By Gary Cohen
Ten years ago, on December 3, 1984, the Union Carbide Corporation leaked a poisonous gas into a slum neighbourhood beside its Bhopal, India, pesticide factory. As a result of the company's criminal negligence, more than 4000 people died immediately in a night of terror, while hundreds of thousands of other residents were disabled, blinded and injured, many of them permanently.
For the Union Carbide Corporation, Bhopal represented the worst "public relations" disaster a corporation could dream of. Not only did the company face a possible $3 billion in liabilities (the original amount the government of India was seeking), but its name, and stock portfolio, were associated with murder and environmental apocalypse.
With factories and related companies in many countries and assets totalling many billions of dollars, Union Carbide could not afford to roll over and play dead. The company spent millions of dollars crafting and selling a story to the media that the chemical leak was due to an act of sabotage of a disgruntled employee, rather than a logical extension of its policy of cutting back on safety personnel and training as the factory lost its profitability.
After playing cat and mouse in the US and Indian courts for several years, Union Carbide executives used their high-level government influence to cop a favourable deal from the Indian government of Rajiv Gandhi, who was anxious to open India to foreign corporations at that time. He didn't want foreign companies to think that India was inhospitable to transnational companies.
In the end, the Indian government, which claimed to be representing the "victims", cut a deal with Union Carbide that required it to pay $470 million in damages in exchange for waiving all future civil claims. The company's annual report the following year proudly announced that Union Carbide was in great financial shape, despite the settlement of the Bhopal claims, which had cost 56 cents per share of stock.
In the past year, the Indian courts have revived the possibility of bringing criminal liability charges against Union Carbide senior officials, especially former CEO Warren Anderson, who went into hiding soon after the massacre.
Yet the Indian government has not asked the US government to extradite Anderson to face criminal charges. Now that the Indian government is in full swing in attracting US and European transnational companies to invest in the country, it is certainly not going to ruin all that by bringing criminal charges against a US corporate executive. The result, quite literally, is that until now Union Carbide Corporation, and its chief executive officers, have gotten away with murder.
The people in Bhopal continue to suffer and die. At last count, there were 15,000 deaths directly linked to the gas leak, while more than 500,000 people had injury claims before the Indian courts.
However, the courts continue to deny two-thirds of the claims because the judges haven't bothered to understand the long-term medical effects of the chemicals spewed into the Bhopal neighbourhoods 10 years ago. The company, of course, hasn't been helpful on this score either. Union Carbide still hasn't released any information about the health effects of the chemicals used at its factory.
The speed of processing the claims is another insult to the Bhopal victims. At the rate the court is processing claims, most of the plaintiffs will be dead before they receive compensation.
The money the Indian government has spent in Bhopal has been mostly squandered. Despite millions spent on economic development, fewer than 100 people are employed in government-sponsored workplaces. Despite millions spent on medical relief, the services in Bhopal's hospitals remain poor and unresponsive to the victims. Despite millions spent on environmental rehabilitation, the Union Carbide factory remains contaminated and abandoned, while funds have been spent bulldozing the slums where gas victims live and beautifying roads at remote areas of the city.
Without the active participation of the people most affected by the gas leak, few gains have been made. The people of Bhopal continue to suffer, forgotten, abused, re-victimised.
The Bhopal Union Carbide massacre mirrors the brutal face of "free trade" and industrialisation in the world today. Bhopal is not an anomaly, the unfortunate consequence of an irresponsible company's actions. On the contrary, it is the norm, a "natural" consequence of a corporate philosophy that subordinates all human and ecological values to next quarter's profit margin.
Given this sober reality, how does the Bhopal massacre speak to citizens of the planet working to build peoples' movements to hold transnational corporations at bay in their relentless pursuit to control the world's economy and the planet's resources? What are the lessons we need to take from Bhopal?
