WB, IMF had firm control on Third World Economy:

Sudan: Session imminent for want of a Rajapaksa

Garvin Karunaratne

The people of Sudan are sad today. The South of Sudan is in the process of receding and a referendum is being held now, asking the people of the South as to whether they want to establish a separate State. It is only the people in South Sudan that are voting!

What would have happened to Sri Lanka, if a referendum was held for the people of the North and the East to vote as to whether they should secede from Sri Lanka and have a separate State, when the LTTE did rule the North and most of the East-before 2005?

Sudan was a colony of the British till 1956, General Omar al Bashi, the present leader has ruled entire Sudan from 1989. It was a single country where the Southerners only amounted to 21 percent of the total population. But Omar al Bashir allowed Western Superpowers and their Non Governmental Organizations to get working, nibbling at the sovereignty of Sudan.

Further, sadly, Omar al Bashir’s ranks did not throw up any hero to defeat the rebels. Yesterday the President of Sudan, al Bashir has stated that he will accept the vote for Secession. He has totally given in!

After a lapse of living twenty two years away from home in far off lands, in 1995, we packed our bags and returned home to Sri Lanka. We lived at our small family estate at Mawaramandiya for a while and then came to reside at Nugegoda till 2000.

That was the time when the LTTE was the lord of the North and the East. Trincomalee was my pet city when I roamed island wide on my endless circuits. I always pitch my stay on a pilgrims rest beside the sea and slept on the beach on a bare mat. In 1995 to 2000 it was the LTTE that ruled that area. No Sinhala person was safe anywhere there.

It was at this time that the LTTE massacred around thirty civilians at Rajagiriya near the Macdonald Restaurant. I remember that day. A group of LTTE cadres had occupied a private play school and was disturbed because the owner came in at an odd time in the evening when normally the school was closed.

He saw a few people behaving suspiciously; knowing that something was amiss, he reported it to he police post close by. Two constables who marched in to investigate were gunned down. Then the LTTE cadres ran amok. They ran towards Borella on the main road shooting their way through, sprain T 56 bullets on every vehicle on the road.

One cadre ran, shooting his way through the Castle Street Maternity Hospital and some scrambled into the top floor of a block of flats and the army surrounded it. The rest escaped. Over thirty Sinhala people were murdered in cold blood that evening.

At that time whenever I had to go to Colombo, I would carefully drive keeping my eyes and ears wide open for anything unwanted. My parking haunt was behind the Regal Theatre. I entered cautiously.

As the parking attendant came to charge fees, I would chat ‘sahodaraya’, and with a smile establish contact on the same wave length. I would inquire whether there were any problems in that area. With an assurance that nothing had happened, I would climb the steps to the main road, looking left and then right and then taking a few steps forward and repeating this procedure again and again. I would with great trepidation pass the Buddhist temple at the roundabout, where a few years earlier, an LTTE cadre shot dead the chief incumbent in broad daylight.

Then I was sad that we had not thrown up a leader who could stand up to the LTTE. But now that President Mahinda Rajapaksa had found solace for all of us, we need not worry about terrorism. The Rajapaksa brothers sorted it out. All of us owe them our sincere thanks.

However, all is not well in our island. As much as Omar al Bashir the President of Sudan lives with an open warrant for genocide that was decided by the International Court on March 4, 2008, there are moves afoot to haul up our President Rajapaksa and his heroic lieutenants for genocide.

To my thinking it is a matter of time. If our leaders are not careful they will be caught in that net and face the guillotine like Milesovich and Karadevich! We have to guard our seas very carefully.

The plight of Sudan, the fact that its leader is hounded by the International Court for War Crimes as well as the reception that our President met with when he went to deliver a speech at Oxford in England gives us the message that we have to go it alone.

World Band and IMF

Our President is recently reported to have vetoed World Bank Aid for our disabled soldiers. He is reported to have said that “there is a possibility of these organizations using such projects to gather information on the military and its plans.”

Can the World Bank or the IMF be trusted? I was perhaps one of the first to prove that the IMF and the World Bank were intent on sabotaging the development of the Third World countries.

In 1992, in a speech at the South Asian Forum of the University of London, in the presence of Minister Nimal Siripala de Silva I made a speech proving that Sri Lnaka’s economy was ruined by the IMF. (pages 43-82 in my2006 book) My 1997 book: Microeterprise Development: The Way out of the IMF and World Bank Stranglehold (1997) and How the IMF Ruined Sri Lanka (2006) reveal how the policies of the IMF and the World Bank ruined Sri Lanka.

Let me quote world authorities – Noble laureate Professor Jeffery Sachs, to show what happened to the Third World because of the IMF and the World Bank.

