INDIA: A woman who lost five members of her family following the 1984 Bhopal disaster will today urge Department of Foreign Affairs officials to support her campaign to gain redress for thousands of similar victims.
Rashida Bee, a leading member of the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal, was with her family, asleep at home, on the night of December 2nd, 1984, when "suddenly people started shouting".
"It was about 12am and we ran out and found everyone was shouting and running. There was no hazard alarm or warning alarm because it was broken. But it was like the factory was on fire - there was smoke and burning eyes and people couldn't breathe."
Speaking through an interpreter, Ms Bee said that at about 4am the local police instructed people to go back to their homes - the thousands of shacks around the Union Carbide Corporation-owned pesticide plant.
What had in fact been a hugely toxic gas leak, affecting half a million people, was to kill 7,000 people within days and a further 15,000 in the years since. Ms Bee has lost her father, a sister, two nieces, a brother-in-law and an uncle to cancers and tumours caused, say doctors, by the gas leak.
She is married with one son and a husband. She was partially blinded by the toxins.
Children born since have suffered birth defects and people still have enormous medical needs. The American company Union Carbide Corporation - since merged into Dow Chemicals - refuses publicly to take responsibility for the plant which it has abandoned and which continues to dump toxic chemicals into the ground and atmosphere.
Dow Chemicals refuses to appear before a court inquiry in Bhopal and while it agreed a compensation package in 1989, its terms were less than generous.
"A dead person earned their family $2,000 and an injured person got $500," said Ms Bee. Not all claims have been processed - some 16,000 remain outstanding.
Ms Bee, who has also met government officials in Japan, Britain, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and the United States, will today ask the Irish Government to put pressure on the US government. She and her fellow campaigners want the US government to in turn pressurise Dow Chemicals to clean up the mess it has left behind in Bhopal and to properly recompense its victims.
It has emerged since the disaster that many working at the plant had raised safety concerns with Union Carbide management. "But if any raised their voice they would lose their job. And jobs were not plentiful in Bhopal," said Ms Bee.
