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The author reports on a campaign by two women from Bhopal, India, to force Union Carbide to take responsibility for the ongoing health problems of people living near the site of the company's chemical plant, which exploded in 1984. Every December for the past nineteen years, marchers in Bhopal, India, have paraded an effigy of Warren Anderson through town and burned it. Anderson is despised because he was the CEO of Union Carbide on December 3, 1984, when an explosion at the company's Bhopal factory leaked deadly methyl isocyanate gas over the city's shantytowns in the worst industrial disaster in history. As the disaster's twentieth anniversary approaches, Bhopal is back in the news. On April 19 two advocates for the survivors won the most prestigious environmental award given in the United States. In her acceptance speech at the annual Goldman Environmental Prize ceremony in San Francisco, Rashida Bee confessed that she and colleague Champa Devi Shukla initially assumed they had been selected by mistake." One a Muslim and the other a Hindu, Bee and Shukla are leading the fight to hold Union Carbide and its new owner, Dow Chemical, accountable for the Bhopal disaster, which the two women assert is still killing and injuring thousands of people a year through poisoned groundwater. Neither Union Carbide nor Dow has ever faced trial for Bhopal--inconceivable, activists charge, had the disaster occurred in the United States or Europe. Upon review of the settlement, an Indian court reinstated criminal charges against Union Carbide and Warren Anderson in 1991. When neither the corporation nor Anderson showed up for trial, they were declared fugitives from justice. The Indian government is now seeking their extradition, but Washington has not honored the request.
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