Published on the 30th of May by the Washington Post. The full article is behind a paywall, so a link to the archived version is here (as an aside, this is a very handy way of getting around paywalls).

For those of us who have been following the development industry long enough, it’s not really any surprise that the World Bank would go ahead with a $100 million project — small potatoes, in their world — despite the ongoing crisis in the area; nevertheless, the general public remains woefully uninformed as to the true depths of Bank’s heartlessness. This is ongoing misconception that the World Bank actually cares about the humanitarian situation anywhere, let alone Myanmar, is reflected in the article itself:

[T]he signal this sends is catastrophic. This project demonstrates that the international community and the institutional order of the West simply do not care about crimes against humanity.

As much as we may prefer not to admit it, this is not a new phenomenon. Not caring about the lives of innocent people was standard practice for the international community, and the development industry more specifically, long before they started pretending that they do care. We know that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but we nevertheless continue to turn a blind eye to the crimes that are committed by the World Bank, the United Nations, the IMF and so on, in the name of such ‘good intentions.’ They might occasionally admit that mistakes have been made and “lessons learned”, but they have no genuine remorse nor drive toward improvement: time and time again, the same mistakes are made; the same crimes committed; the same shrug of the shoulders given.

Part of the problem, of course, comes from the remoteness of these crimes in comparison to the West, the elites of which have appointed themselves as the world’s official hall monitors. Myanmar, like Rwanda, is a relatively far-flung and seldom heard-of nation. There are no internationally-known locations or events that take place there; no infamous historical events that have caught the attention of the West — I myself did not even know that Myanmar has been involved in the world’s longest civil war prior to seeing it mentioned on the nation’s Wikipedia page; there are not even any famous people from Myanmar, be they actors, intellectuals, or of some other fame, that the average Western citizen would be likely to have heard of. And, crucially, just like Rwanda, Myanmar is not known for exporting any particular good or resource — though rich in oil, natural gas and minerals, it is only very recently that foreign economies have tried to overlook the nation’s flagrant corruption and dismal infrastructure in attempt to see its potential value as a trading partner. All things considered, Myanmar is simply not a country that makes many lists.

Of course, neither Rwanda nor Myanmar should not have to be known for anything in particular for us to care about the lives of their inhabitants, even just a little bit. I am not an interventionist by any stretch — growing up under the shadow of Western intervention in Iraq will do that to a person — but I would argue that the absolute least that we could do for them would be to avoid making things worse. Genuine humanitarian efforts, preferably with as little government or corporate financing as is humanly possible, are always welcome as well. What does make things worse is to have the World Bank shower the Burmese government with $100 million dollars in ‘development aid’, the bulk of which can be expected to pad the pockets of government officials and local elites rather than ‘developing’ anything of importance. Again, this has been going on for decades — this is what happens when human beings are transformed into accounting figures.

As usual, it’s all about the money. There is a lot of money to be made in government-funded aid projects operated by government-funded agencies, even with a violent ethnic conflict broiling in the background. In Rwanda, the violence was prevalent in cities, towns, and villages alike; in Myanmar, the places where people are being killed are remote enough to allow for the inherent dangers of civil warfare to be generally ignored. Mainstream Western media has devoted some amount of screen time to covering the issue, yes; but with Myanmar being a country of such non-importance to their audiences, this too is largely ignored. Beyond the fact that the Rohingya, the primary targets of the government’s cleansing campaign for the last two years, are overwhelmingly Muslim in faith, there is little reason for Western politicians to really care about what happens to them — the Muslims in Myanmar simply do not buy them enough favor with the citizens of their countries.

One thing should be made clear: irrespective of one’s own political viewing of the situation in Rakhine State and the subsequent humanitarian crisis in neighboring Bangladesh, the reports of violence that have come out of the area are truly horrific. The people who are being systematically murdered in this fashion or not those who have done anything wrong; neither the elderly women who are gang-raped to death nor the infants who are killed in front of their mothers have done anything at all to ‘deserve’ such a fate. If there is anything that can be done in any way so as to at least mitigate the conflict, then it should certainly be done.

Though I cannot claim to have any solid answers as to how the crisis might be ended, I can certainly argue against the ultimate proposal made by the author of this article:

[T]here are ways for the World Bank to fix its initiative. It could, for example, make this funding conditional on Myanmar allowing a United Nations fact-finding mission on the ground in Rakhine — something that, though long overdue, is still being blocked by the government. Or the bank’s planners could take steps to ensure that the funding is divided equally between the few Rohingya Muslims who still remain in the region and the ethnic Rakhine Buddhists, while prohibiting its use for the development of Buddhist infrastructure in vacated Rohingya lands.

Now, the author does not appear to be as well-versed in the inner workings of the United Nations as I am, so I cannot fault him for wanting to involve them in the situation even more than they presently are. What I can take issue with is the suggestion that the project is salvageable — it should not be salvaged, as it should never have been made in the first place. The fact that it has been, and that anyone at any point of the planning phase would think that this would be a good idea, perfectly reinforces my belief that humane nature possesses too little empathy and too much greed to carry out these types of development schemes without degenerating into blatant corruption. If it were happening in their own countries, the project never would have crossed their minds as a possibility — but it is not happening in a gated New England suburb; it is happening far, far away, in the villages that dot the hills and valleys of northwestern Myanmar. For all intents and purposes, the inhabitants of the area amount to little more than statistical data sets; the land that they live on is seen not to be their home, but an ‘opportunity’ to develop the region economically — to make money, in other words. It always comes down to the money.

This being the case, the best solution — in addition to simply not funding these kinds of projects in the first place — might be to simply isolate the nation economically and politically. If there were some way to ensure that Myanmar could not find any valuable trading partners; to block imports of Burmese goods or perhaps deal some damage to its tourism industry; perhaps then the government would have a reason to give the conflict a rest. Clearly, chastising them for committing crimes against humanity doesn’t seem to work: if all they care about is money, then that’s what needs to be taken from them. So long as governments around the developing world are given no incentive to actually stop killing their own people beyond that of an emotional appeal, what is currently happening to the Rohingya will continue to happen in other places as well. To be blunt, there is no reason to expect that any government that is already willing to murder the innocent will somehow change their minds about it after our pointing out enough times that they are murdering the innocent.

Sadly, I neither know nor reasonably believe that such a thing could be done; it is very rare that enough nations can be convinced into trading sanctions that could potentially make a difference. One thing that is certain, however, is that this status quo of trying to overlook a country’s political situation so as to make easy money in the name of ‘helping’ people has, in the long-term, precisely the opposite effect. What is the point in marginally improving the lives of some when it comes at the expense of the lives of others?