Not only did our state department refuse extradition
of Warren Anderson they put an enormous amount of
political pressure on India to drop its suit and
investigation.
... and to dilute the charges.
Ken
Did you expect anything better?
--
Martin K
"If Greenpeace can track down India's most wanted, I find it hard to
believe that nobody else could have done it," said Harrell, who
confronted Anderson at his home two weeks ago and taped the meeting
with a hidden video camera. "At first he tried to deny who he was and
then he ran into the house," Harrell said, adding that he had handed
Anderson a copy of the Indian arrest warrant.
-- Greenpeace Tracks Down US Exec Wanted Over Bhopal Deaths
Published on Friday, August 30, 2002 by Agence France Presse
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0830-05.htm
... Warren Anderson at his luxury home at The Hamptons, New York. His
local golf club subscription costs $2700 a year, more than five times
what Union Carbide's victims in Bhopal got for a lifetime of illness
and suffering.
(Greenpeace report, link dead)
http://www.bhopal.net/features/bhopalandbabylon.html
Bhopal & Babylon
BRIDGEHAMPTON, LONG ISLAND: Ex-Carbide CEO Warren Anderson is clearly
startled by all the media attention focussed on him since a court in
Bhopal reaffirmed on 28 August that he is wanted for the homicide of
20,000 Bhopalis, and called for his immediate extradition.
He must really have thought he'd got away with it.
Warren has been ignoring the court's summonses and Interpol's
arrest warrant for more than a decade. How is it, Channel 4 asked
last week, that US authorities have apparently been unable to trace
him, when it turns out he has been living openly at his house in Long
Island's exclusive Hamptons district? (Channel 4 found the address,
incidentally, on our website.)
Mrs Lillian Anderson, caught by Channel 4's reporter as she
drove her silver Cadillac into the couple's $1,150,000 home -which
stands on a white sand beach on the Atlantic ocrean - did not want to
talk. She said huffily, "My husband flew to India and they put him in
jail". In fact, Warren Anderson spent three hours under nominal
'house arrest' at Carbide's luxury guest house. He was freed on a
surety of $1,500 and left for America, promising "I will come back to
India whenever the law requires it."
But when the law required it, he said he did not recognise the
court's jurisdiction. He never returned.
How inconvenient of Bhopal's dead and injured -"We've got people
coming to dinner"
Did Warren Anderson have anything to say about the 20,000 people who
have died in Bhopal as a result of Carbide's gas leak? He did not.
Instead his wife testily told Channel 4's reporter, Zoe Conway, "This
is most inconvenient. We've got people coming to dinner." Pressed to
ask her husband to say what his current feelings were on the
continuing suffering of more than 130,000 people in Bhopal, Mrs
Anderson snapped, "I told you, we are giving a dinner party, and it
isn't even catered"
These comments were not shown on last week's broadcast - we learned
of them in a telephone call from a friend - they prompted us to do a
bit of finding out about the Andersons' lifestyle.
Long Island's Hamptons are an expensive part of the world. Steven
Spielberg has a house there. "Meg Ryan was at Sunset Beach on Shelter
Island on Saturday night having dinner,' gushed a recent issue of New
York Metro magazine. "Helena Christensen is always there, Liv Tyler
is always there, and socialites like Lulu de Kwiatkowski always turn
up. The locals have nicknamed some of the customers the boat people,
because they all come over on their incredible boats, and they leave
$300 tips."
So what is a dinner party in the Hampton's like? What sort of
shopping might Mrs Anderson's Cadillac have been carrying home?
Bridgehampton Polo Club is just down the road
from the Andersons. Membership costs upwards
of $7,500 a year.
Not part of the real world.
"I have to tell you, we're not part of the real world," said
Bridgehampton's society caterer Brent Newsom, when we put these
questions to him. "It costs to live here."
It would seem that Lillian Anderson is used to having her
dinner parties catered. A Newsom dinner for eight people could easily
cost over $1,000. At a recent seven-person lunch attended by the
Governor of New York, the food cost $800. There were two staff at
$350 and flowers at around $250.
The client generally provides the wine, because New York
licensing laws mean a caterer would have to charge restaurant prices,
say $100 for a bottle of wine that cost $30 in the shops.
Perhaps Lillian had been over to the Amagansett Wine Store,
where they do a decent Latour Pouilly Fuisse for $22 a bottle, and a
Paumanok 2000 Sauvignon Blanc, a local version of a Sauterne for a
mere $80.
What would she be cooking? Well, beef would be a usual choice
for a smart dinner party, but of course it's red meat. Although
Warren appears fit for his age, he has to take care of his health.
Long Island lobster will be off the menu. The lobsters have been
poisoned, probably by pesticides.
Lobster, in this area of stunning seascapes is a favourite food. It's
delicious, low in fats and not particularly high in cholesterol.
"I call ahead and have Southampton's Clamman cook my
lobsters," says local resident Jamee Gregory, adding, "I don't like
to hear them scream."
In Vero Beach, Florida, where the Andersons have their other
holiday home, P.V.Martin's Oceanside restaurant, famous for its
"champagne brunch" does giant Florida lobster tails at $30, but in
the exclusive Hamptons, a local told us, "Places that serve lobster
do not have the prices on the menu." Eight jumbo-sized
lobsters for a dinner party would cost about $240. But fishermen
report a "widespread lobster die off". The suspected cause:
pesticides like those made by Union Carbide.
