A Candid Conversation with President Kim on institutional racism

A year ago, we were hopeful that your presidency would open a new chapter in overhauling the World Bank’s justice system. But a year later, the presidential mantle that we had hoped would dismantle the racist institutional culture seems to be drawn toward the center of gravity of the status quo

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Dear Mr. President,

We were encouraged by the outstanding speech you delivered in Tokyo during the 2012 World Bank and IMF Annual Meetings that underlined your reverence for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Our enthusiasm was further bolstered by your track record as the head of the FXB Center for Human Rights at Harvard. One of our members said ‘at the end the World Bank got someone who understands human dignity and rights.’

We hoped that your presidential mantle would draw its strength from the gravitas of justice that Dr. King preached about rather than from the inertia of the Bank’s racial status quo. We hoped so because in Tokyo you stated you are guided by Dr. King's fundamental sense of justice which has fueled your life and which you promised to carry with you to the World Bank. Your audience in Tokyo may have taken this as applause-winning rhetoric that speech writers are known to sprinkle in between paragraphs. We took it as the center-piece of your statement – as the sin qua non of your presidency.

Racism in the World Bank is the big elephant stampeding Blacks in the room whose existence is acknowledged, but whose assault is not addressed. Over the last decades, the Bank has seen three types of presidents. There were those who acknowledged the existence of racial discrimination and pretended to be concerned, but did nothing. There were also those who did not even bother to pretend, leave alone to take action. And then there were those who truly cared, but their policies lacked the courage of their convictions. Regardless of who the president was, the recourse that victims of discrimination had was the Tribunal, which serves the Bank as a judicial black hole where claims of racial discrimination are seized and silenced with statutory finality.

We hoped that your presidency would signal the end of the status quo, beginning with the dysfunctional justice system. We also hoped that you would not consider any input from your senior managers in framing your opinion about the current internal justice system because many of them are responsible for the systemic injustice. Let us present a concrete example that was highlighted in a recent article published in the UK.

In 2007, an African staff filed complaints with the Bank’s Appeals Committee. The Committee chaired by a current regional vice president (VP) reached two verdicts: official and confidential. The official verdict was to reject the case, while acknowledging some of what the Bank had done to the aggrieved staff cannot be explained by ‘business reasons.’ Ironically, after rejecting the case, the Committee ‘strongly’ recommended that the Bank ‘immediately resolve the totality of the complaint through mediation.’

The confidential verdict, which was sent to the former Vice President for Human Resources (HRSVP) suggested that the Committee’s official ruling rejecting the case was to protect the reputation of the Bank. At the same time the Committee stressed the need for the HRSVP to take administrative actions to give the aggrieved staff appropriate relief. The HRSVP rejected both the official and the confidential recommendations in a signed memo dated April 15, 2008. The memo read: ‘Your appeal is hereby denied. If you are dissatisfied with the outcome the next step would be recourse to the Administrative Tribunal.’ The actions of the two vice presidents provide a glimpse of what has sustained racial discrimination for decades:

As the Chair of the Appeal Committee, the above noted regional VP’s first order of priority was to protect the image and reputation of the Bank. Only as a secondary matter did she try to secure justice for the staff through the ‘back door,’ but her efforts met no success. The HRSVP has it within his power to confer ‘de minimus’ justice, but chose to deny the aggrieved staff even watered-down justice.

After the case went to the Tribunal, in 2009, the Bank’s Chief Counsel falsely claimed that the HRSVP tried to implement the Appeals Committee’s recommendations in offering the aggrieved staff reassignment but the staff rejected the gesture. The claim was that the HRSVP extended the reassignment offer through the Ombudsman and one of the managers in the Human Resources (HRS) complex. This was pure perjury and it was rejected on record as false by the Ombudsman and by the HRS manager. However, the Chief Counsel saw no reason to be concerned with their repudiations, anticipating rightly that the Tribunal would allow him to use forged documents and false assertions. The aggrieved staff reported the unethical and illegal actions of the Chief Counsel to the General Counsel, but to no avail. As expected, the Tribunal colluded with the Bank and used 32 materially false assertions in its judgment and dismissed the charges against the Bank (See Annex 1).

