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].