In his words: ”Western Governments enforced draconian budget policies in Africa during the 1980s and 1990s. The IMF and the World Bank virtually ran the economic policies of the debt ridden continent recommending regimens of budgetary belt tightening known technically as Structural Adjustment Programs. These Programs had little scientific merit and produced even fewer results.

By the start of the twenty-first century Africa was poorer than in the late 1960s when the IMF and the World Bank had first arrived on the scene, with disease, population growth and environmental degradation spiraling out of control. IMF led austerity has frequently led to riots, coups and the collapse of public services” (Sachs: 2005)

This view finds full support from Noble laureate Professor Joseph Stiglitz who says that “the mistakes of the IMF were sufficiently frequent that they clearly weren’t just an accident... as an academic you look or patterns. One was that they were incompetent, stupid people.

But that argument is not that persuasive, they pay among the highest wages, they get good people... they chose the Models that led to wrong prediction, wrong policies and really negative consequence. (Stiglitz: 2003)

All this has to be read with the revelation by John Perkins, once a Peace Corps worker who later worked for a multinational in Ecuador who confesses that he had under instructions fabricated reports for Ecuador to be given Aid for projects that would not bring any income for Ecuador but would ensure that the Aid given will find its way back to the donor country with interest, and also in the process saddle the country with the loan as a debt. All projects were white elephants.

This was done on a systematic basis to make the country indebted. Debt was the tool used to make our countries indebted! The IMF and the World Bank were institutions that were used for this purpose (Perkins; Confessions of an Economic Hitman: 2005)

I myself can state through my own experience that the World Bank and the IMF had their firm control on the Third World economies. Faced with the problem of youth unemployment in Bangladesh, I designed the Youth Self Employment Program in 1982.

This was done through the concept of import substitution which was not approved by the IMF and the World Bank. These two institutions insisted on the Government following their dictates and in their eyes it was the Departments of Agriculture, Industry and Livestock that they had to control. I knew this constraint and when I commenced implementing the program, we were very secretive.

In my own words: ”The Youth Self Employment Program managed to implement its policy of creating employment in the import substitution manner unknown to the IMF and the World Bank as it was done by a Ministry that did not deal with agriculture, industry or livestock. The interpretation given to youth work included every discipline that could be used to create commercial employment (Success in Development Godages: 2010)

This program was established by me in 1982 and 1983 and expanded island wide implemented by the officers who were trained by me.

When I later met the Secretary of the Ministry in London in about 1993 he told me that the World Bank wanted the Government to hand over this program lock stock and barrel to them, on the promise of Aid which the Government totally refused.

The Program was thorn in their eye, because it created employment for Bangladeshi youth in a manner that created production and obviated imports from the Developed Countries.

It is a Program of employment creation that was expanded apace and now guides as much as 160,000 a year to establish self employed ventures, all under the watchful eyes of Youth Workers who had became trained economists overnight This is today the largest program on employment creation one can find anywhere.

Development of Sri Lanka

Our President is right when he remarked that the World Bank and other NGOs may be having other tasks to do in our country. It is like the Japanese tsunami engineers making a 300 foot long undergroudn tunnel for Prabhakaran to escape in a submarine, if ever the necessity arose done under the guise of repairing homes damaged by the Tsunami! Our Karrannagoda’s dvoras were too smart for that to take place.

This tunnel was constructed without the knowledge of the Government. We must also not forget the Red Baana settlements done by Norway and its Solheim to place Upcountry Tamils from our Central Hills into the Weli Oya region, without the knowledge of the Jayawardena Government.

How underhand can Governments like Japan and Norway be? This will also indicate what will happen when Ban Ki Moon’s Investigation Panel steps into Sri Lanka. It will be like “ittevage geta Kaballeva ringuva vage”.

Minister Sarath Amunugama has stated recently that a change will be made to enable guided development. The Concept is that the Government should play a pro-active role in economic affairs without merely leaving everything to be decided by market forces. This is said to be the new Bird Cage Model used by China.

The Government of Sri Lanka has at last realized that following the Free Market – Liberalization Model of Development enforced on the Third World by the IMF from the Seventies has to be changed to enable development.

It was the IMF and the World Bank that made Sri Lanka indebted by gagging President Jayawardena and winning him over. Sri Lanka was first made indebted by the UNP Governments of 1977 to 1994 and the debt in 1994 meant that the country had to get more loans to repay the dues on the earlier loans. We are on that path right now. That was the unfortunate legacy of President Jayawardena!

We have to systematically undo what the IMF and the World Bank did to our development infrastructure and rebuild our own systems to control the spiraling cost of living, create production, create employment and alleviate poverty. Therein lies our salvation.

Sri Lanka is alive today because President Rajapaksa saved the country, but all that stands to be lost if we listen to the IMF and the World Bank.