The World Bank is back-pedaling on its pledges to protect indigenous peoples from the harmful effects of the projects it finances, say the lender's critics.

Bank officials say they are working on developing safeguards that would give indigenous people unprecedented protections.

The Washington-based Amazon Alliance and Bank Information Centre (BIC), among others, say the Bank's current standards, in effect since 1991, are in fact stronger and more protective of aboriginal rights than the new policy now under review.

"The Bank is weakening its standards, which were not perfect in the first place," says Amazon Alliance co-director David Rothschild. "The old version of the safeguards uses stronger language against projects involving indigenous peoples."

Adds Melina Selverston-Scher of BIC: "The overarching concern is that the new policies fall below international human rights standards. For example, the new policy doesn't prohibit resettling indigenous people. If you relocate indigenous people you are creating a permanent refugee population."

The Bank says that, on the contrary, it is making its provisions tougher and is therefore making it harder for a borrower to relocate local peoples by requiring them to consider alternative projects.

"The new policy says that resettlement should be avoided by having alternative projects," says Navin Rai, who is coordinating the Bank's policy review. "In our technical opinion, involuntary resettlement of indigenous people is not going to be easy at all for the borrower."

New rights

Rai, however, says resettlement could sometimes be to the benefit of indigenous people, many of whom do not mind relocating if the move gives them access to water or better and newer roads.

"If we have a policy that does not permit any resettlement at all, it is going to also negatively affect them," he says.

The Bank official says the new draft would also cover new rights never granted before. These would include conditions governing the commercial exploitation of natural resources, protection of local knowledge of traditional medicine, and the preservation of local arts like indigenous music.

Indigenous peoples' rights have been on the agenda of international institutions since 1972, when the United Nations began debating them. Academics and activists say not much progress has been since then.

There are more than 250 million indigenous people worldwide living in more than 70 countries and spread across 5,000 groups. Many face problems ranging from government plans to prospect for oil, gas or gold on their land, including sacred sites, to one-language schools that suffocate local tongues.

In Belize, logging concessions to foreign companies to cut timber in forests have for years threatened the Maya people who rely on the forest for their subsistence.

In West Papua, also known as Irian Jaya, the Indonesian government has encouraged transmigration and settlement on land where indigenous peoples have lived while in the Philippines; indigenous peoples are considered squatters on their own lands.

The San, in certain African countries, endure problems stemming from the lack of national legislation safeguarding their land use and tenure.

The World Bank has a hand in 260 projects involving indigenous people. Ten more are in the pipeline, Bank officials say.

The Bank watchdog, BIC, says the Bank's review could have far-reaching consequences given the sheer size of the Bank and its influence on other development agencies. It sees the Bank's new policy as stirring up an already volatile situation.

Again, the Bank disagrees. "We expect the borrower to fully uphold rights established in international law," says Rai. "But in the case of those not established in the law, we'll then have to recognise the sovereign rights of the state."

'Misinformation'

Groups like Britain's Forest Peoples Programme (FPP), Amazon Alliance, and BIC also accuse the Bank of not doing enough to consult affected communities as part of its policy review, and of trying to rush the review for approval by the Bank's executive board this month rather than waiting for a parallel internal Bank consultation process, due for completion in April 2003.

Rai says the Bank is not looking to force the policy through and that it will take his staff of 36 until October to submit the new draft to the lender's executive directors.

"There are costs involved in the sense that Bank projects are delayed," he says. "The longer the existing policy stays in force, because the draft doesn't get approved, the longer it takes to design projects in a different way than on old policies written in September 1991."

The policy needs to be updated, he adds, because much domestic and international law has changed since the existing policy was promulgated.

Rai says many activists' complaints about the new policy are tantamount to ''misinformation''.

"Many indigenous people feel that the Bank's policy is the only thing they have," he says. "This constant hammering of the information (and use of) language like 'dilution of policy' and 'steamrolling' creates a lot of noise that we have to deal with. That takes us away from having a more articulate debate about the real issues."