MERCY FOR THE MARTYRS OF BHOPAL!
by
Dominique Lapierre
They
pour out each day by the hundreds into New Delhi from the third class carriages
and the roofs of the Mangala Express, the Punjab Mail, and all the trains
which converge towards the capital across the huge Indian continent. These pathetic flocks of men, women and
children loaded with baskets and packages slowly walk under the blazing July
heat towards the Jantar Mantar, an ancient observatory for astronomy which
over the years has been the capitalís traditional headquarters for
protesters. For now ten days,
it is sheltering a group of hunger strikers embarked into a fast unto death. These desesperados and all those who are
joining them all come from Bhopal, a city in the heart of India where, in
the night of December 3, 1984, a toxic cloud brutally released by a pesticide
plant belonging to the US multinational Union Carbide killed between sixteen
and thirty thousand inhabitants and poisoned half a million others. It was the most deadly industrial accident
in history.
Those responsible for this tragedy, to begin with Warren Anderson,
at the time Union Carbideís CEO, have never been brought to court to
explain why, for the only sake of profit, they had shut one by one the safety
devices which were to guarantee the safety of their plant.
In 1992, the Bhopal Court of Justice issued a warrant against Warren
Anderson for ìculpable homicideî, an accusation which justified
an extradition to India. But
the US authorities took no action on the Indian request. They did not arrest Warren Anderson. During the three years I have devoted
with Javier Moro to reconstruct in minute details the circumstances of the
Bhopal tragedy (Five past Midnight in Bhopal, Warner books), we were unable
to locate the man who is, after all, responsible, even if it is in an involuntarily
way, of the death of five times more people than caused the terrorist attack
against the New York World Trade Center.
His house in Vero Beach, Florida, where he had retired, has been deserted
for many years. As Bin Laden,
Warren Anderson is a fugitive.
And yet, in a very surprising decision, the government of India is
now requesting the Court of Justice of Bhopal to reduce Andersonís
accusation of ìculpable homicideî into a simple accusation of
ìrash negligenceî. In
which case, the procedure for extradition would be automatically dropped. The Bhopal Court of Justice is to take
its decision on July17. But no
one doubts it will comply with the central governmentís request. Under what pressure from Washington has
New Delhi been to decide to ask its local justice to exonerate from its accusation
the man responsible for the Bhopal tragedy? A very strong pressure, no doubt. Could
George W. Bush accept that the former CEO of a prestigious American multinational
continue to be threatened by an extradition procedure initiated by a third
world country?
But in its desire to accommodate its American partners, the Indian
government simply forgot about the indomitable will of those who survived
the December 1984 massacre. Led
by a legendary character named Sathyu, a former mechanical engineer who has,
for the last eighteen years, devoted his whole life to alleviate the sufferings
of the 150,000 survivors of the tragedy, a group of men and women, all gas
victims, has just left Bhopal for New Delhi to revolt against the possible
exoneration of Andersonís liability.
What weapon are they using? The
same weapon the father of their nation, Mahatma Gandhi, used when he fought
to get the British out of India. An
indefinite hunger strike.
Tarai Bai, one of the hunger strikers, is thirty-six years old. She was three months pregnant at the time
of the accident. She lost her
baby as she fled the lethal cloud. The
gas burnt her lungs. She was
unable to ever be pregnant again and she suffers of permanent respiratory
deficiency, of partial blindness, of neurological troubles. Her companion Rashida Bee, forty-six,
has lost five members of her family during the fatal night. In spite of her semi blindness, she manages
one of the most active survivors organization. She is the one who led the famous march
of Bhopal women, when hundreds of gas victims walked over six hundred miles
from Bhopal to Delhi, with babies in their arms, to manifest in front of Parliament
for the respect of the victims rights. The other hunger strikers are all veterans of a relentless
struggle for justice. But because
of their precarious health, their action may lead to premature deaths. Three of them have just entered into a
coma. The doctor who monitors
their health has had to order the interruption of their fast.
Inseparable of all Indian non-violent manifestations, these July days
and nights are days and nights of celebrations around the engineer Sathyu
and his suffering companions. Besides the hundreds of Bhopalis who continue
to poor in, compact groups of journalists, political and union leaders, personalities
of all sorts are permanently surrounding the pathetic small group laying on
cots spread on the sidewalk with, as only food, bottles of water and a few
slices of lemon. The crowd never
stops to sing and recite mantras. As always in India, the adventure has
become a spiritual happening.
But, at any moment, the apparition of a banner may convert this good
humor into an explosion of anger. One
of this banner denounces a new insult to the rights of the victims. A Hindu Member of Parliament, member of the BJP, the extremist
party in power, has just managed to have financial compensations distributed
to the Hindu inhabitants of twenty new wards of Bhopal which were NEVER touched
by the toxic cloud of gas. An
astute way to buy votes for the next elections. Plenty of votes, because the sums of money
involved are enormous.
Authentic victims of the Bhopal catastrophe unfortunately all suffer
from one major malediction: they are all poor, and it is well known that the
poor, especially in poor countries, have no voice.
It is because the fatal night the wind blew from the north to the south.
The north was the plant. The
south was a belt of slums where thousands of migrant workers had crammed together
in the hope to find a job in the high tech pesticide plant America had built
for the benefit of Indian farmers.
This blazing month of July, a third determination is fueling the
anger of New Delhiís hunger strikers.
And that is to force the government to get the multinational chemical
corporation Dow Chemicals, now the owner of Union Carbide, to assume the
responsibility of the defunct corporation with matters regarding medical
treatment of the victims and environmental liabilities. Carbide has disappeared in 1984 leaving hundreds of tons of
toxic effluents on the site of its abandoned plant. This horrendous pollution poison each day a little more the
underground aqua system which provides the water of the wells of those
who still live in the immediate vicinity of the rusting metallic structures
of the former installations. I
recently wanted to reckon the aggressiveness of this pollution by drinking
half a glass of the water of one of those wells.
My mouth, my throat, my tongue instantly got on fire, while my
arms and legs suffered an immediate skin rash.
This was the simple manifestation of what men, women and children
have to endure daily, some eighteen years after the tragedy. With the support of the royalties of Five
Past Midnight in Bhopal, my co-author Javier Moro and I we are
presently working in providing a drinking water distribution to the worst
off inhabitants of the area.
At a time when India is doing its all out best to get major international
corporations to come invest on its territory, itís alas unlikely that
it will want to confront a super giant like Dow Chemicals. Unless the biggest democracy in the world
accepts to hear the desperate voices of the martyrs of New Delhiís
Jantar Mantar.
Dominique Lapierre
