On the night of December 2nd-3rd 1984, 27 tons of methyl isocyanate, hydrogen cyanide, mono-methyl amine and other lethal gases began spewing from Union Carbide Corporation’s pesticide factory in Bhopal, India. Severe cost-cutting meant that six safety systems designed to contain a leak were inadequate or inoperational. Nobody outside the factory was warned because the safety siren was turned off. Not until the gas was upon them in their beds, searing their eyes, filling their mouths and lungs, did the communities of Bhopal know of their danger.

Gasping for breath and near blind people stampeded into narrow alleys. In the mayhem children were torn from the hands of their mothers, never to see them again. Some were wracked with seizures and fell under trampling feet. Some, stumbling in a sea of gas, their lungs on fire, were drowned in their own bodily fluids. It was a massacre. Dawn broke over residential streets littered with corpses. In just a few hours numberless innocents had died in fierce pain and unimaginable terror.

Over half a million people were exposed to the deadly cocktail. The gases burned the tissues of the eyes and lungs, crossed into the bloodstream and damaged almost every system in the body. Nobody knows exactly how many died but in the next days more than 7,000 death shrouds were sold in Bhopal. With an estimated 10-15 people continuing to die each month the number of deaths to date is put at over 20,000. And today, more than 120,000 people are still in need of urgent medical attention.

A CALL TO ACTION
The International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal has declared the upcoming anniversary -- December 3, 2003 -- of the 1984 Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal, the ‘Global Day of Action Against Corporate Crime’. It is a time for us to mourn for the dead but also to fight for the living.

 

The ICJB Demands That The Dow Chemical Company Must:

1. Face Trial : Ensure that prime accused Warren Anderson, former chairman of Union Carbide ceases absconding from criminal justice in India and the authorized representatives of the company [Dow-Union Carbide] face trial in the Bhopal criminal court.

2. Provide long term health care: Assume responsibility for the continuing and long term health consequences among the exposed persons and potentially their future generations. This includes medical care, health monitoring and necessary research studies.

The company must provide all information on the leaked gases and their medical consequences.

3. Clean up the poison: Remove the contamination of the ground water and soil in and around the abandoned Union Carbide factory in Bhopal. Provide for supply of safe drinking water to the community.

4. Provide Economic and social support : The corporation must provide income opportunities to victims who can not pursue their usual trade as a result of exposure induced illnesses and income support to families rendered destitute due to death or incapacitation of the breadwinner of the family.

 

YOUR ACTION
Will be reported on the 'Action Update' page. Please email us with your story at: globalaction@bhopal.net

Please use this address for all other communication regarding the Day of Action.

THE BHOPAL STRUGGLE

Nineteen years after the world’s worst industrial disaster in Bhopal, India, survivors and their children are still battling against an insensitive Government to bring a criminal corporation to address its pending liabilities. Meanwhile, Union Carbide – the company behind a disaster that has killed over 20,000 till date - is now a wholly owned subsidiary of American transnational Dow Chemical.

Probably the longest-standing fight for justice by survivors of an industrial disaster waged against a transnational corporation, the Bhopal struggle epitomizes the worst abuses of globalization and the challenges involved in holding corporations accountable.

However, the survivors’ struggle also points towards the potential for profound change: justice for Bhopal would set a towering precedent in international law that no corporate criminal could ignore. And for this reason, Bhopal is everybody’s business.

Armageddon Inc

Dow Chemical and Union Carbide merged on February 6 2001, an unholy wedlock eighteen months in the making. Due to the merger, Dow inherited Carbide's assets: plants, products, people (many of whom are still in the same jobs in the same offices), markets and profits; according to well established merger law, as the new parent company Dow also inherited Carbide's liabilities. Long before the merger was completed, Bhopal campaigners and Dow’s own shareholders made it clear to Dow that in taking over Union Carbide's assets it would also be taking over Carbide's liabilities in Bhopal, lock stock and all of its stinking barrels. Dow ignored the warnings, and misled both its shareholders and the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission about the true extent of Carbide's Bhopal-related liabilities. These liabilities include:

• Criminal Liability
Union Carbide Corporation and its former chairman Warren Anderson face serious criminal charges, including culpable homicide, at the Chief Judicial Magistrate’s court in Bhopal. Neither party has appeared in court to face trial. Both have been declared “absconders from justice” (fugitives from justice) by the Bhopal court.

