DATE=7/5/2000 TYPE=U-S OPINION ROUNDUP TITLE=WORLD BANK CHINA LOAN MAY HARM TIBET NUMBER=6-11909 BYLINE=ANDREW GUTHRIE DATELINE=WASHINGTON EDITOR=ASSIGNMENTS TELEPHONE=619-3335 CONTENT= INTRO: The World Bank is being criticized for some of the loans it grants to underdeveloped nations that sometimes have unintended, or even negative, consequences. One such loan is drawing a great deal of controversy this week. At issue is 40-million-dollars of a larger proposed loan to the People's Republic of China that would relocate about 58-thousand Chinese farmers into a province of Tibet. All the U-S newspapers commenting on the loan are against it, and we get a sampling now from ___________ in today's U-S Opinion Roundup. TEXT: Pro Tibetan activists around the world have been calling attention to this controversial loan for months, claiming that it will displace traditional Tibetan and Mongol herders from their ancestral homes. They see it as another attempt by the authorities in Beijing to suppress Tibetan culture, as well as solving the problem of moving impoverished Chinese from land they can no longer cultivate. Within the past few days, Tibetans have marched to the Chinese Embassy here in Washington to protest the move. Another criticism of the pending loan, scheduled to be voted on Thursday [7/6] is that an independent inquiry into it found that World Bank staff had broken their own rules in approving it. With that background, we turn to The Washington Post, which opposes the loan on several grounds and worries it bodes ill for the future. VOICE: The Clinton administration sold Chinese entry to the World Trade Organization partly on the argument that membership of a rules-based organization would reform China. Skeptics in Congress objected that China would flout those rules and undermine the W-T-O's cohesion. Both sides could learn something from China's behavior as a member of the World Bank. On the one hand, China has made the most of membership, reducing the number of its citizens living on less than one dollar a day by 150-million during the 1990s. On the other hand, China has bridled at some World Bank rules -- not least in a case that comes to a head at the bank's ... meeting ... Thursday. The case ... has come to the fore thanks to Tibet activists, who rightly argue that the bank has no business subsidizing the eradication of Tibetan culture. But the project has become controversial for another reasons too. Pro-Tibet protests prompted the bank to commission an independent review of the project, which has found that the bank's staff bent in-house rules on the way to approving it. What's more, the bank's board has held up publication of the review, apparently also in deference to China. ... Because of the project's implications for Tibet, the United States and several other board members will vote against it. But Thursday's board meeting should also be watched for the light it sheds on China's attitude to multilateral rules ... TEXT: New England's largest daily, The Boston Globe, joins the debate with these thoughts on the bank's policy in this particular case. VOICE: The World Bank has been criticized in recent years for a lack of transparency and accountability. As an institution, the bank has tried to explain its role in financing economically beneficial projects and, under President James Wolfensohn, has striven to become more open and accountable. Much of that effort is being undercut, however, by the bank's preparations to underwrite a project in China's western Qinghai Province, a traditional homeland for Tibetan and Mongol herders. /// OPT /// The project would place the World Bank in the position of financing the resettlement of 58- thousand Chinese farmers on Tibetan lands and displacing the indigenous people who had been living there. /// OPT /// Above all, the bank should not allow itself to become a collaborator in Beijing's colonialist policy of expunging Tibetan cultural identity by submerging the Tibetan population under waves of resettled Chinese immigrants. /// OPT /// ... Bank management has made a bad situation worse by hiding from public view a report it commissioned on the project.../// END OPT /// TEXT: As The Los Angeles Times points out in yet another unfavorable editorial, Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, has a very personal reason for opposing the project. VOICE: The ... Dalai Lama sees the proposed resettlement -- which would affect the area where he was born -- as "cultural genocide." The U-S and German representatives to the World Bank voted against it, and Tibet supporters around the globe opposed it as an encroachment on Tibetan culture. An independent panel of experts concluded that the bank's staff violated many of its key policies in approving the loan. The bank's board of directors ... should scrap it. TEXT: In Texas, The Houston Chronicle calls the proposed loan a "Cancer Deal" in its headline, and then states its opposition this way: VOICE: The World Bank should cancel the 160- million-dollar loan it has approved for China that, in part, would be used to relocate 58- thousand Chinese farmers into a former Tibetan province that is the birthplace of the Dalai Lama. The major objection to the loan is that it would finance an act by China tantamount to "cultural genocide" by diluting Tibetan culture and influence in the area, as Tibetan exile groups have claimed. /// OPT /// Also, it now turns out, an independent, internal report about the loan, released [in June] ... reveals that the World Bank violated seven of its [own] 10 regulations regarding loan approvals, including a requirement to assess potential social and environmental damage to the region in approving the loan. /// END OPT /// ... Financing the loan has not been worked out and it shouldn't be. The World Bank should not be a party to the brutal elimination of an ancient culture. TEXT: Lastly, The New York Times, which calls the loan "misguided" in its headline, outlines its objections to the bank's response to earlier criticism. VOICE: ...[bank] President James Wolfensohn believes ... these failures can be addressed by conducting more thorough studies on the project's impact. But studies are not the answer. They may satisfy the bank's regulations, but they will do nothing to solve the social problems created by incursions into traditionally Tibetan lands. The bank directors would be wiser simply to reject this poorly designed project, and to invite China and the bank's management to present an alternative plan that would not require a large resettlement program in a culturally sensitive area. TEXT: On that note, we conclude this sampling of opinion from the U-S press on a highly controversial World Bank loan that would resettle Chinese farmers into traditionally Tibetan land. NEB/ANG/JP 05-Jul-2000 13:58 PM EDT (05-Jul-2000 1758 UTC) NNNN Source: Voice of America .