Bhopal: Holding Corporate Terrorists Accountable

[Editor's Note: At press time, 72 people are signed up to fast in solidarity with the people of Bhopal. To learn more about this disaster and to support them, visit Bhopal.net.]

At noon on May 1, two Indian women, watched by a crowd of sympathizers, seated themselves on the sidewalk under the bull statue on Wall Street to begin "a fast unto death." Rasheeda Bee and Champa Devi Shukla are survivors of what the people of Bhopal still refer to as "that night."

On 3rd December 1984, poison gas leaked from a Union Carbide factory, killing thousands. How many people, no one knows. Carbide says 3,800. Municipal workers who picked up bodies with their own hands, loading them onto trucks for burial in mass graves or to be burned on mass pyres, reckon they shifted at least 15,000 bodies. Survivors, basing their estimates on the number of shrouds sold in the city, conservatively claim about 8,000 died in the first week. Such body counts become meaningless when you know that the dying has never stopped.

The two women are on hunger-strike "to highlight the truth behind Dow Chemical and Union Carbide's liabilities in Bhopal," where people are still perishing at the rate of one a day from injuries sustained over eighteen years ago. Since the disaster, the city has experienced epidemics of cancers, menstrual disorders and what one doctor described as "monstrous births."

Treatment protocols are hampered by the company's continuing refusal to share information it holds on the toxic effects of MIC -- the gas that leaked. Union Carbide and its new owner, Dow Chemical, claim the data is a "trade secret." For twelve years the company's executives have also been ignoring the summons of a Bhopal court to answer criminal charges of "culpable homicide" for a death-toll that continues to mount and which, according to Indian government figures, has now climbed past 20,000.

Meanwhile a new generation is being poisoned by chemicals abandoned by the company at its now-derelict factory. In December 1999, Greenpeace reported that soil and water in and around the plant were contaminated by organochlorines and heavy metals. A February 2002 study found mercury, lead and organochlorines in the breast milk of women living near the plant.

Says hunger-striker Bee, who lost five gas-exposed family members to cancers, was herself partially blinded and still suffers from psychiatric and respiratory problems, "A hunger strike is our way of emphasizing the truth that the tragedy in Bhopal continues, and that Dow as Carbide's new owner is now responsible for ensuring that justice is done.

Fasting with Bee and Shukla in New York is Bhopal activist Satinath Sarangi. Supporters around the world are undertaking shorter hunger-strikes in sympathy. Among those pledged to fast indefinitely is Diane Wilson, a shrimp-boat captain and environmental campaigner from Texas. Last July, she went without food for twenty-eight days outside a Dow chemical plant formerly owned by Union Carbide, ending her protest by climbing over the fence and chaining herself 70 feet up a tower, from which she draped a banner saying "Dow is responsible for Bhopal."

Wilson was forcibly removed by an armed SWAT team. Despite the fact that her protest was entirely peaceful and caused no damage, Dow bosses gave interviews indicating that they regarded her as little short of a terrorist and said she would be rigorously prosecuted. The irony that they themselves are refusing to appear in a court where they are wanted for mass homicide, entirely escaped them.

There is an even deeper irony. Consider for a moment what terror is: "extreme fear, fear that agitates body and mind, violent dread" and that which causes and excites these feelings. This is how Webster's Dictionary defines terror. On the night of Dec. 3, 1984, Bee, Devi and many thousands of others suffered terror beyond definition.