Big Dams, Huge Profits and Political Corruption: World Bank Shuts Out Dissident Voices

Dissident voices have no place in a Singapore-style consumer paradise. At the World Bank's annual meeting, civil society protests were restricted to a small stage inside the shopping mall. And Singapore's government banned close to 30 experienced civil society activists from entering the country altogether. The media frenzy that followed the reprisals overshadowed the fact that the ban was just a pale reflection of the repression which poor people in the underbelly of global consumer society -- and often at the receiving end of World Bank projects -- experience.

To keep the wheels of the world's consumer society spinning, new resources of land, water, forests and minerals constantly need to be brought into the market system. The people who own or use these lands, forests and rivers have usually no control over how their resources are appropriated. Outside the limelight of global media attention, repression often reigns large.

On the way to Singapore, I visited several World Bank projects in Pakistan. In the villages around Makhad, a small town on the left bank of the Indus River, we learned that many poor farmers are currently selling their land to the large landlords. The region is at risk of being flooded by the proposed Kalabagh Dam, and the farmers know that once their land is expropriated, only the rich will be able to pay the bribes required to receive fair compensation. If Kalabagh follows the example of other dam and irrigation projects in Pakistan, the large farmers will also bribe the water bureaucrats so that they can build illegal canals and divert additional water flows. Like the people who were displaced by the reservoirs, the small farmers at the end of the irrigation canals will be left high and dry.

Journalists who write about development conflicts in Pakistan live dangerously. In April, Mehruddin Maree, a journalist who used to cover the impacts of large dams and irrigation canals on the Indus delta, was arrested by the police in Golarchi, a small town in Southern Pakistan. He has been missing ever since. "We are often intimidated when we touch on the interests of powerful parties, but this would not stop Mehruddin," one of his colleagues told me. The case of Mehruddin Maree is not an exception. Aftab Ahmed Sherpao, Pakistan's interior minister, confirmed in 2005 that about 5,000 political activists and journalists are missing in the country.

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