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When Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and US President George W Bush arrive at the United Nations building in New York to address the General Assembly Friday September 13, reminders of the unsavory side of Indo-US cooperation will confront them.
New York-based Indians and supporters of the Campaign for Justice in Bhopal plan a hunger strike from 10 am onwards, outside the UN building.
On Thursday, the group called on Vajpayee and Bush to uphold justice by speedily extraditing Union Carbide chairman Warren Anderson and other Dow-Carbide Corporation executives to India to face trial.
The hunger strike will shift to Main Street, Bridgehampton, where Warren Anderson was recently discovered leading a life of luxury.
The protestors include the likes of author Suketu Mehta, whose book on the Bombay underworld will be published by Knopf in early 2003, and Diane Wilson, member of Unreasonable Women for the Earth.
Wilson, a fisherwoman turned environmentalist, has been fighting to save the waters of San Antonio Bay from toxic discharge by chemical companies, including Union Carbide-Dow Chemical.
She was on a solidarity hunger strike with the victims of Bhopal from July 18th to August 15th outside the Carbide/Dow chemical facility in Seadrift, TX.
Earlier this month, on August 26, Wilson chained herself on the top of a 70 foot tower for 8 hours, demanding that Dow clean up Carbide's toxic mess in Bhopal. She was arrested and released on bail.
Announcing the launch of another indefinite hunger strike, Wilson said, "Bhopal is Dow's unfinished business. We are here to bear witness to the injustice that continues to be perpetuated on the victims of Bhopal by Dow along with the complicity of both the Indian and US governments. If the current United States administration is really serious about increasing corporate accountability and punishing corporate crime, then they must extradite Warren Anderson and Dow. And Dow must be made to clean up its mess in Bhopal."
Anderson, chairman of Union Carbide at the time of the 1984 disaster, was till recently untraceable. The Indian government and US authorities, say protestors, have dragged their feet in bringing him and other executives to book for their role in the deaths of over 20,000 in Bhopal.
On August 28, a Bhopal court restated that the Indian government should expedite the extradition of Anderson and other Dow-Carbide executives.
"The Indian Government has publicly declared that it will pursue the extradition of Warren Anderson. Now that Bush, Vajpayee and even Anderson are here in New York, we believe that this is the most opportune moment for Vajpayee to initiate discussions with the US for extraditing him and the other Dow-Carbide representatives," said a supporter of the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal from New York.
The international manhunt for the corporate CEO accused of 20,000 dead and a further 120,000 injured in the Bhopal gas tragedy finally ended -- in the Hamptons.
The ex-CEO of Union Carbide Corp maintains two homes in the exclusive resort communities of Bridgehampton, New York, and Vero Beach, Florida.
He was recently discovered hiding in his Hamptons residence -- estimated to cost over $1 million -- by Greenpeace activists.
"This," say protestors, "is the same man whose company, to save $47 in daily costs at the Carbide plant in Bhopal, ordered a series of essential safety mechanisms to be shut down, leading to the world's worst industrial disaster in 1984."
He was arrested in Bhopal and released on bail, in return for pledging that he would be back to face a trial. When he absconded, a warrant for his arrest was issued in 1992. In August, an Indian judge dismissed an attempt by the Indian government to dilute the charges against Andersen from culpable homicide to negligence.
Protestors say that when Vajpayee lands up at the UN Friday morning to address the General Assembly, they will call on him to obey the courts and energetically pursue the extradition of Anderson and the authorized representatives of Union Carbide Corporation's new owner The Dow Chemical Company, so that they face trial in the ongoing criminal case, whose next hearing is on October 17, 2002.
Protestors also demand that the Indian government distribute the balance of the settlement fund to the survivors. Such a distribution will provide each survivor with approximately $600.
It is also demanded that Dow Chemical Company be made accountable for the long-term medical care, research and health monitoring of the survivors and their children, for providing economic rehabilitation and social support to survivors too weak to earn a livelihood, and for cleaning up contaminated groundwater and soil in and around the abandoned pesticide factory in Bhopal.
"The Government of India is bound to undertake these steps - morally, as a democratically elected government; legally, as the parens patrie [parent] of the victims of Bhopal; and constitutionally, as a protector of fundamental rights," a press release issued by the protestors says.
Wilson argues that in recent times, much attention has been paid to the financial impact on ordinary Americans of recent corporate disasters involving Enron, WorldCom and others.
"Imagine if those CEOs had been responsible for the death of 20,000 Americans -- would Ken Lay be allowed to summer in the Hamptons and winter in Florida? Americans call for an end to double standards in pursuing corporate crime," Wilson says.
"We demand that our government take immediate action to cooperate with the Indian government in the extradition and trial of Warren Anderson and representatives of Dow-Carbide responsible for the world's worst corporate crime, and investigate withholding of liability-related information by Union Carbide and The Dow Chemical Company in their filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission during their merger in 2001."
Wilson and other protestors point out that though the Carbide disaster left Bhopal "a land of the living dead", the victims never received adequate financial compensation - average awards from the settlement amount to a mere $200 per person.
"Now the victims seek, at the very least, some judicial accountability for the executives who did this to them," the protestors said in a release. "Perpetrators of corporate terror should be brought to justice no less than perpetrators of any other kind of terror.
"Eighteen years is long enough. Warren Andersen must be extradited and face justice -- now."
Also Read: American joins Bhopal victims' fight The International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal
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