Bhopal: More than History (GL Wkly)
NY Transfer News Collective
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
from Green Left Weekly #170 12/7/94
Bhopal is more than history
by Gary Cohen
Ten years ago, on December 3, 1984, the Union Carbide Corporation
leaked a poisonous gas into a slum neighbourhood beside its
Bhopal, India, pesticide factory. As a result of the company's
criminal negligence, more than 4000 people died immediately in a
night of terror, while hundreds of thousands of other residents
were disabled, blinded and injured, many of them permanently.
For the Union Carbide Corporation, Bhopal represented the worst
``public relations'' disaster a corporation could dream of. Not
only did the company face a possible $3 billion in liabilities
(the original amount the government of India was seeking), but its
name, and stock portfolio, were associated with murder and
environmental apocalypse.
With factories and related companies in many countries and assets
totalling many billions of dollars, Union Carbide could not afford
to roll over and play dead. The company spent millions of dollars
crafting and selling a story to the media that the chemical leak
was due to an act of sabotage of a disgruntled employee, rather
than a logical extension of its policy of cutting back on safety
personnel and training as the factory lost its profitability.
After playing cat and mouse in the US and Indian courts for
several years, Union Carbide executives used their high-level
government influence to cop a favourable deal from the Indian
government of Rajiv Gandhi, who was anxious to open India to
foreign corporations at that time. He didn't want foreign
companies to think that India was inhospitable to transnational
companies.
In the end, the Indian government, which claimed to be
representing the ``victims'', cut a deal with Union Carbide that
required it to pay $470 million in damages in exchange for waiving
all future civil claims. The company's annual report the following
year proudly announced that Union Carbide was in great financial
shape, despite the settlement of the Bhopal claims, which had cost
56 cents per share of stock.
In the past year, the Indian courts have revived the possibility
of bringing criminal liability charges against Union Carbide
senior officials, especially former CEO Warren Anderson, who went
into hiding soon after the massacre.
Yet the Indian government has not asked the US government to
extradite Anderson to face criminal charges. Now that the Indian
government is in full swing in attracting US and European
transnational companies to invest in the country, it is certainly
not going to ruin all that by bringing criminal charges against a
US corporate executive. The result, quite literally, is that until
now Union Carbide Corporation, and its chief executive officers,
have gotten away with murder.
The people in Bhopal continue to suffer and die. At last count,
there were 15,000 deaths directly linked to the gas leak, while
more than 500,000 people had injury claims before the Indian
courts.
However, the courts continue to deny two-thirds of the claims
because the judges haven't bothered to understand the long-term
medical effects of the chemicals spewed into the Bhopal
neighbourhoods 10 years ago. The company, of course, hasn't been
helpful on this score either. Union Carbide still hasn't released
any information about the health effects of the chemicals used at
its factory.
The speed of processing the claims is another insult to the Bhopal
victims. At the rate the court is processing claims, most of the
plaintiffs will be dead before they receive compensation.
The money the Indian government has spent in Bhopal has been
mostly squandered. Despite millions spent on economic development,
fewer than 100 people are employed in government-sponsored
workplaces. Despite millions spent on medical relief, the services
in Bhopal's hospitals remain poor and unresponsive to the victims.
Despite millions spent on environmental rehabilitation, the Union
Carbide factory remains contaminated and abandoned, while funds
have been spent bulldozing the slums where gas victims live and
beautifying roads at remote areas of the city.
Without the active participation of the people most affected by
the gas leak, few gains have been made. The people of Bhopal
continue to suffer, forgotten, abused, re-victimised.
The Bhopal Union Carbide massacre mirrors the brutal face of
``free trade'' and industrialisation in the world today. Bhopal is
not an anomaly, the unfortunate consequence of an irresponsible
company's actions. On the contrary, it is the norm, a ``natural''
consequence of a corporate philosophy that subordinates all human
and ecological values to next quarter's profit margin.
Given this sober reality, how does the Bhopal massacre speak to
citizens of the planet working to build peoples' movements to hold
transnational corporations at bay in their relentless pursuit to
control the world's economy and the planet's resources? What are
the lessons we need to take from Bhopal?