What is more disturbing is the fact that the director that the Bank used its full force to defend had been accused of bias by four different staff members over 10 years. And yet, she was chair of the Bank’s Appeals Committee and a member of the Bank’s Reform Committee that was charged to reform the internal justice system in 2008. The Chief Counsel who protected her using perjury as a legal strategy was a member of the Bank’s 1998 Reform Committee. Adding insult to injury, the Bank terminated the aggrieved staff. The Tribunal found that his termination was ‘unlawful and an abuse of discretion’ but ruled he ‘should not be reinstated.’

In a recent email communication with the aggrieved staff, the only Black member of the Tribunal wrote about the injustice as follows: ‘I held up the [Tribunal’s judgment] for some months pleading your case but was outnumbered. I did not find it fit to dissent... I was not yet ready for such a momentous step in your case and at the time I was not aware that your entire career rested on this case.’ The fact that taking dissent on a racial discrimination case is seen as a momentous step speaks volumes about the Tribunal’s modus operendi. Even more disturbing is that the judge went on to say, ‘I have been in this business a long time and know what litigating against an employer does to the employee who sees his rights trumpled (sic) without remedy.’

A year ago, we were hopeful that your presidency would open a new chapter in overhauling the Bank’s justice system. Apart from making Dr. King’s outlook of justice your opening lines, you appeared in your best elements when you spoke about the inviolability of human dignity and rights. You came across as sincere and true to your calling of bending the moral universe toward justice.

A year later, the presidential mantle that we had hoped would dismantle the racist institutional culture and totally overhaul the internal justice system seems to be drawn toward the center of gravity of the status quo, having been swept into the orbit of its inertia. President Wolfensohn’s much talked about reform proved futile because he (i) maintained the status quo, (ii) failed to hold his senior managers accountable, instead putting them in charge of implementing his policies, and (iii) ignored the recommendation of his own internal Grievance Process Review Committee to open up the Bank’s justice system to external arbitration. His reform was partly neglected and partly sabotaged, and ultimately aborted.

We are worried because the path you are following mirrors that of President Wolfensohn’s rather than Dr. King’s. The internal justice system cannot be tweaked or recycled. The Bank’s HRS and Legal Complexes can neither lead nor willfully follow a reform agenda. When it comes to addressing racial discrimination, the Bank’s history is replete with debris of failed band-aid therapies and aborted reforms.

In a recent Q & A session at Georgetown University you said: ‘I'm one of the few people, probably, who is in this position who’s ever been spit at because of their race.’ Now imagine how your life would have been affected if you had filed a complaint to the authorities at your school and they suspended you for complaining? Imagine, also, how your career would have suffered if your school had punished you further by changing your GPA from 4.0 to 2.0, claiming that it was ‘overinflated’ and denied you the chance to go to Harvard. Farfetched though it may appear such injustice is what Blacks face in the World Bank (see Annex 2). Today you have the authority and the power to bend the Bank’s moral universe toward justice. You have eloquently talked the talk of bending the moral arc of history toward justice at your Tokyo speech. We hope that you would walk the walk and would not outsource the moral authority of your presidency to the discredited Tribunal.

ANNEX 1: COORDINATED AND SYSTEMATIC PERJURY THE TRIBUNAL ALLOWED TO STAND

The matrix represents a summary of AI v. World Bank (2010). It presents 3 examples out of 32 materially false statements that the Tribunal allowed to stand. Mr. AI was told he could not be appointed Global Manager (GM) of the International Comparison Program (ICP) because ‘Europeans are not used to seeing a black man in a position of power.’ The Matrix explains how and why the Bank went from acknowledging Mr. AI’s Deputy Global Manager role in 2007 to denying it and subsequently falsifying his personnel record in 2009. In 2007, Mr. AI’s Director acknowledged his stellar performance as deputy GM under oath and blamed the Bank’s external partners for not appointing him GM. In 2009, during the Tribunal’s proceedings, the Bank’s external partners rejected her sworn testimony. Subsequently, the Bank changed its story. The Matrix shows the Bank’s Chief Council submitted starkly contradictory statements to the Appeals Committee and to the Tribunal. Moreover, HR and Mr. AI’s Director changed their stories in tandem. The Tribunal ruled that the Bank’s testimonies are materially consistent and there is no reason to question the credibility of the Bank’s witnesses.

