Anonymous
29th July 2002, 21:06
It’s been four days since Diane Wilson, a 52 year-old fourth-generation shrimper, set up her pick-up truck outside of a Dow Chemical plant in Sea Drift, Texas and stopped eating.
Despite 95 degree heat, callous public relations staff, and once-an-hour emissions of noxious clear plumes that as Diane says “are more than nauseating, they knock you over,” she plans to continue her hunger strike until her demands are met: that Dow Chemical take responsibility for the 1984 disaster caused by its subsidiary, Union Carbide.
Ten to fifteen people die every month from health complications related to the disaster.
A few minutes after midnight the night of December 2nd 1984, in an Indian city called Bhopal, a Union Carbide pesticide factory’s cooling system failed, causing one of its reactor to overheat. The explosion that followed emitted 40 tons of poisonous gas that swept across the sleeping city. Debates rage about how many people died that night, how many were injured, and how many more have been affected since. The conservative estimate of that night’s death toll is 2,500. Hundreds of thousands were injured and many have faced lifelong debilitating illnesses. Human rights groups say that still today birth defects are rampant and 10 to 15 people die every month from health complications related to the disaster.
The official Dow line is that the accident was started when “a disgruntled employee, apparently bent on spoiling a batch of [methyl isocyanate], added water to a storage tank.” But investigators say otherwise: company dictated “cost cutting” measures led to what was really a preventable accident. Money to keep the cooling system properly functioning had been cut, the warning sirens were switched off that night.
Union Carbide’s stock actually jumped when
the settlement was announced.
Denying any real responsibility, Union Carbide brought the case to Indian courts where it settled for $470 million in payment to victims families and survivors. (One Bhopal activist states that this settlement was so ridiculously low that Union Carbide’s stock actually jumped when it was announced). The average payout to families of Bhopal’s dead was $1,250, for injured survivors—if they got anything at all—$500.
In early 2001 Union Carbide merged with Dow Chemical Company. Although Dow has taken on much of Union Carbide’s liabilities, they claim the Bhopal case is closed, and anyway, they’re not responsible.
Still fighting to get the company to admit liability and to bring charges against the CEO at the time Warren Anderson, on June 28th three Indian activists began a hunger strike outside the Indian parliament in New Delhi. The three—Sathyu Sarangi who has been working to provide free medical services for survivors and Bhopal survivors Rashida Bi and Tara Bai (Rashida lost five members of her family; Tara lost the child she was carrying)—say they will not end the strike until they feel justice has been served.
Twenty days later Diane Wilson, started her own strike in front of the Dow Chemical plant near her home in Sea Drift.
It’s been five days since Diane started and dozens of solidarity hunger strikers are stepping up around the world. Dow headquarters and the Indian Parliament are starting to be hit with phone calls, faxes, and emails. Today, the whole world is starting to hear.
GNN's Anna Lappé spoke with Diane this weekend by phone from her home in Sea Drift. She said she was feeling pretty perky. She’s used to the struggle; she’s been fighting Union Carbide and the other plants polluting her community since 1989 when she learned her county was the country’s number one toxic hotspot.
This is Diane’s fifth hunger strike, in a previous one she succeeded in getting Formosa to sign a zero wastewater discharge agreement. We have a feeling it won’t be her last.
Anna: What made you get involved with this?
Diane: I had been reading the emails back and forth from the Bhopal survivors and activists working with them who are hunger striking now. In one of the emails, I read this poem by a survivor:
aim a blowtorch at my eyes
pour acid down my throat
strip the tissue from my lungs
choke my baby to death in front of me
spare me nothing.
watch us starve
don’t ever say sorry
It really got to me. I’d been to Bhopal myself in 1992 for a People's Tribunal on Human Rights and Industrial Hazards, there were people from Korea, Thailand, Vietnam… I was the only American. We marched down to the Union Carbide plant—it’s still standing—we all wrote messages across this long wall. I wrote: “Do not forget Bhopal.”
"I’ve been a fisherman too long. You don’t have lines that divide the air, the water, the sea, the fish. It all flows together."
