Bangkok
ON ARRIVAL IN Bangkok, we were tagged and assigned seats in a fleet of new Volvos driven by men in white ice-cream suits, white shoes and white peak caps. In the back of my Volvo were two men in pinstripes; one of them arranged debt equity swaps, the other owned a third of a bank in Ecuador. With lights flashing and police outriders going ahead – and looking terrific in their ice-cream suits, reflecting sunglasses, parachutist’s wings and decorative holsters – we headed into Bangkok’s famous traffic, which had vanished, past Bangkok’s famous street vendors, most of whom had vanished, through an underpass where people have scratched for a living since I have been coming here; and they, too, had gone. In their place were teams of women in blue smocks waiting to catch anything, a leaf, before it sullied the ground.
Along the way Coke, Pepsi, IBM, Nissan and a large massage parlour welcomed us to the World Bank/International Monetary Fund conference ‘ . . . everything 50 per cent off for you delegates and participants’. On arrival at the Holiday Inn, people in white coats and tails ran at us, bowing low. We were thanked for everything; one of them got into the lift and thanked us for going up and down. Thais are polite and gracious people but do not normally engage in the sort of spectacular deference for which the door-openers of Tokyo department stores are famous.
Once in room 2436, things were becoming clearer. There was much to look at, including a picture of Margaret Thatcher and the words: ‘You don’t have to be rich and powerful . . . When the daughter of a humble grocery shop owner went on to become prime minister of Britain, she proved it! Now we are proving it again!’ The ‘we’ is a computer firm.31
Next to this was a profile of World Bank President Lewis T. Preston. ‘He is, first of all, a Marine,’ it said. ‘However, an intimate family friend swore that he and his wife are warm and hospitable . . . but no one fails to mention that Lew Preston is one tough hombre!’32
Next to Lewis T. Preston was a form for me to fill in my blood group. A Thailand health guide advised against sharing a toothbrush, due to the prevalence of Aids. Under ‘Emotional Health’ it warned that some of us World Bankers might have difficulty adapting to our new environment and find ourselves feeling depressed. ‘This stage is not unusual,’ it reassured us, ‘nor is it a sign of failure.’
Do tough hombres like Lewis T. Preston get these depressions too? Surely not. The World Bank seldom has a surplus of less than a billion dollars and everyone wants to borrow from it – everyone being those very poor countries whose economies have been ‘structurally adjusted’ by the World Bank and the IMF so that they can compete with other very poor countries for ever-diminishing export markets in order to acquire hard currency, in order to pay back the World Bank and the IMF the interest charges on loans they have repaid several times over.
The consequences of this system bring to mind Tolstoy: ‘I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means – except by getting off his back.’
In Senegal, 40 per cent of the fertile land is given over to growing peanuts for Western margarine; in Ghana half the arable land is devoted to cocoa for Western chocolate bars; and in Colombia cut flowers are grown on farmland for export to the American rich. In these countries, the corollary is widespread, increasing malnutrition.
Remember Live Aid? In 1985, the twenty-nine poorest countries of sub-Saharan Africa paid back to the World Bank, the IMF and Western commercial banks a total of $6.7 billion – more than twice as much as they received in emergency aid from governments and the good-hearted.33
These facts are known here as ‘unmentionables’. The original aim of the World Bank, says Lewis T. Preston, ‘was and remains the reduction of poverty’. The original aim as enshrined in the 1947 Bretton Woods charter was, in so many words, to provide markets for the rich world and to control the resources of the poor. Understandably, in these triumphant days, it is difficult for the corporate do-gooders to restrain themselves. ‘We should not be afraid’, Norman Lamont told the conference, ‘to say that what we are extolling here are the virtues of capitalism! And the driving force of capitalism is the pursuit of profit!’ There, he said it: no blah about eradicating poverty from Norman, whom a Bangkok radio station persists in calling ‘Chancellor of the Excesser, Norm Lament’.34
The World Bank usually holds its annual conference in Washington. The last conference held in Asia was in Manila in 1976 soon after the IMF had given the dictator Ferdinand Marcos $4.5 billion, or about a third of the amount he is now believed to have had stashed away when he died.35 In return for this largesse, Marcos built a number of luxury hotels to accommodate the World Bankers in the manner to which they are accustomed when deliberating about the poor. The poor, of course, were kept well away. Marcos sent the bill to the city authorities, who passed it on in municipal taxes; the poor of Manila are still paying it off.
Something similar has happened here. A vast conference centre, with gilded lacquer and other adornments, was completed just in time for the conference, and at great cost. In a country where rural children still die from malnutrition and preventable disease, and where low wages, bonded child labour, prostitution and illegal sweatshops support a ‘growing’ economy, the poor will end up paying indirectly.