People are expendable in the balance sheets of transnational corporations. Murder is acceptable, whether that be slow death from prolonged exposure to toxic chemical exposures in the workplace and community, or immediate death from massive gas leaks, radiation and other inevitable hazardous accidents, releases and exposures in a toxic chemical-based economy.
Bhopal is the norm. When the Johns Mansville Corporation, with full knowledge of the health hazards, allowed workers to be exposed to asbestos; when the Ethyl Corporation, with full knowledge of the health hazards of lead, sells leaded petrol in Mexico; when the Rhone Poulenc Corporation, with the full knowledge of the poisons in its pesticides, continues to sell them to the Third World; when the DuPont Corporation, with full knowledge of the dangers of CFCs, allows the whole planet and all its species to be exposed to ultraviolet radiation due to ozone destruction so it can continue to make billions on CFCs, then we understand that people and the Earth are expendable in the pursuit of profit.
From the Bhopal massacre, and from the recent passage of GATT and NAFTA, we understand that national governments have relinquished their authority to transnational corporations to decide the fate of the planet's economic, political and ecological health. In many cases, national governments are paving the way for transnational corporations to expand their monopolies around the globe.
Many transnational corporations have more financial wealth and political power than most governments around the world, especially in the Third World. These trade agreements have accelerated the destructive power of transnational corporations in their pursuit of new markets for poisonous and unsustainable technology and products.
Just as the Indian government can not, and will not, hold Union Carbide officials accountable for their murder of Bhopal residents, so the Mexican government will not hold General Motors Corporation accountable for poisoning the border region, the Malaysian government will not hold Mitsubishi Corporation accountable for poisoning the residents of Bukit Merah with radiation, the Brazilian government will not hold Rhone Poulenc Corporation accountable for poisoning the people of Brazil, the US government will not hold Chemical Waste Management accountable for poisoning the African American community in South Chicago, and so on and so on around the globe.
Since the Bhopal massacre, transnational corporations have become more powerful. Under the banner of "free trade" and the GATT, corporations can move their production and their waste to more than 100 countries, shopping in the process for the cheapest labour and most favourable dumping conditions for their toxic by-products.
And when national governments attempt to regulate their own environment, transnational corporations can appeal to international trade forums to prevent governments from interfering with their ability to freely trade in poisons.
GATT and NAFTA have codified the authority of transnational corporations to exercise the traditional functions of government — except that corporations are inherently undemocratic and undermine the rightful authority of the world's citizens to decide for ourselves the fate of our economies and ecosystems. Under these trade agreements, corporations have become empowered to destroy local and national economies, undermine community-based democratic processes and plunder the ecosystems of the planet. The Earth is not a "business in liquidation", yet that is how it is being treated by many transnational corporations.
The Bhopal massacre has not had any lasting effect regarding government efforts to stop corporations from producing, using and dumping poisons and killing people and the planet in the process. It has not led to new laws to try corporate officials when they kill, lie and maim. It has not even slowed the export of poisonous technologies and waste. On the contrary, the export of poisonous industries to the Third World is accelerating.
In India alone, there are 26 separate proposals to open chlorine-related factories around the country. The electronics industry, with its use of cancer-causing solvents and other chemicals that cause birth defects in women workers, is rapidly moving its production to South-East Asia. The pesticides industry is moving to Brazil and South America. The toxic waste trade is looking for markets in Eastern Europe and Russia.
The radioactive waste trade, sponsored by the US government, is looking to Native American lands in the south-west United States as the "national sacrifice zone" for materials that will remain hazardous to human health and other species for at least 50,000 years.
The forests are being destroyed at a rate that will eliminate all old growth forests within a century. Indigenous people are becoming extinct as their native habitats get stolen for dam projects, logging projects, cattle grazing and other environmentally destructive activities. At last count, 2000 native peoples have been declared extinct by the United Nations in this century. Genocide is not too high a price to pay for "free trade" and global industrialisation.
