Navin Rai
Coordinator, Indigenous Peoples Policy
World Bank
1818 H St NW
Washington, DC 20433
USA

Dear Mr Rai,

Revision of World Bank’s Indigenous Peoples Policy

As we are unable to attend your meeting with NGOs about the World Bank’s new Indigenous Peoples Policy, we wanted to put our concerns to you in writing:

1. Lack of recognition of tribal peoples’ right to own their lands

Both the World bank’s existing Operational Directive 4.20, and the proposed replacement Operational Policy 4.10, fudge the single most important aspect of any meaningful attempt to improve the welfare of tribal peoples; namely, their right to have their ownership of their land recognised in law.

For over 30 years Survival International has argued that tribal peoples have ownership rights over the lands they use and occupy. We have based this both on the concept of ‘natural justice’ and on ILO Convention 107, and 169 which superseded it. These conventions constitute ‘international law’ inasmuch as anything does. The fact that many countries have ratified neither does not diminish their status as the widely accepted international law(s) on tribal peoples. Both conventions affirm the land ownership rights of tribal peoples. The earlier convention, now nearly half a century old, says, ‘The right of ownership... over the lands which these populations traditionally occupy shall be recognised.’ The more recent convention is of course stronger.

Many parts of these conventions should be considered international customary law, with the same force as, for instance, the genocide convention and the same status in international courts (i.e. both legally and morally binding whether it/they have been ratified or not).

Survival International believes that communal and inalienable land ownership rights are the sine qua non of tribal peoples’ survival. Besides their basis in international law, these rights are also made explicit in the draft UN declaration on indigenous peoples’ rights, as well as in countless declarations from tribal peoples themselves. Yet this vital point is missing from OP 4.10, which talks merely of ‘rights to use and develop the lands they [tribal peoples] occupy’ and of the need to ‘enhance their security over lands and other resources’.

This (presumably deliberate) obfuscation means that future World Bank projects on tribal peoples’ lands will inevitably be just as destructive as past ones, and tribal peoples stand little chance of gaining the security of land tenure that they need.

2. The World Bank’s continual violations of its own policies.

Survival International was heavily involved in the drafting of OD 4.20 in the late 1980s, and devoted a considerable amount of time and resources to the effort to make the policy as genuinely helpful to tribal peoples as possible. Notwithstanding the defects of the policy as it eventually emerged, it should at least have marked an improvement in the Bank’s treatment of tribal peoples affected by its projects.

Yet as countless studies, evaluations and reports have only too painfully demonstrated, the greatest problem in any discussion of World Bank policies towards tribal peoples is that the policies are continually broken. You are doubtless aware of the many criticisms levelled at World Bank projects during the 1980s and 1990s, but Survival’s experience suggests that many of the same problems continue to exist today. To take just one example: nineteen years after the World Bank lent Brazil and its mining company CVRD $900 million to develop the Carajás iron ore deposits, and despite the recognition of all Indian territories within the area being a condition of the project, the Awá Indians in Maranhao state are still waiting for their lands to be officially recognised and protected.

This lack of protection has had deadly consequences for the Awá: their land has been invaded by loggers, ranchers and settlers, and many Awá have died. In December 1998, for example, six uncontacted Awá died, almost certainly from disease brought in by outsiders. There have also been massacres; one Awá man called Karapiru told a Survival researcher: ‘They killed my mother, my brothers and my sisters, and my wife’. I cite this to illustrate the fact that the Bank’s violation of its own policies (and unwillingness to take responsibility for the result) is not merely a semantic point to be discussed at meetings and workshops, but has had profound and terrible consequences for people who are already uniquely vulnerable. 

Without a marked shift in the will of the World Bank actually to comply with its existing policies, devoting substantial time and effort to the creation of a new policy seems somewhat redundant.

Yours sincerely,