People are expendable in the balance sheets of transnational
corporations. Murder is acceptable, whether that be slow death
from prolonged exposure to toxic chemical exposures in the
workplace and community, or immediate death from massive gas
leaks, radiation and other inevitable hazardous accidents,
releases and exposures in a toxic chemical-based economy.
Bhopal is the norm. When the Johns Mansville Corporation, with
full knowledge of the health hazards, allowed workers to be
exposed to asbestos; when the Ethyl Corporation, with full
knowledge of the health hazards of lead, sells leaded petrol in
Mexico; when the Rhone Poulenc Corporation, with the full
knowledge of the poisons in its pesticides, continues to sell them
to the Third World; when the DuPont Corporation, with full
knowledge of the dangers of CFCs, allows the whole planet and all
its species to be exposed to ultraviolet radiation due to ozone
destruction so it can continue to make billions on CFCs, then we
understand that people and the Earth are expendable in the pursuit
of profit.
>From the Bhopal massacre, and from the recent passage of GATT and
NAFTA, we understand that national governments have relinquished
their authority to transnational corporations to decide the fate
of the planet's economic, political and ecological health. In many
cases, national governments are paving the way for transnational
corporations to expand their monopolies around the globe.
Many transnational corporations have more financial wealth and
political power than most governments around the world, especially
in the Third World. These trade agreements have accelerated the
destructive power of transnational corporations in their pursuit
of new markets for poisonous and unsustainable technology and
products.
Just as the Indian government can not, and will not, hold Union
Carbide officials accountable for their murder of Bhopal
residents, so the Mexican government will not hold General Motors
Corporation accountable for poisoning the border region, the
Malaysian government will not hold Mitsubishi Corporation
accountable for poisoning the residents of Bukit Merah with
radiation, the Brazilian government will not hold Rhone Poulenc
Corporation accountable for poisoning the people of Brazil, the US
government will not hold Chemical Waste Management accountable for
poisoning the African American community in South Chicago, and so
on and so on around the globe.
Since the Bhopal massacre, transnational corporations have become
more powerful. Under the banner of ``free trade'' and the GATT,
corporations can move their production and their waste to more
than 100 countries, shopping in the process for the cheapest
labour and most favourable dumping conditions for their toxic
by-products.
And when national governments attempt to regulate their own
environment, transnational corporations can appeal to
international trade forums to prevent governments from interfering
with their ability to freely trade in poisons.
GATT and NAFTA have codified the authority of transnational
corporations to exercise the traditional functions of government -
except that corporations are inherently undemocratic and undermine
the rightful authority of the world's citizens to decide for
ourselves the fate of our economies and ecosystems. Under these
trade agreements, corporations have become empowered to destroy
local and national economies, undermine community-based democratic
processes and plunder the ecosystems of the planet. The Earth is
not a ``business in liquidation'', yet that is how it is being
treated by many transnational corporations.
The Bhopal massacre has not had any lasting effect regarding
government efforts to stop corporations from producing, using and
dumping poisons and killing people and the planet in the process.
It has not led to new laws to try corporate officials when they
kill, lie and maim. It has not even slowed the export of poisonous
technologies and waste. On the contrary, the export of poisonous
industries to the Third World is accelerating.
In India alone, there are 26 separate proposals to open
chlorine-related factories around the country. The electronics
industry, with its use of cancer-causing solvents and other
chemicals that cause birth defects in women workers, is rapidly
moving its production to South-East Asia. The pesticides industry
is moving to Brazil and South America. The toxic waste trade is
looking for markets in Eastern Europe and Russia.
The radioactive waste trade, sponsored by the US government, is
looking to Native American lands in the south-west United States
as the ``national sacrifice zone'' for materials that will remain
hazardous to human health and other species for at least 50,000
years.
The forests are being destroyed at a rate that will eliminate all
old growth forests within a century. Indigenous people are
becoming extinct as their native habitats get stolen for dam
projects, logging projects, cattle grazing and other
environmentally destructive activities. At last count, 2000 native
peoples have been declared extinct by the United Nations in this
century. Genocide is not too high a price to pay for ``free
trade'' and global industrialisation.
