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| Bhopal protests move online |
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| Mon 10 March 2003 |
| INDIA/Mumbai |
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| Dow Chemical is going to court
soon in India. Not as the defendants for their ongoing
responsibility for the Bhopal disaster, but as the plaintiffs.
They're suing (we're not making this up) the SURVIVORS of the
disaster for protesting at a Dow plant. |
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The company is also pressing for US$10,000
in compensation from the survivors for previous peaceful
protests. Dow wants the courts to order the survivors to
physically stay away from Dow plants and Dow employees. (The
technical term for this legal ploy is the "out of sight, out
of mind defence." OK, we made that up.)
But pesky
internet activists are showing Dow there is no escape, and
providing survivors with a way they can stay far away from Dow
plants and Dow employees, but still exercise their right to
protest and demand accountability of Dow: a virtual sit-in at
Dow's world-wide greenwash headquarters on the internet,
www.bhopal.com
Be part
of the virtual sit in. This protest starts on
Monday 10 March and will continue untill Dow drops the court
case against the survivors.
Dow's unapologetic website,
which includes an "incident review," denies that Dow purchased
any liability for the disaster when they bought Union Carbide,
which was the majority stakeholder in the Bhopal plant. The
site also claims that "The legacy of those killed and injured
is a chemical industry that adheres voluntarily to strict
safety and environmental standards." You may want to read that
sentence again just to be sure you got it right.
Virtual sit in?
A virtual sit-in
is simply an automated way of sending lots of traffic to a
website. Activists around the world park their browsers on a
page which does nothing more than automatically load the
bhopal.com site several times a minute. In the same way that a
real-world sit-in disrupts traffic, the virtual sit-in makes
the target site less responsive and slow. Eventually, the site
may become so crowded with protestors that it stops serving
information completely.
The sit in was the idea of the
legendary internet activist group the yesmen who have
already been giving Dow a black eye with dowethics.com.
Andy Bichlbaum from the group said: "We're going to continue
representing Dow more honestly than they represent themselves
until Dow decides to fulfill its responsibilites in Bhopal.
And this protest is going to continue until Dow drops its
court case against the survivors."
The ongoing disaster in
Bhopal
After the 1984 gas leak, which has killed
20,000 people to date, Union Carbide abandoned the factory
site and fled India. For 18 years since, the toxic wastes left
by Union Carbide have been bleeding poisons into the
groundwater and affecting the health of the people living near
the factory. Dow merged with Union Carbide in 2001 and despite
paying up for Union Carbide's asbestos liabilities, it refuses
to do the same for Bhopal.
Dow has faced may protests
since taking over Union Carbide but suing the victims
represent a new low in Dow's attempts to gag its critics. Most
of the survivors come from the poorest sections of Indian
society. Despite this Dow is not only attempting to prevent
peaceful protests at Dow locations but is asking for a
monetary settlement from the victims. The amount it seeks
represents an average survivors earnings over 10 to 20 years.
The cause? Dow's "loss of business".
The virtual
sit-in, organised by the yesmen, follows on from their hugely
successful spoof of Dow's website, currently located at http://dowethics.com/r/Homepage/index.html.
Dow has been playing whack-a-mole with the site, launching
several abortive legal attempts to shut it down, only to have
new activists set it up in a new spot on the interent. The
site takes a slightly more honest look at why Dow refuses to
clean up Bhopal and why image is everything to Dow.
Maybe this protest will help show Dow that the only
way to really silence protest will be to spend a fraction of
its huge US$28 billion annual turnover on cleaning up
Bhopal?
Take
action:
Already got your browser busy with the
virtual
sit in? Discover more ways to keep
the pressure on Dow.
Find out
more:
Read
why Bhopal.com is more about myths than reality. (pdf file
46Kb)
Discover the true facts about Bhopal, minus the
corporate spin, at these sites:
bhopal.net
greenpeace.org/bhopal
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