[sacw] sacw dispatch #2 (26 Oct.99)

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Web Dispatch #2
26 October 1999
_________________
#1. Casting votes in India's daily internet polls
#2. Remember Bhopal
#3. Pakistan Ruler Seen as 'Secular-Minded' Muslim
________________
#1.
[Message from Shabnam Hashmi / SAHMAT, Delhi]
26 October 1999
[...]
I feel that every little effort makes a difference somewhere. We
should seriously start casting votes in the daily internet polls specially
in National daily's TOI and HT.Today.s HT's www.hindustantimes.com question
is Is the govt.'s planned legislation to ensure full five-year term for the
Lok Sabha and State Assemblies a sound proposition?

The poll result at the moment stands at 81% saying yes!! I think we ask
friends to cast their vote before midnight (IST) today. BJP is all out to
throttle democracy.
[...]
________________
#2.
REMEMBER BHOPAL

If you happen to pass by the derelict Union Carbide pesticide factory in
Bhopal, nothing would strike you as out of the ordinary. It looks like any
other abandoned factory. Rust has set in and creepers are growing over the
machinery.

Apart from the angry graffiti scrawled on the walls, there is no visible link
between this rotting structure and the worst industrial disaster in history.
One that has taken the lives of over 16,000 children, women and men and maimed
over 5,00,000 people. And the disaster is far from over.

ONE SUNDAY NIGHT
Late one Sunday evening, December 2, 1984 during routine maintenance
operations in the Methyl Iso Cyanate (MIC) plant, a large quantity of water
entered one of the storage tanks containing 60 tonnes of MIC. This
triggered off a runaway reaction resulting in a tremendous increase of
temperature and pressure. Little before midnight, a deadly cocktail of MIC,
Hydrogen Cyanide, Mono Methyl Amine and other chemicals was carried by a
northerly wind to the neighbouring communities. Over the next couple of hours
close to 40 tonnes of the chemicals spread over the city of about one million
people covering an area of 40 square kilometres.

People woke up surrounded by a poison cloud so dense and searing that they
could hardly see. With their eyes stinging and their throats burning, hundreds
of thousands of people ran screaming for their lives. As they gasped for
breath, the effects of the gas grew even more suffocating. The gases burned
the tissues of their eyes and lungs, and attacked their nervous system. People
lost control over their bodies. Urine and faeces ran down their legs. Some
began vomiting uncontrollably. Others were wracked with seizures and fell
dead. The gases irritated people's lungs into producing so much fluid that
their lungs were filled with it, "drowning" them in their own body fluids.

People had no way of knowing it, but they would have been safer running
against the wind towards the factory or by simply covering their faces with a
wet cloth. Nobody told them. The factory's emergency siren had been switched
off. Not until the gas was upon them, filling their mouths and lungs, did
people know of their danger. By 4.30 a.m., the manager was in his office
telling reporters that is safety measures were the best in the country.
Another Carbide official was telling a newsman "Nothing has happened. Can't
you see us alive?" Barely 100 yards away, dead bodies lay on the ground
outside the factory gates.

It was a massacre.. Dawn broke over the streets littered with corpses.
Though the official figure was 1,600, the exact death toll in the immediate
aftermath is not known. Many families living on the wayside without any
address were wiped out. While it was still dark, hundreds of dead bodies were
carried away in government vehicles and dumped in nearby forests, and a
river. In the days after the leak, 6000 shrouds were distributed by religious
organisations and many were buried or cremated in the condition they were
found.

THE UNENDING AFTERMATH. . .
Medical research carried out by official agencies has established that the
half a million people who were exposed to the toxic gases had poison
circulating in their blood stream. The toxins caused damage to their eyes,
lungs, kidneys, liver, intestines, muscles, brain and reproductive and immune
systems. 40 % of the women from the severely affected communities, who were
pregnant at the time of the disaster, aborted. Anxiety, depression, insomnia
and irritability are common among the affected people. Chromosomal aberrations
were detected in an unusually large number of survivors indicating the
likelihood of congenital malformation in future generations of the survivors.
Union Carbide continues to treat medical information on the leaked chemicals
as a trade secret. Till today, very little is known about how to treat chronic
exposure induced diseases.

The toxic legacy of Union Carbide continues to haunt the communities in the
neighbourhood. Huge quantities of chemicals wantonly dumped in and around the
factory have found their way into the ground
ater. The community handpumps bring forth water laced with poisons damaging
to the liver, kidney and lungs. At least two of the chemicals are known
carcinogens.

Meanwhile, Union Carbide has managed to get away after paying a pittance in
damages.

THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES . . .
Faced with corporate machinations of liability evasion, a government that
considers people's lives expendable and a legal system that has persistently
denied them justice, the survivors of Bhopal continue to carry on with the
longest struggle ever.

"NO MORE BHOPALS"
The Bhopal disaster is neither over, nor have lessons been learnt from it.
People need to learn about the Government's inability and unwillingness to
protect the environment and public health from corporate crime. We need to
realise that Bhopals can happen anywhere, and are, in fact, happening in many
places.

In Ankleshwar and Vapi, industrial pollution has contaminated the
groundwater in several villages in Gujarat to an extent that well water comes
out Coca-Cola red in colour. Isn't that a sign that the disaster has
happened?

Birla's Grasim factory near Kozhikode pumps out nasty coloured and vile
smelling effluent into a river in Kerala, and spews out poisonous Carbon di-
sulphide through its smokestacks. For more than 3 years, people have
complained of health problems, high incidence of cancers and respiratory
disorders, and declining river fisheries.

