INDIA: The agony of Bhopal

Twenty years after the horrific disaster in Bhopal, probably responsible for 20,000 deaths, the victims are still fighting for compensation. This article on this act of mass murder is abridged from  www.bhopal.net, where information on how to support the victims can be found.  (Note this article only brings up more questions; if the Bhopal disaster was a result of an angry, disgruntled employee then it would be a mass murder, no? Was this really an accident? What was the motivation here?)

On December 3, 1984, poison gas leaked from a Union Carbide factory in the Indian city of Bhopal, killing thousands. How many thousands, no one knows. Carbide says 3800. Municipal workers who picked up bodies with their own hands, loading them onto trucks for burial in mass graves or to be burned on mass pyres, reckon they shifted at least 15,000 bodies. Survivors, basing their estimates on the number of shrouds sold in the city, conservatively claim about 8000 died in the first week. Such body counts become meaningless when you know that the dying has never stopped.

The Union Carbide factory in Bhopal seemed doomed almost from the start. The company built the pesticide factory there in the 1970s, thinking that India represented a huge untapped market for its pest control products. However sales never met the company’s expectations; Indian farmers, struggling to cope with droughts and floods, didn’t have the money to buy Union Carbide’s pesticides. The plant, which never reached its full capacity, proved to be a losing venture and ceased active production in the early 1980s.

However vast quantities of dangerous chemicals remained; three tanks continued to hold over 60 tons of methyl isocyanate, or MIC for short. Although MIC is a particularly reactive and deadly gas, the Union Carbide plant’s elaborate safety system was allowed to fall into disrepair. Every safety system that had been installed to prevent a leak of MIC — at least six in all — ultimately proved inoperative.

Regular maintenance had fallen into such disrepair that on the night of December 2, when an employee was flushing a corroded pipe, multiple stopcocks failed and allowed water to flow freely into the largest tank of MIC. Exposure to this water soon led to an uncontrolled reaction; the tank was blown out of its concrete sarcophagus and spewed a deadly cloud of MIC, hydrogen cyanide, mono methyl amine and other chemicals that hugged the ground. Blown by the prevailing winds, this cloud settled over much of Bhopal. Soon thereafter, people began to die.

Remembers Aziza Sultan, a survivor: “At about 12.30 am I woke to the sound of my baby coughing badly. In the half light I saw that the room was filled with a white cloud. I heard a lot of people shouting. They were shouting 'run, run'. Then I started coughing with each breath seeming as if I was breathing in fire. My eyes were burning.’‘

Another survivor, Champa Devi Shukla, remembers that, “It felt like somebody had filled our bodies up with red chillies, our eyes tears coming out, noses were watering, we had froth in our mouths. Somebody was running this way and somebody was running that way, some people were just running in their underclothes. People were only concerned as to how they would save their lives so they just ran.

“Those who fell were not picked up by anybody, they just kept falling, and were trampled on by other people. People climbed and scrambled over each other to save their lives — even cows were running and trying to save their lives and crushing people as they ran.”

“In those apocalyptic moments no one knew what was happening. People simply started dying in the most hideous ways. Some vomited uncontrollably, went into convulsions and fell dead. Others choked to death, drowning in their own body fluids. Many died in the stampedes through narrow gullies where street lamps burned a dim brown through clouds of gas. The force of the human torrent wrenched children's hands from their parents' grasp. Families were whirled apart”, reported the Bhopal Medical Appeal in 1994.

“The poison cloud was so dense and searing that people were reduced to near blindness. As they gasped for breath its effects grew ever more suffocating. The gases burned the tissues of their eyes and lungs and attacked their nervous systems. People lost control of their bodies. Urine and feces ran down their legs. Women lost their unborn children as they ran, their wombs spontaneously opening in bloody abortion.”

Despite the desperate pleas of doctors in the city’s crammed and panicked hospitals, Union Carbide refused to reveal what was in the gas cloud, preventing any effective treatment.

According to Rashida Bi, a survivor who lost five gas-exposed family members to cancers, those who escaped with their lives “are the unlucky ones; the lucky ones are those who died on that night”.

Since the disaster, survivors have been plagued with an epidemic of cancers, menstrual disorders and what one doctor described as “monstrous births”.

The gas-affected people of Bhopal continue to succumb to injuries sustained during the disaster, dying at the rate of one each day. Treatment protocols are hampered by the company's continuing refusal to share information it holds on the toxic effects of MIC. Both Union Carbide and its new owner Dow Chemical claim the data is a “trade secret”, frustrating the efforts of doctors to treat gas-affected victims. The site itself has never been cleaned up, and a new generation is being poisoned by the chemicals that Union Carbide left behind.

It wasn’t until 1989 that Union Carbide, in a partial settlement with the Indian government, agreed to pay out some $470 million in compensation. The victims weren’t consulted in the settlement discussions, and many felt cheated by their compensation — $300-$500 — or about five years’ worth of medical expenses. Today, those who were awarded compensation are hardly better off than those who weren’t.

Victims of the gas attack eke out a perilous existence; 50,000 Bhopalis can’t work due to their injuries and some can’t even muster the strength to move. The lucky survivors have relatives to look after them; many survivors have no family left. Everyone has perished.

In 1991, the local government in Bhopal charged Warren Anderson, Union Carbide’s CEO at the time of the disaster, with manslaughter. If tried in India and convicted, he faces a maximum of 10 years in prison. However Anderson has never stood trial before an Indian court; he has, instead, evaded an international arrest warrant and a summons to appear before a US court. For years Anderson’s whereabouts were unknown, and it wasn’t until August of 2002 that Greenpeace found him, living a life of luxury in the Hamptons. Neither the US nor the Indian government seem interested in disturbing him with an extradition.

The Union Carbide Corporation was charged with culpable homicide, a criminal charge whose penalty has no upper limit. These charges have never been resolved, as Union Carbide, like its former CEO, has refused to appear before an Indian court.

These liabilities became the property of the Dow Corporation, following its 2001 purchase of Union Carbide. The deal was completed much to the chagrin of a number of Dow stockholders, who filed suit in a desperate attempt to stop it. Dow has consistently and stringently maintained that it isn’t liable for the Bhopal accident.

Thus the victims in Bhopal have been left in the lurch, told to fend for themselves as corporate executives elude justice and big corporations elude the blame. Dow’s unwillingness to fulfill its legal and moral obligations in Bhopal represents only the latest chapter in this horrifying humanitarian disaster.

From Green Left Weekly, December 8, 2004.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.