The soldiers pointed their guns at Odoge Otiri and led the 22-year-old student into the forest outside his village in western Ethiopia. Then, he says, they began pounding him with their nightsticks, leaving him bloody and unmoving.
“I was unconscious,” he recalls. “The reason they left me is they thought I was going to die.”
That night, soldiers arrested his wife, Aduma Omot.
“The soldiers took me to their camp,” she says. “Then they mistreated me, they raped me.”
They held her for two days, she says, before they let her go.
The soldiers attacked them, Otiri says, because he opposed Ethiopian authorities’ efforts to force him and his neighbors from their homes as part of the country’s so-called “villagization” effort — a massive social engineering project that sought to move almost 2 million poor people to newly built sites selected by the government.
Otiri and Omot are among thousands of Anuak, a mostly Christian indigenous group from the rural Ethiopian state of Gambella, who have fled from Ethiopia’s mass relocation campaign.
The Ethiopian government financed the evictions in part by tapping into a pool of aid money from the world’s most influential development lender, the World Bank, two former Ethiopian officials who helped carry out the relocation program told the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. The money, the former officials said, was diverted from the $2 billion in funding that the World Bank had put into a health and education initiative.
The World Bank strongly disputes that its money supported the mass evictions in western Ethiopia. Even as Anuak refugees and human rights groups have publicly charged that World Bank money has been used to bankroll brutal evictions, the bank has continued to send hundreds of millions of dollars into the same health and education program.
“We are confident that the money was used for the purposes intended,” Greg Toulmin, the World Bank’s country program coordinator for Ethiopia, told ICIJ in March. “We remain confident that there was no link.”
New evidence gathered by ICIJ undermines the bank’s continuing denials that its money bankrolled the evictions.
One of the two former officials interviewed by ICIJ was well-positioned to know exactly how World Bank funds were being used: Omot Obang Olom, the former governor of Gambella, oversaw the resettlement program in his state.
Olom told ICIJ that he personally oversaw the diversion of some $10 million from the World Bank’s health and education initiative, redirecting the money to finance mass relocations through the villagization program. He said senior officials in Ethiopia’s federal government instructed him to divert the funds, and this money was essential to conducting the resettlement program.
“If we were not ordered by the federal government to reallocate the World Bank budget for the program, the program would not be possible,” Olom said.
Olom, who left the country last year and is now seeking political asylum in the Philippines, has never before spoken to the news media about the eviction program. He now acknowledges that the mass evictions were carried out through threats and violence.
“The farmers came to me and they say, ‘Omot, we are not free because members of the defense force come and intimidate us,’ ” he said. “There are incidents of abusing farmers, even raping the women.”
Farmers who spoke out against the evictions, he said, “were beaten, were tortured, by the national defense forces.”
The evictions in Ethiopia fit a larger pattern.
Communities displaced amid World Bank Group projects in Nigeria, Honduras, Kenya, Indonesia, India, Guatemala and Uganda have accused the organization’s borrowers of committing human rights violations.
Governments and companies backed by the World Bank or its private-sector lending arm, the International Finance Corp., have bulldozed and burned homes and deployed soldiers or private security operatives who have arrested, beaten or even killed people, residents of affected communities have said in official complaints and in interviews with ICIJ.
Human rights experts say the bank is undercutting its mission of helping the world’s poorest people by failing to embrace international policies upholding human rights.
Philip Alston, the United Nation’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, has accused the bank of hiding behind a “sleight of hand” argument that it can’t fully engage in human rights issues because its charter forbids it from getting involved in politics. In December Alston and 27 other U.N. human rights officials wrote World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim to complain that the bank’s proposed revisions to its “social safeguards” policies for protecting people in the path of development “avoid any meaningful references to human rights.”
A spokesman for the World Bank said the bank takes communities’ reports of human rights abuses “very seriously,” and that “these cases show we must continually improve our approach to supervision.” He said the bank has been a leader for decades in setting strong safeguards for people living in the footprint of its projects, and that its proposed new rules go “as far as or further than any other multilateral development bank” to protect vulnerable populations.
The World Bank’s Ethiopia program director, Toulmin, said the bank’s mission is to support initiatives that fight poverty, not to police unrelated activities by its borrowers.
“We are not in the physical security business,” he said. Read more…
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