Bhopal Anniversary Rememberance

[LowerCaseRepublican]

This is the column done by my friend Ra down here at UIUC:

 

What's common to Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein and Union Carbide? They all gassed humans. The first two have acquired well deserved notoriety, but in yet another instance of corporate malfeasance going unpunished, Union Carbide (acquired by Dow Chemicals in 2001) has so far escaped unscathed.

 

In the early hours of December 3, 1984, several tons of lethal methyl isocyanate (MIC) leaked out of Union Carbide's pesticide factory in Bhopal, India. More than 8,000 people died in the first three days. The death toll has since then crossed 20,000 and an estimated 120,000 remain chronically ill.

 

Warren Anderson, Union Carbide's CEO at the time of the disaster, was charged with culpable homicide (punishable with imprisonment for up to twenty years) and declared a "fugitive from justice" in 1992. Both Union Carbide and Anderson face criminal charges in India but continue to ignore the Indian courts and also the Manhattan District Court Judge's ruling that Union Carbide "shall consent to submit to the jurisdiction of the courts of India."

 

Given the poor safety standards at the Union Carbide factory, it was a powder keg waiting to explode. In 1982, a confidential safety audit warned of a "potential for the release of toxic materials" and identified 61 hazards, 30 of them major and 11 in the dangerous MIC section ofthe factory. Corrective measures were taken at Union Carbide's sister-plant in West Virginia, but not in Bhopal. Furthermore, while all the vital systems in the West Virginia plant had back-ups hooked to computerized alarms, even the sole manual alarm in the Bhopal plant had been switched off. Consequently, the sleeping victims were caught completely unaware.

 

On the night of the disaster, six safety measures designed to prevent a gas leak were either shut down or malfunctioning. A crucial refrigeration unit had been turned off so as to save $40 a day. This is not all, though. Recently declassified Union Carbide documents revealed that it used unproven technology to keep costs down.

 

In February 1989, the Indian Government settled (without consulting the survivors or their representatives) for a paltry $470 million compensation with Union Carbide. About 95 per cent of the survivors received $500 for lifelong injury and loss of livelihood and Union Carbide was absolved of its civil -- but NOT criminal and environmental -- liabilities.

 

This much was clear when in 2001, Dow Chemicals bought over Union Carbide. Dow accepted Carbide's asbestos liabilities in the U.S., but has been trying to lie its way through Carbide's Bhopal liabilities in India. To add insult to injury, it claimed "$500 is plenty good for an Indian" and refused to clean up the Bhopal site. Meanwhile, the chemical wastes left behind by Union Carbide continue to take lives and livelihoods, not to mention deformities in newborn babies.

 

Soon after the accident, Barry Neuman prophecied in the Wall Street Journal that Indians don't expect compensation for lives lost because "the certainty of reincarnation satisfies the Hindus; for the Muslims, what God wills, God wills" (quoted on ABC NEWS, September 4, 2002). It turned out that not just Indians, but social justice activists everywhere -- be they accident survivors like Rashida Bee and Champa Devi Shukla who lost immediate members of their families to the disaster and themselves suffer from several ailments or Texan fisherwoman Diane Wilson -- do care for justice and will settle for nothing less.

 

The Bhopal disaster, rightly dubbed the "Hiroshima of the Chemical industry",

epitomizes the worst of corporate globalization. The 19 year-old struggle for justice is one of the longest ever against a transnational corporation and reinforces the need for enforcing corporate accountability. As the survivors' legal counsel Raj Sharma says, "Criminal trial of corporate CEOs is not merely a necessary legal measure for justice in Bhopal" but "an essential prerequisite for tackling the growing crisis of corporate crime." Despite the many hurdles (including the U.S. and Indian Governments and the powerful business interests that control them), an International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal continues to gain in strength.

 

The Bhopal campaign has received the support of AFL-CIO, Corporate Watch, Farm Workers of America, Greenpeace, Jobs With Justice, the Living Wage Campaign, National Association of Working Women and United Steel workers of America, among others. This July, 18 members of the U.S. Congress (including Dennis Kucinich) accused Dow of being a "party to the ongoing human rights and environmental abuses in Bhopal." They also took Dow and Carbide to task for the companies' "blatant disregard for the law."

[FlaSoxxJim]

It's hard to believe that was 20 years ago. Harder still to fathom accidental loss of life on that magnitude, the kind of corporate greed that could have allowed it, and that still keeps justice from being done.

[BrandoFan]

It was a clear-cut case of sabotage. Reagan admin exposed the "corporate malfeasance-caused accident" as a partisan distortion long time ago.

 

 

Oh and Chernobyl only released about 5% of the radioctive fuel mass into the atmosphere