Remembering Bhopal

I've mentioned it before - I work for one of the Big Oil. I don't work for BP.

We mention BP more and more these days. A book titled "Failure to Learn" was distributed amongst some of the staff recently.

We discuss this incident a lot, and it is especially poignant for me because I have experience something highly similar almost 4 years ago. Typing this, I can't believe it's been so long since it happened. I remember it like it was last week. The lucky (or perhaps we were better?) thing was that the last link of the chain of disaster wasn't there. The overspill was, the ignition source wasn't.

And now the Gulf disaster. The worst environmental disaster in US History.

If I were to be mean, or maybe cynical, I'd say it out loud that I'm glad that of all the places for this to happen, it happened in the US. Because of the free media, the people, the ATTENTION that it is getting now. So now BP has to pay $4,300 per barrel it spills. Good. Great.

But today is the anniversary of a much greater disaster. Where the people affected are still waiting (or perhaps already despaired) more than 20 years after it happenned. Where a major corporation got away almost scot-free, helped by the local government. Crime upon crime, injustice upon injustice befell these people.

Are lives cheaper elsewhere outside the Western hemisphere? Can illiterate, uneducated people ever get the justice they deserve more than anyone else? Do people who just had the misfortune of being at the wrong place at the wrong time, who since then have spent their entire lives suffering from the health effects of the disaster, remain voiceless, and continue to suffer in silence?

Is this what globalisation really means? That big corporations can enter a 3rd world country, destroy a generation, a city, then leave without a scratch? Shareholders over victims?

Neither the Indian nor American governments or justice system will pursue this further. Evidence supressed, what little compensation dollars there was given mysteriously missing, sorely needed medical help witheld, ground zero abandoned with all its hazards still intact, leaching into groundwater day by day. What world do we live in that we allow such blatant injustice? And elected governments abandoning their people.

Shame. What can we say of ourselves? What do we tell our children?

It sickens and disgusts me.

Remember Bhopal.

Don't let the world forget.