Silent Night, Deadly Night

By Mark Hertsgaard, Dragonfly Media. Posted December 1, 2004.

On the night her world changed forever, Rashida Bee was 28 years old and had already been married for more than half her life. Her parents, traditional Muslims, had selected her husband for her when she was 13. He worked as a tailor, and they lived together in her parents' modest home in the industrial city of Bhopal, in central India. Bee didn't learn to read or write, and she ventured out of the house only when escorted by a male relative. It was nevertheless a full life; her extended family of siblings, nieces and nephews numbered 37 in all.

The fateful night came on a Sunday. Bee and her family had gone to bed after sharing a simple supper. But shortly after midnight, in the early hours of Dec. 3, 1984, Bee was awakened by the sound of violent coughing. It was coming from the children's room.

"They said they felt like they were being choked," Bee later told the online environmental magazine Grist, "and we [adults] felt that way too. One of the children opened the door and a cloud came inside. We all started coughing violently, as if our lungs were on fire."

From out on the street came the sound of shouting. In the light of a streetlamp, Bee saw crowds of shadowy figures running past the house. "Run," they yelled. "A warehouse of red chiles is on fire. Run!"

A few blocks away, a woman who would later become a dear friend of Bee's was also running for her life. Champa Devi Shukla, a 32-year-old Hindu, lived down the street from the pesticide factory owned by Union Carbide. She knew better than to believe the rumors about a warehouse fire.

"We knew this smell, because Union Carbide often used to release these gases from the factory late at night," Shukla later told me. "But this time it went on longer and stronger."

Shukla was right. An explosion inside the Union Carbide factory had sent 27 tons of methyl isocyanate gas wafting over the shantytowns of Bhopal. "The panic was so great," said Shukla, "that as people ran, mothers were leaving their children behind to escape the gas."

In the pandemonium, Bee too was separated from most of her family. She found herself running with her husband and father, but they didn't get far.

"Our eyes were so swollen that we could not open them," she recalled. "After running half a kilometer we had to rest. We were too breathless to run, and my father had started vomiting blood, so we sat down."

The scene around them was apocalyptic. There were corpses everywhere, many of them children. Those people still alive were bent over double or splayed on the ground, retching uncontrollably or frothing at the mouth. Some had lost control of their bowels, feces streamed down their legs.

Exactly how many people died that night will never be known; many corpses were disposed of in emergency mass burials or cremations without documentation. Bee remembers that as she searched for family members in the following days, "I had to look at thousands of dead bodies to find out if they were among the dead."

***

Perhaps the most extraordinary fact about Bhopal is that no one has faced trial for what happened that night. Even though Union Carbide's own safety experts had warned two years before of a "serious potential for sizable releases of toxic materials," the managers of the Bhopal factory had no system in place to warn and evacuate residents in the event of emergency. Indian government officials likewise failed to insist upon such basic precautions. And as thousands of survivors streamed into local hospitals that night, Union Carbide spokesmen actively denied that methyl isocyanate was poisonous, calling it "nothing more than a potent tear gas."

Despite all this, corporate officials have never answered in a court of law for their actions. Such an evasion of legal accountability would be inconceivable if the disaster had occurred in the United States or Europe. Had the victims been affluent westerners rather than impoverished Indians, they would have had their day in court long ago.

India's courts have tried to pursue justice for Bhopal, but they have been thwarted. In 1991, an Indian court ordered Union Carbide officials, including Warren Anderson, the CEO at the time of the disaster, to face criminal charges. After Anderson and the other defendants failed to appear, India's Supreme Court named them "proclaimed absconders" – that is, fugitives from justice – and pressed for their extradition. After sitting on the extradition request for years, the U.S. State Department refused it without explanation in September 2004.

Bhopal survivors, however, have never stopped pressing their demands for a proper trial, appropriate compensation for victims, and sufficient medical, economic and environmental rehabilitation for survivors. And in this 20th anniversary year of their struggle, they have gained new allies. In April, Bee and Shukla won the Goldman Prize, the biggest environmental award given in the United States. This week, Amnesty International has endorsed Bhopal activists' demands in a report launching Amnesty's first major campaign targeting a corporation for allegedly violating the human right to a healthy environment.

Amnesty's report, "Clouds of Injustice," estimates that 7,000 to 10,000 people died in the first three days of the Bhopal disaster and 15,000 more have died in the years since. Another 100,000 continue to suffer chronic, largely untreatable diseases of the lungs, eyes and blood. Meanwhile, a new generation in Bhopal endures an epidemic of infertility and grotesque birth defects, including missing palates and fingers growing out of shoulders, in part because of continuing contamination of the groundwater.

Mark Hertsgaard, the author of "Earth Odyssey: Around the World in Search of Our Environmental Future" and many other books, has written on Bhopal for Dragonfly Media and The Nation. Image copyright Raghu Rai/Greenpeace.

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