “carbon colonialism.” The organization argued that the UN scheme was “emerging as a new form of colonialism, economic subjugation and a driver of land grabs so massive that they may constitute a continent grab.” Of course, the giant globalist land grabs are not limited to Africa. But Africans — currently the target of multiple UN depopulation programs, too — are among its most severely harmed victims.
After the investigation uncovered millions of displaced victims, government and World Bank officials rushed to promise stronger “safeguards” and “human rights” protections — even as the controversial entity continues to take taxpayer funds to enrich cronies, destroy poor people, and attack national sovereignty worldwide. A far better and simpler solution than more “safeguards,” though, would be to shut down the corruption-plagued World Bank entirely, along with all of its globalist partners in crime — the UN, the IMF, and more. At the very least, Congress should stop funding it all with the American people’s money.
Alex Newman is a correspondent for The New American, covering economics, education, politics, and more. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU. He can be reached at [email protected]
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