Remembering Bhopal: Corporate
responsibility means never having to do much more than hire a PR
company and say: sorry, we won't do that again; we've changed, we
really have; we care.
Unfair?
Hajra Bi remembers
waking up just after midnight on 3 December 1984. A strange smell
was making it difficult to breath. She ran outside with her family:
'People were running
blindly. Many were falling down. By then my eyes had become so
swollen that I could hardly open them. I had my dupatta covering my
eyes.
'I was
carrying four year old Nazma and my husband was carrying Shareef who
was six and Iqbal who was two years old. I had gone a little
distance when Nazma started making gurgling and choking sounds. I
pried my eye lids open and saw there was froth coming out of her
mouth.'
Shareef died after
three months. Yosouf, born six months after the leak, died when he
was a year old. Shahbano, born later, also died.
Hajra Bi
received Rs 15,000, just under £200, in compensation from Union
Carbide, the corporation responsible for the world's worst
industrial accident. [Bhopal.org].
Yesterday,
protestors dumped toxic waste at the headquarters of Dow Chemical in
Bombay to mark the 18th anniversary of the Bhopal gas
leak.
Women from Bhopal delivered brooms to Dow with the
message: 'Dow, clean up your
mess'.
Some 20,000 people have died since the leak of
40 tonnes of deadly gases at the pesticide factory in 1984.
At least one person a day still dies from diseases related
to the leak. [Greenpeace].
Dow Chemical,
which merged with Union Carbide in 2001, denies responsibility for
cleaning up the site or for paying out any compensation.
In
1989, the Indian government settled out of court with Union Carbide
for $470m. It seems unwilling to press the Bhopal victims' case,
possibly for fear of putting off potential US investors.
What
if a gas leak had occurred in New York or London?
Anne Karpf
pointed out last year that the 25,000 families of those bereaved by
the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre received on average
$25,000 each.
This contrasts with the average $1,300
compensation for each of the 14,824 Indians killed immediately in
Bhopal. For the hundreds of thousands of people disabled by the
leak, the average payout has been $580. [Guardian].
For
more about the Bhopal campaign for justice, see Bhopal.net.
For more
insight into the ways in which corporations like Dow play merry with
the truth, see the pranksters (quickly, before they attract the
attention of Dow's lawyers) at Dow
Toxic:
'We don't want
people to think "chemicals" when they hear "Dow" -- we want them to hear "Living.
Improved Daily." We don't want them
to think of a corporation striving to maximize profits, we want them
to think of a good neighbor. . .
'. . . unless we're frequently and
visibly expressing a deep concern about Sustainable Development,
we're missing opportunities to position Dow as the caring, concerned
global citizen our customers must believe us to be. . .
'Setting corporate targets and judging
ourselves against them is an important part of our strategy to
ensure that we remain free of the fetters of over-regulation by
government.' [Dow-Chemicals].