In the decade since Bhopal, governments have allowed chemical
companies like Union Carbide to increase their worldwide
production of toxic chemicals. Governments have regulated toxic
chemicals with the presumption that toxics are innocent until
proven guilty. Chemicals have been entering the marketplace
without extensive testing as to their ability to cause cancer,
birth defects and other problems. As a result, more than 70,000
chemicals are now in commercial use.
Even when chemicals are proven guilty, when thousands of people
die from chemical exposures or contract cancer or suffer genetic
damage, even then governments have usually acted to set arbitrary
``acceptable limits'' for exposure to the chemical. In this way,
corporations have been given free rein to continue the production,
use and dumping of poisons, while the deaths, cancers and birth
defects have been declared an ``acceptable risk''.
In the decade since Bhopal, an emerging body of scientific
evidence suggests that chlorine-related chemicals, which are
building up everywhere and in every species on the planet, are a
likely cause of breast cancer in women and sterility in men. These
chlorine-based chemicals are used in the production of most major
pesticides, industrial solvents, CFCs, PVC and other plastics and
chlorine-bleached paper. They are also released into the
environment through emissions from trash and hazardous waste
incinerators.
Rather than encourage governments to set more stringent limits on
exposure to these chemicals, we should call for their worldwide
ban and hold the chemical producers liable for the global damage
they have caused. Winning the right to know about our chemical
exposures is not enough. We need to fight for the right to be safe
from chemicals that are killing us and destroying ecosystems
worldwide.
We can not simply rely on stockholder resolutions that attempt to
rein in corporate behaviour to reverse this life-destroying trend.
We also can not simply rely on national governments to rein in
transnational corporations. And we certainly can not rely on the
corporations themselves to act in ``enlightened'' self-interest.
We must build an international movement that can wield enough
political power to dismantle the most destructive corporations and
get national and international governing bodies to limit the
actions of the rest.
We need to take back our national, state and local governments. We
need to reinvent them so they can support environmental and
economic activities that support life on the planet, rather than
destroy it. We need to build communities of resistance that span
every corner of the global village, so that the struggles against
transnational corporations in Tanzania and Tonga and Tijuana are
not only known by activists worldwide, but actively supported.
We need to break down racial, ethnic, gender and class barriers
supported by governments and corporations and unite against the
destruction of our home. We have all become ``throw-away
labourers''; our health and the planet's health have become
``externalities'' to the bottom line of corporate profit.
We need to develop a set of principles for how to live together on
this Earth and develop demands for how corporations will need to
operate if they are to survive. These demands need to be agreed
upon by communities worldwide and raised in every struggle against
a transnational corporation.
Commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Bhopal massacre, we can
mobilise to support the development of an international people's
movement to stop the poisoning of people and the planet and
increase the power of people in relation to transnational
corporations.
We can do this by supporting actions in Bhopal and elsewhere that:
* publicise and put pressure on the US government to extradite
former Union Carbide CEO Warren Anderson to face criminal charges
in India;
* publicise the Bhopal residents' demands for health care and a
streamlined compensation system that will allow them to receive
justice and needed funds to support their families. * support the
demands for Union Carbide Corporation to dismantle its abandoned
pesticide factory in Bhopal, and spend whatever it takes to return
the contaminated land to useable and non-toxic form.
* support the rights of citizens of Bhopal and India to
democratically control their fate.
As environmental justice activists, as human rights activists, as
free people aspiring to democratically govern our communities with
justice and compassion, we have a responsibility to remember
Bhopal.
We have a responsibility to bear witness to the murder committed
by Union Carbide, and to the continuing injustice to the victims
of its violence. We have a responsibility to speak out against the
way that transnational corporations are destroying democratic
self-governing structures and poisoning legislative and electoral
processes worldwide.
We have a responsibility to educate people worldwide that
transnational corporations and the agencies at their behest (World
Bank, International Monetary Fund, etc) are committing genocide
and ecocide under the banner of free trade.
In the New World Order, where transnational corporations are
running amok across the globe, there will be more Bhopals unless
people's movements can unite worldwide. If we do not use history
to educate people about the horrors of institutional inhumanity
and violence, then we risk being silent accomplices in that
inhumanity and violence. Bhopal is not only history. Bhopal is the
world.
[Military Toxics Project, USA, and Third World Network, India]
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