The display of wealth has been unrelenting. A three-star chef has been flown in from Paris, reported the Bangkok Nation, accompanied by ‘succulent turkeys from the famous Bresse region . . . Belgian caviar from Iran, smoked salmon from Norway and prime rib from the US’.36 Following the seminar on the conversion of socialism to capitalism and ‘the lessons learned’, delegates headed off to a party where, said the Nation, ‘they must have been surprised and delighted that something very appropriate to their status was in store for them . . . a display of gems consisting of an 89-karat diamond, a 100-karat emerald and a 336-karat opal.’37
‘It is just not acceptable’, says Lewis T. Preston, ‘that so many people in the world have to live on less than a dollar a day.’38 The 6,000 employees of the World Bank are unlikely to find themselves in such straits. Middle-ranking civil servants earn 300 times the per capita income of half of humanity, and their perks include first-class air travel and tenure in deluxe hotels, costing up to $45 million a year.39
As part of Bangkok’s ‘beautification’ for the conference, an iron wall was built opposite the convention centre, painted in bright murals and draped with a ‘Welcome to Thailand’ sign. Alas, during a heavy downpour the sign fell down, revealing to the delegates a large number of poor people hidden behind the wall. These are the slum people of Klong Toey. To most of them ‘beautification’ has meant eviction to places where it is often impossible for them to resume work as street vendors, or keep their jobs as day labourers and domestics.
For as long as I have been coming to Bangkok, one of the city’s landmarks, as you drove in from the airport, was a small town of people living beside the railway tracks. A few weeks before the World Bank conference began, everything was bulldozed: homes, a kindergarten, a school. The people were moved to wasteland well out of sight of the to-ing and fro-ing Volvos, though still beside the railway line. Each was given £90 as ‘removal expenses’. They have no electricity and running water, and the army says it wants its tents back once the conference is over. The Miss Universe circus is due next, and another 5,000 people are likely to be evicted.
The beautifiers and bankers have not had it all their way. Forty-three countries have sent representatives to an International People’s Forum at Chulalongkorn University. People who have been both victims and opponents of ‘development’ have spoken, often movingly, about the effects of World Bank capital projects, and IMF austerity programmes in their countries.
Vandana Shiva from India described how hundreds of thousands of people had been made homeless all over India by flooding caused by World Bank dams and irrigation schemes, which have taken little account of the environmental impact. ‘They see only new markets and new investment zones that come with the dams,’ she said. ‘They cause these environmental disasters because it is assumed that “development” must come from outside. They think they bear a kind of White Man’s Burden; but they do not really study life.’40
According to American economist Patricia Adams, ‘World Bank-sponsored hydro projects have flooded a million and a half people off their land; and another million and a half are about to follow.’41 One of the themes of the World Bank conference has been the Bank’s new ‘green’ image as it emphasises the need to protect the environment. In selecting Thailand as the venue of its conference this year, the bank is making a point that the Thai economy should serve as an example to others. In fact, Thailand is the model exploitative economy: an environmental disaster, with its great forests wiped out by uncontrolled logging and profiteering.
I put several of these ‘unmentionables’ to senior officials of the World Bank and the IMF, in particular the conclusions of the UNICEF study that more than half a million children died every year as a result of high growth rate and austerity policies imposed by the institutions.42 The officials sought to discredit the UNICEF figures. ‘Oh, that one’s got suspect data,’ said Richard Erb, deputy managing director of the IMF. He offered nothing to support his statement.
There have been numerous sideshows. The most demeaning was a press conference called by the Russians to announce that they were more ‘pro-market’ than anyone. One of them said, ‘Comrade Yavlinsky wants to explain his views on . . .’ He was interrupted by his colleague, who said, ‘What’s this comrade stuff?’ To which the first Russian replied, ‘My God! Sorry. Old habits die hard.’43
The saddest are the Vietnamese, who fought for half a century to free their country from colonialism and to establish a national health care system, remarkable by Third World standards, as well as free education and a minimum wage. In Bangkok, the Vietnamese have been promising to do almost anything to get the United States to lift its embargo so that the IMF can ‘structurally adjust’ them and impose more austerity, if that’s possible. They say they have no choice but to sell off much of the forests not destroyed by American defoliants; and they took the opportunity to announce that they had abolished the minimum wage. Their labour force will now be the cheapest in Asia, which means that people must work in ‘free-enterprise zones’ for a pittance. Yet Washington still says no; the embargo stands; the punishment goes on.
Some things transcend even ‘the virtues of capitalism’, as Norm Lament surely would agree.
October 25, 1991