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Thursday, October 18, 2007

activist alleges World Bank is funding paramilitary enforcers in China

"...Harry Wu, a Chinese American human rights activist, released a report Thursday charging that the World Bank is funding a quasi-military organization in China and covering up that relationship.

Wu said the World Bank has awarded more than $100 million in projects since the mid-1980s to the group, which he said runs forced-labor camps and has violently suppressed protests by Muslim peasants called Uygurs in the remote province of Xinjiang in upper northwest China.

"That the World Bank works with this organization is an outrage," Wu said at the National Press Club. He said his study is based largely on internal Chinese documents, which show the military functions of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, or XPCC.

Wu, who spent 19 years in China's forced-labor camps known as laogai before emigrating to the United States, said the Pentagon as well as China's State Council and its Central Military Organization consider the XPCC a military organization.

"So does nearly everyone - except the World Bank," said Wu, who has often
returned to China to document human rights abuses. Last August, Chinese
authorities expelled him from the country after a trial in which they charged him with spying.

Wu, a resident of Milpitas and a scholar at Stanford University's Hoover
Institution, urged World Bank President James Wolfensohn to name an
independent international commission to investigate the bank's projects in
Xinjiang...."  Read on >>

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