Many Long Islanders are partial to tomalley, the pale green
stuff found in the lobster's body, but local Lobster Promotion
Councils advise against eating it, warning that as tomalley is the
liver and pancrea, dioxins might have entered the system from the
environment. Ironically, the dioxins enter the environment courtesy
of Dow Chemical, which bought Warren's old company, Union Carbide.
On second thoughts, Warren and Lillian wouldn't eat those lobsters
anyway. Pesticides can do awful things to your health.
Organic produce, untouched by herbicides and pesticides
Lillian can find fruit and vegetables at the Scuttle Hole farm shop,
just a quick dash from her house up to the top of Ocean Road and a
jink across the Montauk Highway.
Brent Newsom thinks its worth going further afield."If I want
really good field-ripened tomatoes, I go to to Round Swamp in East
Hampton. They grow almost everything they sell, and their corn is
fabulous. It's fresh organic produce untouched by herbicides or
pesticides," Sounds wonderful. "But", he admits, "it is tr�s cher."
Tr�s cher, too, are the butchers, but of course the meat is
simply the best.
"Dreesen's in East Hampton is good, and the shop delivers - it's
a fabulous if you don't mind paying $18 for veal scallopini."
So, uncatered, how much at minimum must Lillian Anderson's
dinner party have cost?
Perhaps $40 on nibbles from somewhere inexpensive like
Gemelli's of Babylon - you wouldn't want to be fussed with them
yourself. $160 for the meat, because you want the best, and another
$40 for the tr�s cher vegetables. Four bottles of Latour Pouilly
Fuisse, $88 and the Paumanok at $80.
Cheeses? "I can only afford Sagaponack's Loaves & Fishes once
a month," one local complains. "It seems like it's $20 for a
quarter-pound of anything." $80. Dessert? Fresh fruit, enough for
eight, $40.
Flowers? $0 from the garden - after all why else keep three
gardeners? And the total is $528.
A world away from Lillian's $500 bash: Leela Bai's dinner party in Bhopal.
In her shack, lit by a single dim bulb, Leela Bai prepares dinner for
her family. She is the same age as Warren Anderson and like him, has
to watch her health. It'll be rice again tonight, the same as last
night, seasoned with a little salt. Rice costs 9� a pound in Bhopal.
There is nothing else in the house. Occasionally there will be
a some daal (lentils), and perhaps some spinach (4� a pound). When
hunger becomes unbearable, they tie scarves tightly round their
bellies to give the illusion of fullness.
Leela was one of those caught by Union Carbide's cloud of
poison gas nearly eighteen years ago. She recalls the terror of "that
night", waking with eyes and mouth burning, every breath like
inhaling acid. The panic in the narrow lanes, when people were
trampled. People choking and dropping dead, with bloody foam bubbling
from their lips.
Her family of six survived, but ever since they have suffered
from breathlessness and spells of vomiting. One of her sons has gone
blind. All six family members suffer from breathlessness and spells
of vomiting.
Burdened by injury they cannot earn well. The family's joint
income is $30 a month.
Monsoon rains wash toxins from the factory into the groundwater.
Drinking wells are polluted by carcinogens and heavy metals,
including 20,000 to 6 million times the expected levels of mercury.
Organophosphates don't taste as nice as organics.
With their meal, Leela and her family will be drinking not wine but
water. Mind you this is no ordinary water.
It's Chateau Carbide, laced with chemicals leaching into the
ground water and wells from the toxins dumped by Carbide for years
before and after the gas leak. Piles of dangerous chemicals are still
lying in the abandoned factory. Each monsoon's rains washes them into
the soil and groundwater.
Greenpeace analaysed the drinking water of communities like
Leela's who live the near the factory. They found chemicals capable
of causing cancers, leukemia, damage to vital organs and birth
defects. People who drink the water report symptoms like those who
were gassed in the original disaster.
French writer Dominique Lapierre, whose book Five Past Midnight
in Bhopal demonstrates how Union Carbide's neglect led inexorably to
the disaster, drank a half glass of the water and reported:
"My mouth, my throat, my tongue instantly got on fire, while my
arms and legs suffered an immediate skin rash. This was the simple
manifestation of what men, women and children have to endure daily,
eighteen years after the tragedy".
Warren Anderson probably spent more in one night than his victims got
'in compensation' for a lifetime of torture.
For the gas victims of Bhopal every day of the past eighteen years
has been a struggle against breathlessness, nausea, brain damage,
cancers, fevers, numbness, panic attacks, menstrual chaos, monstrous
births. Yet of those who have received any compensation, ninety
percent got less than $500.
Leela got just $208. "No one in my family received more than
that", she told us. "The money went on medicines as soon as it came
to our hands."
Over eighteen years $208 works out at just 3 cents a day and
with each day that passes, its value dwindles. - which is why the
case must not be stalled any longer. The survivors demand that
Anderson and Union Carbide (now a wholly owned subsidiary of Dow
Chemicals) must no longer be allowed to obstruct justice.
The poor and the hungry of Bhopal live in the real world. Mr
Anderson does not
Last week, he was annoyed when Bhopal came knocking at his door
in the idyllic Hamptons and held up his smart dinner party. How
ironic is that from a man who has been holding up justice for
thousands of poor, sick and hungry people for eleven years?
Three days ago the Indian Government finally announced that it
will seek Warren Anderson's extradition from the US.
He and his wife must have been hoping Bhopal had gone away. But
Bhopal will never go away. Not until there is justice.
Additional reporting by Farah Khan in Bhopal and Sarvadarshi in
Bridgewater * bhopal.net @nti-copyright for activists � for everyone
else
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