In the decade since Bhopal, governments have allowed chemical companies like Union Carbide to increase their worldwide production of toxic chemicals. Governments have regulated toxic chemicals with the presumption that toxics are innocent until proven guilty. Chemicals have been entering the marketplace without extensive testing as to their ability to cause cancer, birth defects and other problems. As a result, more than 70,000 chemicals are now in commercial use.
Even when chemicals are proven guilty, when thousands of people die from chemical exposures or contract cancer or suffer genetic damage, even then governments have usually acted to set arbitrary "acceptable limits" for exposure to the chemical. In this way, corporations have been given free rein to continue the production, use and dumping of poisons, while the deaths, cancers and birth defects have been declared an "acceptable risk".
In the decade since Bhopal, an emerging body of scientific evidence suggests that chlorine-related chemicals, which are building up everywhere and in every species on the planet, are a likely cause of breast cancer in women and sterility in men. These chlorine-based chemicals are used in the production of most major pesticides, industrial solvents, CFCs, PVC and other plastics and chlorine-bleached paper. They are also released into the environment through emissions from trash and hazardous waste incinerators.
Rather than encourage governments to set more stringent limits on exposure to these chemicals, we should call for their worldwide ban and hold the chemical producers liable for the global damage they have caused. Winning the right to know about our chemical exposures is not enough. We need to fight for the right to be safe from chemicals that are killing us and destroying ecosystems worldwide.
We can not simply rely on stockholder resolutions that attempt to rein in corporate behaviour to reverse this life-destroying trend. We also can not simply rely on national governments to rein in transnational corporations. And we certainly can not rely on the corporations themselves to act in "enlightened" self-interest.
We must build an international movement that can wield enough political power to dismantle the most destructive corporations and get national and international governing bodies to limit the actions of the rest.
We need to take back our national, state and local governments. We need to reinvent them so they can support environmental and economic activities that support life on the planet, rather than destroy it. We need to build communities of resistance that span every corner of the global village, so that the struggles against transnational corporations in Tanzania and Tonga and Tijuana are not only known by activists worldwide, but actively supported.
We need to break down racial, ethnic, gender and class barriers supported by governments and corporations and unite against the destruction of our home. We have all become "throw-away labourers"; our health and the planet's health have become "externalities" to the bottom line of corporate profit.
We need to develop a set of principles for how to live together on this Earth and develop demands for how corporations will need to operate if they are to survive. These demands need to be agreed upon by communities worldwide and raised in every struggle against a transnational corporation.
Commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Bhopal massacre, we can mobilise to support the development of an international people's movement to stop the poisoning of people and the planet and increase the power of people in relation to transnational corporations.
We can do this by supporting actions in Bhopal and elsewhere that:
- publicise and put pressure on the US government to extradite former Union Carbide CEO Warren Anderson to face criminal charges in India;
- publicise the Bhopal residents' demands for health care and a streamlined compensation system that will allow them to receive justice and needed funds to support their families.
- support the demands for Union Carbide Corporation to dismantle its abandoned pesticide factory in Bhopal, and spend whatever it takes to return the contaminated land to useable and non-toxic form.
- support the rights of citizens of Bhopal and India to democratically control their fate.
As environmental justice activists, as human rights activists, as free people aspiring to democratically govern our communities with justice and compassion, we have a responsibility to remember Bhopal.
We have a responsibility to bear witness to the murder committed by Union Carbide, and to the continuing injustice to the victims of its violence. We have a responsibility to speak out against the way that transnational corporations are destroying democratic self-governing structures and poisoning legislative and electoral processes worldwide.
We have a responsibility to educate people worldwide that transnational corporations and the agencies at their behest (World Bank, International Monetary Fund, etc) are committing genocide and ecocide under the banner of free trade.
In the New World Order, where transnational corporations are running amok across the globe, there will be more Bhopals unless people's movements can unite worldwide. If we do not use history to educate people about the horrors of institutional inhumanity and violence, then we risk being silent accomplices in that inhumanity and violence. Bhopal is not only history. Bhopal is the world.
[Military Toxics Project, USA, and Third World Network, India]