Bank witnesses gave coordinated false testimony under oath

cc J B

ANNEX 2: THE TRIBUNAL ALLOWED THE BANK TO FALSIFY MR. AI’S EMPLOYMENT RECORD AND DECLARE HIS STELLAR PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF SIX YEARS ‘OVERINFLATED’ AND EFFECTIVELY NULL AND VOID

The following represent two examples out of the many items that the Bank deleted from Mr. AI’s employment history. Having faced total rebuke from its partners about its patently false sworn statements during the Appeals Committees hearing, the Bank had to come up with a new storyline before the Tribunal. The story was that Mr. AI has no management experience to be appointed Global Manager. To give credence to the new storyline, the Bank falsified his HR record, deleting his management experience and declaring his six years of stellar performance evaluation “overinflated.” The Tribunal saw nothing wrong with it.

Example 1: In May 2001, Mr. AI was appointed a team leader/coordinator and charged to overhaul the International Comparison Programme (ICP). His appointment was officially announced both internally and externally to the Bank’s international partners. The team that Mr. AI led built a highly successful program, turning the Program around to ‘the World’s largest statistical endeavor.’ His performance was rated ‘outstanding/best practice’ and he was praised by his superiors in his official evaluation record for:

‘An excellent job of developing global and regional proposals, building partnerships, working with the team and bringing together research, advocacy, financing, project planning…’

A senior advisor for the ICP wrote in 2002:

‘I have been most impressed by Mr. AI’s accomplishments as coordinator of the ICP work to date. He has done an absolutely first-rate job. It is hard to imagine how anyone could have done a better job.’

In 2009, the Bank wiped all the above from the record and claimed he was never a team leader/coordinator. The Bank went as far as erasing the ICP team from the Department’s files and submitting a signed statement to the Tribunal that there was not even an ICP team in 2001 and 2002, let alone a team leader.

Example 2: Mr. AI was Deputy Global Manager (DGM) of ICP for six years. Though he was DGM, he never reported to the GM. The GM and he co-managed the ICP and jointly reported to a senior manager in the department. This was confirmed by the Bank’s HR official in 2007. Mr. AI was in charge of the Bank’s ICP work in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East and North Africa. On the division of labor between the GM and Mr. AI, their immediate supervisor testified before the Bank’s Appeals Committee in 2007 stating ‘Mr. AI managed the regions except for Africa and CIS.’ The GM managed Africa and the CIS regions. The GM and Mr. AI communicated with the ICP external Executive Board consisting of senior officials of international and national agencies and both attended Board meetings. Mr. AI’s significant contributions were explicitly noted in his Overall Performance Evaluations (OPE). He received "outstanding/best practice" and "superior" ratings. In his 2003, 2005 & 2006 OPEs his director remarked:

‘Mr. AI manages a very important and critical work for the Bank [2003]... He has been Deputy Global Manager and continues to be a very strong performer managing one of the most critical programs the Bank has ever managed [2005]…. He has multiple roles in the global management of ICP. He is praised for his many skills [2006]”… As Deputy Global Manager, Mr. AI continued to make significant contributions and is carrying a heavy work load. [2007].’

In 2009, the Bank renounced his OPEs, falsified his HR record, and claimed ‘Applicant was asked to help during spikes in work assignments as a team member and to foster teamwork competency in Applicant. He had no management responsibility in comparison to the GM.” The Bank went as far as deleting his title from World Bank publications and websites, presenting him as a technical staff without management responsibility. The Bank has refused to release Mr. AI’s employment record fearing that it will expose the perjury its high-powered lawyers committed. The Bank insists that his employment history needs to be “extensively edited.’