What Does the World Bank Have to Do with Burma’s Wars, Conflicts and Atrocities?

ASIA--PACIFIC, ECONOMICS, 12 Nov 2012

Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service

The World Bank was a Cold War era tool of Washington which was part of the Containment Strategy. Talk of poverty which came to be institutionalized after the ex-Pentagon chief Robert McNamara’s speech on poverty in 1976 (after American defeat in Vietnam) was rooted in the institutionalized view that poverty bred Communism.

In fact, even before the discourse of poverty became institutionalized, the Bank was used by Washington to finance dodgy regimes that were under Communist threats or that were Washington’s front line proxy states such as South Korea, then one of the most destitute nations in Asia, in the 1960s.

The Bank’s entry into Burma has nothing to do with the Wretched of Burma, but everything to do with Washington’s interests – and interests of its allies.

Do not be fooled by the Bank’s dishonest and ideological message of it as being “Lord of Poverty and Development”.

The war in Kachin State has everything to do with the World Bank which funded and promoted the idea of “cross-border energy free market”. The peace-exporting Norway is deep in this neo-liberal – that is, market reigns supreme – dodgy idea: its consulting firm Noj Consult was commissioned by the Asian Development Bank to draw the blueprint for the free marketization of Greater Mekong Sub-region, involving massive hydropower dam projects across 6 countries there.

The war against the Kachin State has to be understood in this wider regional context – and the invisible but complicit parties such as these Washington-based neo-liberal institutions/banks and agencies and organizations based as far as Europe.

CSOs Lambast World Bank for ‘Hasty’ Grant to Burma

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Dr. Maung Zarni is member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment, founder and director of the Free Burma Coalition (1995-2004), and a visiting fellow (2011-13) at the Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit, Department of International Development, London School of Economics. His forthcoming book on Burma will be published by Yale University Press.

Go to Original – maungzarni.com

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