I’ll always remember this one moment. We had just gotten onto a bus to head to New Delhi for the tribunal and I saw a man running toward us. As he got close, he reached out and handed me a white handkerchief. Wrapped inside were pictures of three dead babies; they were each a couple of months old and they were lying across white sheets. This man had been carrying these pictures for 8 years.
When I heard about Sathyu, Rashida, and Tara hunger striking in India I knew I had to do something. That’s how I am, spontaneous. It was my heart talking.
I’ve been a fisherman too long. You don’t have lines that divide the air, the water, the sea, the fish. It all flows together. It’s real hard for me to place boundaries to say I can’t feel what they feel.
If you feel moved, but give too much time to think, your cowardly self, your rational self talks you out of it. I believe you just have to act.
"We found out our county was #1 in the country for toxic waste. We’re a small county, 15,000 people, four towns."
I feel an extremely close connection with these folks. I’ve had my own experience with Union Carbide. They’ve been in this area since 1952. They’d been real subtle about what they were doing, but we heard about them big in 1989. That year, we found out our county was #1 in the country for toxic waste. We’re a small county, 15,000 people, four towns. The report came out just after Union Carbide had won a big award for safety.
Well, two years later we had an explosion at the plant. One worker was killed and 32 others were injured. At the same time an OSHA document was leaked. It said the company had been told for twenty years by their own internal audit teams about the possibility of that very disaster and the company had ignored them. They argued it was too costly.
That’s what really got me involved with Union Carbide. I fought permits and picketed and crashed stockholders meetings.
Union Carbide activists from Bhopal got in touch with me then and some Bhopal survivors came down to Sea Drift. They came to talk with the plant manager about the company’s policies. The company kept saying, sorry, the manager was going to be gone. That’s the standard: when you want to meet them, they’re never there.
When the Indians came, the public relations folks greeted them and sat them down in front of a 30 minute safety video! I mean these are people who had survived one of the worst industrial accidents and the manager made them sit through this video. The plant manager was nowhere to be seen. They never got to talk to anybody that day.
Anna: In the face of such odds, these giant multinationals, the international decades-long battle, the factories in your community dumping 5 to 10 million gallons of effluent a day into the Bay how do you continue to have the energy to fight?
"I don’t think there’s a woman alive who would give up fighting for her kid and that’s why I won’t give up."
Diane: You might call it a sense of place. Four generations of my family have been fisherman here. I’ve been on boats since I was 8 years old. Even when I was a little girl I felt the Bay was a literal thing. It was a person, it had a personality of this old woman. It’s real to me. It’s like a person I know real well. I get outraged with what they try to do to this place. It’s like them asking for my kid. They’re not going to get it. I don’t think there’s a woman alive who would give up fighting for her kid and that’s why I won’t give up.
Anna: Why a hunger strike?
Diane: I believe that the game board, the rules, are made by the people in power, these corporations. When you play by the rules it’s exactly what they want you to do. You spend your time filing your drafts, making your petitions, going to court, dealing with bureaucracy and in the end they give you little scraps.
So you’ve got to not play by the game. If you don’t, they won’t know what to expect.
“It’s what Ghandi said, what we are trying to do is transform our enemy and I believe you can do that.”
With hunger strikes, there’s something about the commitment it takes. You have to be able to come to a place in yourself where you’re ready to make that commitment. It’s at your core and I think it’s there where you have the ability to transform things, to transform people.
It’s what Ghandi said, what we are trying to do is transform our enemy and I believe you can do that. I believe that people are good, but we can easily forget that. I agree with Ward Morehouse, one of the most knowledgeable people in the world about Bhopal, when he says their minds are colonized.
I do believe you can reach people, I do believe you can transform them, but it takes actions like this.
[end]
Supporting the hunger strikers:
One easy thing to do, and to ask your friends and family to do now, is to call Dow Corporation and say that you support Diane Wilson's hunger strike and others striking in support of Bhopal victims and that you expect Dow to pay attention to her demands. Their headquarters number in Michigan is 1-800-232-2436. For more on Union Carbide/Dow go to Dow.com Their corporate slogan is "Living. Improved Daily."
Learn more about Bhopal:
See www.bhopal.net, www.bhopal.org or www.corpwatchindia.org.