• Environmental Liability
Union Carbide fled India leaving behind thousands of tons of toxic wastes strewn in and around the factory site. Over the years, these poisons – which include trichloroethene, 1,3,5 trichlorobenzene, dichloromethane, chloroform, lead, and mercury - have leached into the groundwater supplying nearly 20,000 people living nearby. A 2002 study by the Fact Finding Mission on Bhopal found high levels of many of Carbide’s poisons in the breast milk of mothers living around the factory.

In full knowledge of these crimes, Dow, a $30 billion company, refuses to submit their subsidiary to the Bhopal courts, to clean up the site, to provide safe drinking water or otherwise protect the health of people already poisoned once by the gas. In the almost three years since Carbide became Dow, perhaps another 1000 survivors have died; also the heavy metals and volatile organic chemicals emanating from the Carbide factory have travelled that much further into local aquifers, and from there into the bodies of thousands of adults and children. Dow sits back and watches: they are now very much party to the crime of this progressive poisoning.

Double Standards

In a recent development which sent its stocks plummeting, Dow accepted Carbide’s historical asbestos liabilities in the US, setting aside as much as $2.2 billion to address future liabilities arising out of the acquisition. Yet when challenged about its Bhopal liabilities, Dow speciously maintains that Carbide is a separate company. That Dow only makes this distinction in respect of Bhopal reveals deeply racist double standards.

The Mocking Criminal

In February 2001, survivors' groups began a series of protests against Dow, calling on the company to accept its legal and moral responsibilities. In the face of survivors' insistence that they submit to the rule of law, Dow has responded with evasion, lies and lawsuits. Following a peaceful demonstration in Mumbai last December, the craven Dow slapped a $10,000 lawsuit upon impoverished survivors. In the suit Dow claims, without irony, that survivors made “illegal” demands which included asking for "compensation for victims of the tragedy, impleadment of the company in the criminal case and clean up of the site (factory in Bhopal)."

Click here for 20 downloadable posters about Dow-Carbide

Dark Days Ahead for Dow

Though Carbide had long ago divested itself of its Indian stock in order to wriggle free of the criminal case in the CJM, Bhopal, Dow has significant assets in India that are vulnerable to attachment in the event of a transfer of pending liabilities from Carbide. If found guilty in the criminal case, Carbide can be sentenced to a fine which has no upper limit. Such penalties are decided based on the magnitude of the crime (in this case, the world’s worst industrial disaster), the stature and ability of the accused party to pay (Dow is the world’s largest chemical corporation) and the current state of the victims. Thus, Dow faces punitive and restitutionary fines of potentially billions of dollars. Yet at Dow’s AGM in May 2003, CEO William Stavropoulos denied to assembled shareholders that Union Carbide were part of an ongoing criminal case in Bhopal at all.

It looks like the lie is soon to blow up in Dow’s face. At an April 9, 2003 update during the criminal case hearing presented to the Bhopal court, the prosecuting agency – the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) – said it will submit its report on including Dow as an accused in the criminal case in light of Dow’s acquisition of Union Carbide. The same month survivors and their organisations filed an appeal in the US Class Action that aims to hold Dow-Carbide liable for the massive ongoing contamination around its abandoned factory in Bhopal. The Madhya Pradesh government has also stated that it plans to approach the Indian Supreme Court in a bid to get Dow to clean up the toxic wastes left behind by its subsidiary Union Carbide.

More worrying still for Dow, the outstanding issue of Bhopal is being increasingly seen as central to pressing questions about corporate crime in a globalized world. This year alone, UK MP’s signed an Early Day Motion supporting the ICJB, US Congresspeople have filed a statement with the Court of Appeals in support of the US Class Action and called for Dow to accept its Bhopal liabilities, MP’s of the European Parliament have joined the call, chemical worker’s unions, including Dow’s own staff, have done likewise, and US students have mobilised against Dow for the first time in more than 30 years.

A huge Thank You to everybody who joins us in solidarity, in whichever way, on the 3rd.