Bhopal’s Long Agony
BHOPAL, India - Aliya Bano woke to the screams of children. She retched as burning vapors filled her lungs. She thought, "I can't breathe; I will die." She didn't. Her husband, two sons and their wives did. Eighteen years later, Bano, now 60, is still waiting for compensation from the U.S. company she holds responsible for their deaths.
It was just after midnight on Dec. 3, 1984, when a storage tank burst at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, unleashing 40 tons of methyl-isocyanate into the early-morning air. The poisonous gas - a precursor for a pesticide called Sevin - swept with a stubborn certainty over the shanty-towns surrounding the plant, chocking the confused as they lay in beds of straw. Men and women grabbed their children and ran for their lives, bursting their lungs with the deep inhalations.
The official count from the Indian government: 3,800 dead and 11,000 disabled. The count by several activist groups: 20,000 dead and more than half a million physically injured.
The devastation persists for the 1.9 million people living here, a stain on the country's mental landscape. Outsiders invariable associate the once-majestic capital of Madhya Pradesh state with death and suffering. The city of Bhopal is about as popular with tourists as Chernobyl, where the world's worst nuclear accident occurred.
Bhopal is unfinished business. The site is still dirty. Victims battle lingering illness. Jobs lost to the accident have not been replaced. The criminal case remains unresolved.
The now-abandoned plant stands like a rusty skeleton of metal and tanks. Meandering cows and jittery street dogs inspect discarded candy wrappers lying in sewage on streets overlooking the plant. On the cement wall outside, someone has painted a skull and the words, "Dow: Living Poisoned Daily," an anonymous slam on the corporation that acquired Union Carbide in 2001. Nearby, a gray, crumbling statue memorializes the anguish of a Bhopal victim, a woman clutching her dead baby.
Before the tragedy, the city evoked the splendor of its Muslim past. It was here that princes and princesses rode elephants draped in gold. It is the home of the Taj-ul-Masjid, one of the largest mosques in the country. The "City of Lakes" lies along a sandstone ridge.
Now, it is a living museum of horror.
Nearly two decades after the disaster, state newspapers till report each new wrinkle, including, recently, Green-peace activists' staging a protest at the plant and a front page story on a sit-in by the windows of gas victims.
The cause of the gas leak remains in dispute. Union Carbide says it was an act of sabotage, the malicious work of a disgruntled employee who added water to a storage tank, which caused a reaction that built up heat and pressure. However, no one has been charged.
Queries to Indian government officials by The Herald regarding victim compensation, criminal proceedings and environmental cleanup netted four months of polite evasion.
"Getting answers like these from India takes a hell of a long time," concedes Sunil Lal, spokesman for the Indian Embassy in Washington, DC.
Less reticent have been the critics, who blame the company, pointing to money pressures from Union Carbide headquarters in Danbury, Conn. The plant was losing money, and cost-cutting measures paved the way for significant breaches in safety, they say.
COMPANY'S RESPONSE
Admission of 'responsibility' is followed by swift retreat
A day after the leak, Warren Anderson, then the company's chief executive, accepted "moral responsibility" for the disaster. Soon after, he flew to Bhopal on the company jet on what was to become a disastrous diplomatic mission: He was charged with culpable homicide and briefly detained.
Anderson hightailed it back to the United States. He hasn't been back.
Anderson retired in 1986. Now 82, he lives in Bridgehampton, N.Y., and has a winter home in Delray Beach. He declined to comment for this report.
Not at a loss for words are company PR representatives, who continue to assert that the Bhopal leak was caused by sabotage, not the actions of the executive. Anderson's attorney, William A. Krohley, says there is no connection between his client and the tragedy that night.
"We tried to do everything humanely possible to make this thing right," Krohley said. The charges remain, he said, "because of the emotions involved."
In March, a federal judge in New York tossed out a lawsuit against Union Carbide Corp. and Anderson. Indian groups and residents of Bhopal said contaminated groundwater near the site was making them ill. U.S. judge John Keenan called the claims "untimely."
"Union Carbide has met its obligations to clean up the contamination in and near the Bhopal plant," he wrote. "Having sold their shares long ago and having no connection to or authority over the plant, they cannot be held responsible at this time."
To be sure, anger among victims and their families runs deep. For some, Anderson has come to personify some of the evil that bedevils globalism and multinational expansion. "Hang Anderson" and "Death to Killer Anderson" are common refrains among graffiti artists and widows who burn Anderson in effigy during anniversary protests.
Abdul Jabbar, who runs a gas victims' center for women, goes as far as to liken Anderson to Osama bin laden.
"It's not even confirmed that [bin Laden] was behind 9/11," he said. "We know Warren Anderson was behind this."
ASSIGNING BLAME
Indians focus on company; firm says Indians ran plant
Still, not even Jabbar believes the leak was intentional. But many believe Anderson is responsible for a climate that led to lower safety standards. Conversely, company officials worked to shift attention to the staff working in India at the time.
"In 1984, the entire work force at the Bhopal plant was Indian," Jackson Browning, retired vice president of Health, Safety and Environment Programs at Union Carbide, wrote in a 1993 report. "In keeping with the government's interest in promoting self-sufficiency and local control, the last American employed at the site had left two years before."
Still, Browning stopped short of arguing that the Indian staff was less trained. Last summer, in a victory for Indian activists, a high court refused to lower the charges of culpable homicide to a nonextraditable offense. Anderson could serve 10 years in an Indian prison.
The government has aid it will pursue extradition. But victims say the Indian government is unlikely to push for his arrest. Continued publicity over the gas leak doesn't help attract business, they say.