Or read Five Past Midnight in Bhopal by Dominique Lapierre and Javier Moro.
Despite 95 degree heat, callous public relations staff, and once-an-hour emissions of noxious clear plumes that as Diane says “are more than nauseating, they knock you over,” she plans to continue her hunger strike until her demands are met: that Dow Chemical take responsibility for the 1984 disaster caused by its subsidiary, Union Carbide.
Ten to fifteen people die every month from health complications related to the disaster.
A few minutes after midnight the night of December 2nd 1984, in an Indian city called Bhopal, a Union Carbide pesticide factory’s cooling system failed, causing one of its reactor to overheat. The explosion that followed emitted 40 tons of poisonous gas that swept across the sleeping city. Debates rage about how many people died that night, how many were injured, and how many more have been affected since. The conservative estimate of that night’s death toll is 2,500. Hundreds of thousands were injured and many have faced lifelong debilitating illnesses. Human rights groups say that still today birth defects are rampant and 10 to 15 people die every month from health complications related to the disaster.
The official Dow line is that the accident was started when “a disgruntled employee, apparently bent on spoiling a batch of [methyl isocyanate], added water to a storage tank.” But investigators say otherwise: company dictated “cost cutting” measures led to what was really a preventable accident. Money to keep the cooling system properly functioning had been cut, the warning sirens were switched off that night.
Union Carbide’s stock actually jumped when
the settlement was announced.
Denying any real responsibility, Union Carbide brought the case to Indian courts where it settled for $470 million in payment to victims families and survivors. (One Bhopal activist states that this settlement was so ridiculously low that Union Carbide’s stock actually jumped when it was announced). The average payout to families of Bhopal’s dead was $1,250, for injured survivors—if they got anything at all—$500.
In early 2001 Union Carbide merged with Dow Chemical Company. Although Dow has taken on much of Union Carbide’s liabilities, they claim the Bhopal case is closed, and anyway, they’re not responsible.
Still fighting to get the company to admit liability and to bring charges against the CEO at the time Warren Anderson, on June 28th three Indian activists began a hunger strike outside the Indian parliament in New Delhi. The three—Sathyu Sarangi who has been working to provide free medical services for survivors and Bhopal survivors Rashida Bi and Tara Bai (Rashida lost five members of her family; Tara lost the child she was carrying)—say they will not end the strike until they feel justice has been served.
Twenty days later Diane Wilson, started her own strike in front of the Dow Chemical plant near her home in Sea Drift.
It’s been five days since Diane started and dozens of solidarity hunger strikers are stepping up around the world. Dow headquarters and the Indian Parliament are starting to be hit with phone calls, faxes, and emails. Today, the whole world is starting to hear.
GNN's Anna Lappé spoke with Diane this weekend by phone from her home in Sea Drift. She said she was feeling pretty perky. She’s used to the struggle; she’s been fighting Union Carbide and the other plants polluting her community since 1989 when she learned her county was the country’s number one toxic hotspot.
This is Diane’s fifth hunger strike, in a previous one she succeeded in getting Formosa to sign a zero wastewater discharge agreement. We have a feeling it won’t be her last.
Anna: What made you get involved with this?
Diane: I had been reading the emails back and forth from the Bhopal survivors and activists working with them who are hunger striking now. In one of the emails, I read this poem by a survivor:
aim a blowtorch at my eyes
pour acid down my throat
strip the tissue from my lungs
choke my baby to death in front of me
spare me nothing.
watch us starve
don’t ever say sorry
It really got to me. I’d been to Bhopal myself in 1992 for a People's Tribunal on Human Rights and Industrial Hazards, there were people from Korea, Thailand, Vietnam… I was the only American. We marched down to the Union Carbide plant—it’s still standing—we all wrote messages across this long wall. I wrote: “Do not forget Bhopal.”
"I’ve been a fisherman too long. You don’t have lines that divide the air, the water, the sea, the fish. It all flows together."
I’ll always remember this one moment. We had just gotten onto a bus to head to New Delhi for the tribunal and I saw a man running toward us. As he got close, he reached out and handed me a white handkerchief. Wrapped inside were pictures of three dead babies; they were each a couple of months old and they were lying across white sheets. This man had been carrying these pictures for 8 years.
