The Violence of Development
Balakrishnan Rajagopal
Washington Post
August 9, 2001

"Ethnic cleansing" -- the forcible dislocation of a large number of people
belonging to particular ethnic groups -- is an outlawed practice.
Individuals who are accused of ethnic cleansing are subjected to indictment
by international criminal tribunals, and even domestic courts are
increasingly used in the West to prosecute those who commit mass violence
abroad.

Yet most large forced dislocations of people do not occur in conditions of
armed conflict or genocide but in routine, everyday evictions to make way
for development projects. A recent report by the World Commission on Dams
estimates that 40 million to 80 million people have been physically
displaced by dams worldwide, a disproportionate number of them being
indigenous peoples. Indeed, this "development cleansing" may well
constitute ethnic cleansing in disguise, as the people dislocated so often
turn out to be from minority ethnic and racial communities.

In the Philippines, almost all the large dam schemes are on the land of the
country's 6 million to 7 million indigenous people. In India, 40 percent to
50 percent of those displaced by development projects -- a total estimated
at more than 33 million since 1947 -- are tribal people, who account for
just 8 percent of the country's 1 billion population.

Still, international human rights monitors remain oblivious to the violence
of development. A biased focus on international criminal justice -- the
pursuit of a Milosevic, for example -- has blinded the world's conscience
to mass crimes that are often as serious as those that occurred in Rwanda
and the former Yugoslavia.

The millions of people forcibly dislocated from their lands are usually
from among the poorest and most vulnerable sections of populations. Upon
dislocation, these communities are pushed into further poverty and
violence. These conditions are themselves grave human rights violations,
but they also lead to further violations -- for example, by exacerbating
conflicts between large communities that lose land and are resettled and
the communities into which they move.

Forcible dislocation destroys the livelihoods of entire communities as
large dams and inappropriate agricultural projects alter the land-use
patterns that traditionally support farming, grazing and fishing. And the
number of people forcibly dislocated is probably far larger than reported,
as the displaced are systematically undercounted -- for example, by as much
as 47 percent in the case of the projects funded by the World Bank. In
China's Western Poverty Reduction Project in Quinghua, the World Bank
Complaints Panel found that entire towns of thousands of Tibetan and Mongol
minorities were not counted as affected.

The United Nations has declared mass eviction to be a violation of the
human right to housing. And because of growing conflicts over water and
natural resources, the World Commission on Dams was established in 1998 by
the World Bank, the International Conservation Union and others. But
despite these efforts, human rights violations continue in the name of
development.

For instance, a judgment by the Indian Supreme Court in October 2000 will
allow the construction of a mega-dam on the Narmada River to go forward.
This is deeply disappointing given the Indian judiciary's history as the
protector of the rights of the underprivileged. It is also tragic because
the project will lead to the displacement of more than 200,000 people and
the elimination of the rich ecological resources in the Narmada Valley, one
of India's most fertile.

The Narmada Valley dam project is the second largest in the world, after
the Three Gorges dam project in China, which is known for its excessive
human and environmental costs. The World Bank, which originally was to have
funded the Narmada project, withdrew funding in 1993 after being criticized
for violating its own internal regulations on resettlement and
rehabilitation and environmental clearance. Every funder since then --
Japanese and Germans included -- has withdrawn after running into
criticism, and the project is now being funded by Indian state governments,
redirecting scarce funds from much-needed health and education projects.

A broad coalition opposing the dam, consisting of the people of the Narmada
Valley as well as domestic and foreign intellectuals, social activists,
journalists, judges and lawyers, has repeatedly pointed out technological
alternatives for producing power and providing water, but these have been
dismissed by the Indian Supreme Court

On the other side is the developmental nationalism displayed by Indian Home
Minister L. K. Advani, who says opponents of such projects are working at
the behest of "foreign nations" -- a response commonly given by governments
that commit gross human rights abuses

It is clear that international indifference toward the violence of
development projects needs to end.

The writer is a professor of law and development at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and director of MIT's Program on Human Rights and
Justice.