Dow Chemical is going to court this week in India. Not as the defendants for their ongoing responsibility for the Bhopal disaster, but as the plaintiffs: Dow is suing the SURVIVORS of the disaster for protesting at a Dow plant, and--we're not making this up--they're demanding US $10,000 from them... about 10 years of wages at local rates.

But pesky internet activists are showing Dow there is no escape, with a virtual sit-in of Dow's internet Greenwash headquarters, Bhopal.com ( http://www.dowethics.com/bhopal.com/). Dow's unapologetic website, which includes an "incident review," denies that Dow purchased any liability for the disaster when they bought Union Carbide, which was the majority stakeholder in the Bhopal plant (even though Dow did pay up for Union Carbide's asbestos liabilities in the First World). The site also states that "The legacy of those killed and injured is a chemical industry that adheres voluntarily to strict safety and environmental standards." (You may want to read that sentence again just to be sure you got it right.) After the 1984 gas leak, which has killed 20,000 people to date, Union Carbide abandoned the factory site and fled India. For 18 years since, the toxic wastes left by Union Carbide have been bleeding poisons into the groundwater and affecting the health of the people living near the factory. Dow merged with Union Carbide in 2001 and paid up for Union Carbide's asbestos liabilities, but it refuses to do the same for Bhopal. Dow has faced may protests since taking over Union Carbide, but suing the victims represent a new low in Dow's attempts to gag its critics. Most of the survivors come from the poorest sections of Indian society. To reinforce its message, therefore, Dow is asking for a monetary settlement from the victims. The amount they seek represents an average Indian's earnings over 10 to 20 years. The cause? Dow's "loss of business".

If Dow sues real-life protesters into silence, protest will spring up elsewhere. This protest hopes to show Dow that the only way to really silence protest will be to spend a small fraction of its US$28 billion annual turnover on cleaning up Bhopal. A virtual sit-in is simply an automated way of sending lots of traffic to a website. Activists around the world park their browsers on a page which does nothing more than automatically load the bhopal.com site several times a minute. In the same way that a real-world sit-in disrupts traffic, the virtual sit-in makes the target site less responsive and slow. Eventually, the site may become so crowded with protestors that it stops serving information completely. The virtual sit-in will be located at The Yes Men's hugely successful spoof of Dow's website:  http://www.dowethics.com/bhopal.com/.=20 Dow has been playing whack-a-mole with the DowEthics.com site, launching several abortive legal attempts to shut it down, only to have new activists set it up in a new spot on the internet. Other parts of the site explain more honestly why Dow refuses to clean up Bhopal and why image is everything to Dow.

For more info:  ARevents@londonaa.demon.co.uk