Bhopal's Legacy
By Mark Hertsgaard
08 May, 2004
The Nation
Every
December for the past nineteen years, marchers in Bhopal, India, have
paraded an effigy of Warren Anderson through town and burned it. Anderson
is despised because he was the CEO of Union Carbide on December 3, 1984,
when an explosion at the company's Bhopal factory leaked deadly methyl
isocyanate gas over the city's shantytowns in the worst industrial disaster
in history. The exact death toll will never be known--many corpses were
disposed of in emergency mass burials or cremations without adequate
documentation--but the Indian government now puts the total at more
than 22,000 and climbing.
As the disaster's
twentieth anniversary approaches, Bhopal is back in the news. On April
19 two advocates for the survivors won the most prestigious environmental
award given in the United States. In her acceptance speech at the annual
Goldman Environmental Prize ceremony in San Francisco, Rashida Bee confessed
that she and colleague Champa Devi Shukla initially assumed they had
been selected by mistake. "We knew a few individuals who had won
awards," she explained, "[but] they were all educated people,
spoke English and had e-mail accounts."
One a Muslim and
the other a Hindu, Bee and Shukla are leading the fight to hold Union
Carbide and its new owner, Dow Chemical, accountable for the Bhopal
disaster, which the two women assert is still killing and injuring thousands
of people a year through poisoned groundwater. "The gas disaster
was sudden, one night, but the last twenty years have also been miserable,"
Shukla said in an interview. "People still have pain and breathlessness,
and now we are seeing cancers, too. There is mental and physical retardation
among children. Many women are sterile or never begin menstruating,
so men don't want to marry them." A 1999 study commissioned by
Greenpeace International but conducted by independent scientists concluded
that Bhopal's groundwater contains heavy metals, volatile chemicals
and levels of mercury millions of times higher than is considered safe.
Neither Union Carbide
nor Dow has ever faced trial for Bhopal--inconceivable, activists charge,
had the disaster occurred in the United States or Europe. Union Carbide
instead reached a $470 million settlement with the Indian government
in 1989, based on now-discredited estimates that only 3,000 people died
and only 100,000 were "affected." Upon review of the settlement,
an Indian court reinstated criminal charges against Union Carbide and
Warren Anderson in 1991. When neither the corporation nor Anderson showed
up for trial, they were declared fugitives from justice. The Indian
government is now seeking their extradition, but Washington has not
honored the request. Meanwhile, Dow, which purchased all outstanding
shares of Union Carbide in 1999, refuses to accept the company's alleged
Bhopal liabilities. "Dow remains firm in its position that in acquiring
the shares of Union Carbide it acquired no new liability," John
Musser, a Dow spokesman, wrote in an e-mail interview.
So Bee and Shukla
are touring the United States, using the prestige of the Goldman prize
to press their case. On May 13 they'll confront Dow officials at a shareholders
meeting in Midland, Michigan. They demand that Union Carbide/Dow appear
at trial in India, pay for survivors' healthcare and economic rehabilitation
and help restore Bhopal's environment. They reject the suggestion that
the $470 million settlement discharged the company's obligations. "Union
Carbide made that settlement with the government, not with the people
affected," says Rashida Bee. "Not a single victim was consulted."
Battling the world's
biggest chemical corporation is a far cry from the humble beginnings
of the two activists. Bee was illiterate and knew nothing of the outside
world when, at age 28, she experienced the disaster. It killed seven
members of her extended family and left her husband too ill to continue
his work as a tailor. Shukla lost her husband and two sons. A daughter
later suffered three miscarriages, a grandson died and a granddaughter
was born with a cleft lip and a missing palate.
Bee and Shukla consistently
refer to what happened in Bhopal as a crime rather than an accident.
"It was Warren Anderson's criminal negligence and insistence on
cost-cutting that caused this disaster," says Bee. Internal Union
Carbide documents, released in 2002 during the discovery phase of a
civil lawsuit against the company, seem to support her contention. A
1973 document, signed by Anderson himself, notes that the technology
to be used in the Bhopal factory was "unproven." A safety
review conducted by Union Carbide experts in 1982 warned of a "serious
potential for sizable releases of toxic materials" at the factory.
Dow spokesman John
Musser confirmed the existence of the 1982 study but asserted, "None
of the issues [it] raised would have had an impact on the fatal gas
leak and all of the issues had been addressed by the plant well before
the December 1984 disaster." The real culprit, the company insists,
was sabotage. Musser further notes that it was the Indian government
that declared itself the sole representative of Bhopal's victims before
the 1989 settlement. Nor are allegations of groundwater contamination
true, he said, citing studies in the late 1990s by local and federal
government agencies in India.
"They have
their studies, we have ours, so let's go to court and let a judge decide
who's right," said Gary Cohen, director of the Environmental Health
Fund in Boston. Cohen has little hope that the Bush Administration will
extradite Anderson or current Union Carbide/Dow officials. But, he says,
"Dow wants to expand in India, and we're going to make that very
difficult" by raising questions about the trustworthiness of a
corporation that refuses to heed a court summons. Nityanand Jayaraman
of the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal says activists plan
to press the Indian government to include Dow, not just Union Carbide,
in the current criminal case; the government could then attach Dow's
assets if it refuses to appear in court.
For their part,
Rashida Bee and Champa Devi Shukla hope to pursue justice face-to-face
by tracking down Warren Anderson during their US tour. Shukla says that
"if we see him, we will ask, If you are innocent, why are you hiding
and not answering questions about what happened in Bhopal?"