Survivors of 1984 Union Carbide chemical disaster in Bhopal, India are to be sued by the new owners of the company for $10,000, the environmental pressure group Greenpeace has revealed.

Dow Chemical, which merged with Union Carbide in 2001, is to sue the survivors and others who protested outside Dow’s Bombay offices on 2nd December (the 18th anniversary of the disaster) last year for ‘loss of work’. The company’s offices were closed for two hours during the peaceful protest.

Not only are Dow seeking to sue survivors for 10 years earnings, they are also seeking to stifle legitimate protest at their failure to clean up the site of the disaster by seeking an injunction banning demonstrations by survivors within 100 metres of Dow offices in India.

Nearly 4,000 people died on the night of 2-3rd December 1984 when a cloud of poisonous Methyl Isocyanate gas (MIC) swept over the city after badly maintained storage tanks burst under pressure.

Since the disaster, Union Carbide fought not only to pay the minimum compensation but have also sought to distance itself from the disaster by blaming it on sabotage. In 1989 Union Carbide paid $470 million in compensation to the Indian government. Survivors of the Bhopal disaster have so far received on average a whopping $500 of this money – don’t spend it all at once (if you live long enough).

Most seriously, Dow has not cleaned up its mess in Bhopal. A further
20,000 people in the Bhopal area have died and 150,000 remain ‘chronically ill’ as a result of polluted air, earth and water supplies. Children born with deformities consistent with MIC poisoning are commonplace in Bhopal. The abandoned site has not been cleaned and a 1999 Greenpeace report found stockpiles of hazardous chemicals leaking into the water supply. The company recently reported sales worth $6.9 billion in 2002, up 9% from 2001.

Greenpeace in India is one of the defendants in the case. Their spokesperson Namrata Choudhary said “If, after being denied the right to a healthy life, to clean water and a pure environment, the people of Bhopal are even deprived of their right to protest in a peaceful, non-violent manner, it is tantamount to adding insult to grievous injury.”

Indian courts are still seeking the extradition of Warren Anderson, former CEO of Union Carbide, from the United States for ‘culpable homicide’ for cost cutting at the plant that led safety procedures to be compromised. This despite pressure from Dow on the Indian government to drop its extradition request. America claims it has no knowledge of Mr Anderson’s whereabouts. However, despite being held responsible for disaster far bigger than 9/11, there have been no calls to bomb Florida, where Anderson was last seen playing golf.

Little comment is needed on the almost unbelievable reaction of Dow to legitimate protest at its role in one of the most serious disasters of the last 20 years.

Their own website’s section on ‘social responsibility’ carries the following: “[The] distinctive contribution we make to society helps customers succeed, stockholders prosper, employees achieve and communities thrive”.

Lets just hope that the ‘distinctive contribution’ Dow has made to the community in Bhopal is not repeated elsewhere.