Time to hold Dow responsible
Members of the report on their protests.
BOSTON--The 26th anniversary of the world's worst chemical disaster in Bhopal, India, was marked in a special way on December 3 when over 50 activists participated in events at four different university campuses to protest the ongoing negligence and apathy among those responsible for the disaster.
The protests--held at Boston University (BU), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard University and Tufts University--began at 9 a.m. at BU and ended at 6 p.m. in Harvard Square. A sizable number of students expressed interest at all four university campuses, especially at Tufts.
"The Bhopal disaster is so deeply tragic because it demonstrates how governments and corporations differentially value human life. Dow has never provided Bhopalis with any reasonable compensation, despite its unequivocal responsibility and undeniable capacity to mitigate the suffering of the thousands harmed by its subsidiary," said Lauren Onofrey, a student at Harvard and an activist with the Harvard AIDS Coalition.
This is the 26th year since a Union Carbide gas leak exposed half a million people in Bhopal to its deadly effects. On December 2-3, 1984, a pesticide manufacturing plant belonging to Union Carbide (now a fully owned subsidiary of Dow Chemical) released 40 tons of methyl isocyanate (MIC), a highly toxic chemical, killing over 8,000 people within 72 hours and affecting more than 500,000 residents of the area. The effects of exposure to the gas continue to ail survivors and their children. In addition, ground water contamination continues to endanger the lives of the communities living in that area.
The activists in the Boston protests were composed of members of the Boston Coalition for Justice in Bhopal (BCJB), as well as a number of local groups, such as Tarang from Boston University, the Association for India's Development at MIT (AID-MIT), the Harvard AIDS Coalition and AID-Tufts. These organizations were also joined by members of Colombia Vive, a group involved in environmental injustice in Colombia.
At each location, the activists performed a "die-in" with an accompanying narration of the story of Bhopal. They shouted slogans directed at Dow Chemical and collected signatures for petitions asking each university's president to sever the university's ties with Dow for as long as it fails to take responsibility for the disaster. A total of nearly 100 signatures were collected from concerned students and employees at these universities. About 500 informational fact sheets were handed out to interested passers-by.
The remembrance of the day ended at Harvard Square with continued slogans, songs, a minute of silence, a die-in and a candlelight vigil. In addition, all the activists present expressed their views on the continued injustice in Bhopal. They expressed the desire that there should not be a 27th year of this protracted misery and denial of justice for the gas-affected in Bhopal.
"This is not just about Bhopal; it is about injustice everywhere," observed Vinay Bhatt, one of the participants. Two activists from BCJB, Srikant Sarangi and Leonid Chindelevitch, rounded out the day with a performance of the song "Alive" that they had written to commemorate the occasion.