Government officials reject the implication.
Still, India, working against a declining economic growth rate, is a nation where environmental enforcement efforts are easily thwarted by corrupt, low-level bureaucrats taking bribes. For Jabbar, that also means there are "thousands of potential Bhopals in India" because, he says, the government encourages industry by overlooking safety.
"Worst case, you will pay a fine," he said.
At the time of the leak, Jabbar was 28, single and living with his family near the railroad tracks. His father and brother died from gas exposure. He says he suffers from chronic lung problems, including asthma and breathlessness.
His desk is a muddled stack of testimonials fro victims, newspaper articles and letters to officials. Behind rows of sewing machines at his center, victims make a little money by sewing stuffed animals that are hawked by street children. Today, Jabbar is joined by activists and some government officials in emphasizing the need to clean up the site.
Maj. Gen. Pushpendra Singh, executive director of the state-run Disaster Management Institute in Bhopal, said traces of poison still contaminate the water and soil.
Singh said the 1989 out-of-court settlement with Union Carbide for $470 million "doesn't compensate even fractionally."
He closes his eyes when asked about safety measures taken at the Union Carbide plant.
"I feel there was no social concern of the company to make people aware," he said. "A wet rag over their nose and mouth, understanding it was safer to stay indoors… [the people] didn't know anything."
Aliya Bano is now blind in one eye, and she says she suffers from joint pain and dizziness. She can no longer thread a needle or roll a beedie cigarette, which is how she made money before the leak. Sitting on a threadbare blanket, swatting at flies, she appears resigned.
"It was all fate," she said.
She is still waiting for compensation for the death of her husband, who went blind immediately after the leak, then died two years later. She says she can't even afford to send her 12-year-old granddaughter Saima to school. The young girl with dirt-encrusted feet just smiles.
The compensation trail is murky. About half of the $470 million has been distributed, official say. Another $40 million went to build the Bhopal Memorial Hospital and Research Center, which opened two years ago.
More than half a million people have filed for compensation. Special tribunals have been convened to hear claims, but assertions of corruption are common.
Mahesh Panthi, 18, was 6 months old at the time of the leak. Now he is profoundly retarded, autistic, mute and incontinent. His mother, Hirabei Panthi, says the child was "perfect" before the disaster.
On a recent afternoon, Mahesh stared out from under a yellow tarp outside a liquor shop and scratched his fingers in the mud.
"They want proof," Hirabei Panthi said sarcastically. "Maybe they want some bribe from us."
To be sure, the line between misery made worse by the gas leak and misery born of abject poverty or tragic life circumstance is not easy to measure. Some slum dwellers, too illiterate to understand the disaster, blame nearly everything in their lives on the gas leak. Others who are entitled to a share of the settlement live much the same way they did before that day, just waiting.
The Panthis live in the same slum, just behind the Union Carbide plant.
The neighborhood is a crowded collection of rust single-room shacks. Roofs are a patchwork of planks, plastic tarps and burlap sacks. The air is thick with the smell of burned cow dung, used for fuel. Children with distended bellies walk on loose gravel, sharing their footpaths with cappuccino-colored goats.
In the morning, Muslim and Hindu families crouch over fires to get warm. Electricity wires snake over rooftops, pirating power from streetlights. Holes dug in the ground serve as open-air toilets. Just as often, people just squat in the middle of a nearby field or on the railroad tracks.
On a recent afternoon, women wearing burkas lined up outside one of seven outreach centers the Bhopal Memorial Hospital has set up to dispense medications to patients. They were armed with government-issued "gas-victim" cards, their treatment records stored on computer.
The long-term effects of the gas on survivors are unclear.
"Blindness, diminished breathing, overall eye and lung problems - they are the most common," said Prof. Indraneel Mittra, director general of the Bhopal Memorial Hospital and Research Center. "It's too early to say for cancer rates."
Depression is widespread, said Dr. Rajni Chatterji, a professor who leads psychiatric treatment at the hospital.
"There is hopelessness, perhaps made worse because there has not been any punishment against Warren Anderson," she said. "It's chronic headaches, apathy, alcoholism. They feel 'What is left for us?'"
The grounds where the plant sits are overgrown by weeds and bushes. Late last year, the state's minister for gas relief, Arif Akeel, Came out to drink a glass of water from a water pump that activists say is contaminated.
"Eighteen years have gone by and people have been drinking the water; nothing has happened to them," he said in an interview with The Sunday Express. "If you want, I will go with you and drink the water again. If people were falling ill I should also fall ill."
But even within the government, disagreements persist about the safety of the water.
Singh, executive director of the state-run Disaster Management Institute in Bhopal, disagree with Akeel. He says the water is highly toxic.
Sanjay Kumar was just over 1 year old when the poison blanketed his home. He remembers neither the panic nor the deaths of his parents, two sisters and three brothers.
His older brother, Sunil, now 32, does. He remembers the feeling in his eyes: like burning from peppers.
A tribunal deemed the two brothers eligible to share about $550 per dead family member - in this case, almost $4000.
Sunil blew much of his share on alcohol. Then, four years ago, he poured kerosene near his feet and lit a match. His neighbors broke down the door and saved him. He attributed the suicide attempt to too many "mental tensions."
He is now on antidepressants and helps out at the Sambhavna Trust clinic, a research and treatment facility for Bhopal gas victims financed mostly by foreign donations.
Sunil Kumar tires easily. On dry, hot days, his eyes water.
Sanjay, 18, has fared better. He was sent to an orphanage for gas victims and had a foster mother looking out for him. He does not suffer physically from the gas. His money is in savings, and he is preparing to study business management in college.