When I heard about Sathyu, Rashida, and Tara hunger striking in India I knew I had to do something. That’s how I am, spontaneous. It was my heart talking.
I’ve been a fisherman too long. You don’t have lines that divide the air, the water, the sea, the fish. It all flows together. It’s real hard for me to place boundaries to say I can’t feel what they feel.
If you feel moved, but give too much time to think, your cowardly self, your rational self talks you out of it. I believe you just have to act.
"We found out our county was #1 in the country for toxic waste. We’re a small county, 15,000 people, four towns."
I feel an extremely close connection with these folks. I’ve had my own experience with Union Carbide. They’ve been in this area since 1952. They’d been real subtle about what they were doing, but we heard about them big in 1989. That year, we found out our county was #1 in the country for toxic waste. We’re a small county, 15,000 people, four towns. The report came out just after Union Carbide had won a big award for safety.
Well, two years later we had an explosion at the plant. One worker was killed and 32 others were injured. At the same time an OSHA document was leaked. It said the company had been told for twenty years by their own internal audit teams about the possibility of that very disaster and the company had ignored them. They argued it was too costly.
That’s what really got me involved with Union Carbide. I fought permits and picketed and crashed stockholders meetings.
Union Carbide activists from Bhopal got in touch with me then and some Bhopal survivors came down to Sea Drift. They came to talk with the plant manager about the company’s policies. The company kept saying, sorry, the manager was going to be gone. That’s the standard: when you want to meet them, they’re never there.
When the Indians came, the public relations folks greeted them and sat them down in front of a 30 minute safety video! I mean these are people who had survived one of the worst industrial accidents and the manager made them sit through this video. The plant manager was nowhere to be seen. They never got to talk to anybody that day.
Anna: In the face of such odds, these giant multinationals, the international decades-long battle, the factories in your community dumping 5 to 10 million gallons of effluent a day into the Bay how do you continue to have the energy to fight?
"I don’t think there’s a woman alive who would give up fighting for her kid and that’s why I won’t give up."
Diane: You might call it a sense of place. Four generations of my family have been fisherman here. I’ve been on boats since I was 8 years old. Even when I was a little girl I felt the Bay was a literal thing. It was a person, it had a personality of this old woman. It’s real to me. It’s like a person I know real well. I get outraged with what they try to do to this place. It’s like them asking for my kid. They’re not going to get it. I don’t think there’s a woman alive who would give up fighting for her kid and that’s why I won’t give up.
Anna: Why a hunger strike?
Diane: I believe that the game board, the rules, are made by the people in power, these corporations. When you play by the rules it’s exactly what they want you to do. You spend your time filing your drafts, making your petitions, going to court, dealing with bureaucracy and in the end they give you little scraps.
So you’ve got to not play by the game. If you don’t, they won’t know what to expect.
“It’s what Ghandi said, what we are trying to do is transform our enemy and I believe you can do that.”
With hunger strikes, there’s something about the commitment it takes. You have to be able to come to a place in yourself where you’re ready to make that commitment. It’s at your core and I think it’s there where you have the ability to transform things, to transform people.
It’s what Ghandi said, what we are trying to do is transform our enemy and I believe you can do that. I believe that people are good, but we can easily forget that. I agree with Ward Morehouse, one of the most knowledgeable people in the world about Bhopal, when he says their minds are colonized.
I do believe you can reach people, I do believe you can transform them, but it takes actions like this.
[end]
Supporting the hunger strikers:
One easy thing to do, and to ask your friends and family to do now, is to call Dow Corporation and say that you support Diane Wilson's hunger strike and others striking in support of Bhopal victims and that you expect Dow to pay attention to her demands. Their headquarters number in Michigan is 1-800-232-2436. For more on Union Carbide/Dow go to Dow.com Their corporate slogan is "Living. Improved Daily."
Learn more about Bhopal:
See www.bhopal.net, www.bhopal.org or www.corpwatchindia.org.
Or read Five Past Midnight in Bhopal by Dominique Lapierre and Javier Moro.