As important as the human toll in Bhopal is the significance that the
disaster has for the very future of technology on our planet. If we forget
Bhopal, we are doomed to repeat it. Every year sees more dangerous plants like
the Union Carbide unit coming up in countries rich and poor around the world.
The well-financed industrial lobbies that promote the death factories can be
stopped in their tracks with two simple words: Remember Bhopal! If we keep
Bhopal alive, we help keep alive the life on the planet.

Your local pollution problems, be it a polluting factory, a garbage dump,
pesticides in your food, or medical waste incinerators are all your own
mini-Bhopals happening in Slow Motion. To stop it, you need to get organised
and take action. If you're interested in finding out more about how you can
help the fight for justice to the Bhopal victims, and prevent Bhopals from
happening in your community, please write to us for more information.

Greenpeace International, PO BOX 3166, Lodi Road Post Office, New Delhi
-110003.
Email - shai@v...

Friends of Bhopal, 44, Sant Kanwar Ram nagar, Berassia Road, Bhopal -462001
Email: sambavna@b...
________________
#3.
New York Times
October 26, 1999

PAKISTAN RULER SEEN AS 'SECULAR-MINDED' MUSLIM
By Celia W. Dugger

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- The Chicago anesthesiologist picked up his
morning newspaper and read a headline that roiled him. "Pakistan Wakes Up
to a Dictator," it said.

Pakistan was the doctor's native country, and it was his brother, Gen.
Pervez Musharraf, who was being called a dictator.

Dr. Naved Musharraf said the true villain was Prime Minister Nawaz
Sharif, who was booted out in the Oct. 12 military coup. And the doctor was
also upset that news accounts suggested that his brother, the army chief of
staff who had appointed himself Pakistan's chief executive, was an
anti-Western fundamentalist Muslim.

Far from it, the doctor said in a telephone interview. The general's
only son, he said, works as an actuary in Boston for the state of
Massachusetts. Musharraf himself is a U.S. citizen who has lived in Chicago
for 25 years, ever since his medical residency at Cook County Hospital. As
for religion, the Musharrafs are faithful, though hardly the most observant
of Muslims, he said.

"Pervez is a secular-minded man," Musharraf said of his brother. "He
believes in the separation of church and state. He doesn't want a
theocracy."

Conversations with the general's brother, friends and colleagues provide
some of the first clues about the elusive army commander who now rules a
nation of 150 million people that came near to all-out war this summer with
its neighbor, India, while he was army chief.

Both India and Pakistan conducted underground nuclear tests a year and a
half ago, heightening the world's concern about their conflict with each
other and the political stability of Pakistan, a country plagued by epic
corruption and tottering on the brink of bankruptcy.

In the two weeks since the armed forces took power, Musharraf, 56, has
made only carefully scripted appearances and given no news conferences. His
army-sanctioned biography is a single-page, double-spaced listing of his
steady climb through the ranks.

But those who know the general personally, as well as military officers
and defense experts, describe him as a liberal Muslim and a level-headed
military commander whose commitment to democratic rule cracked when Sharif
meddled once too often in the military's business by trying to get rid of a
second army chief within a year.

While a head of state's decision to impose his will on the military
would not be considered justification for a coup in most democracies,
Sharif is widely blamed here for bringing ruin on himself by toying with a
potent military that has ruled Pakistan for 25 of its 52 years and that
remained the real power behind the scenes even when democracy was
ostensibly in place.

"You don't interfere in the spheres that are strictly army," said Brig.
Rashid Qureshi, who served as Musharraf's chief of staff when he was a
corps commander in the mid-1990s, referring to internal army promotions.

In an address to the nation a week ago, Musharraf praised freedom of
speech, promised a crackdown on corruption, and appealed to religious
clerics to discourage the exploitation of religion for sectarian and
political ends.

But while he has put forth a domestic political agenda that seems like a
campaign platform for good governance and made a pledge to tolerate dissent
that is still untested, he is almost certain to be hawkish on relations
with India.

Like other military officers, Musharraf sees India as a threat to
Pakistan's security and views Pakistan's dispute with India over control of
the Himalayan territory of Kashmir as central to the army's nationalistic
role, friends and colleagues say. He believes that predominantly Muslim
Kashmir must be allowed to choose whether to join the Islamic state of
Pakistan or remain part of largely Hindu India.

"He's aware that Kashmir is an irreducible, inescapable issue," said
Javed Jabbar, a friend of the general's who has been involved in unofficial
peace efforts between India and Pakistan.

Just as the Kashmir dispute has its origins in the partition of India
and Pakistan in the dissolution of British India in 1947, so Musharraf's
own identity was forged in the Hindu-Muslim bloodletting that followed.

The Musharrafs lived in the old Indian city of Delhi, but fled to
Pakistan just days before the two new nations gained their independence.
Pervez Musharraf was then 4. His parents told their three sons that the
family had been on the last train to make it safely to Pakistan. Muslim
passengers on the trains after them were massacred by Hindus and Sikhs,
they said.

"That was a very traumatic time in my parents' lives," Musharraf said.
"It's seared into their memories. That's why they don't like India. They
kept saying we couldn't trust Hindus and all that."

The boys' father, Syed, had been a civil servant under the British and
went on to work for the Pakistani government, eventually joining the
Foreign Ministry.

In Karachi, the boys attended a Roman Catholic high school. Though no
one in the family had served in the military, young Pervez decided to
become a soldier, his brother said. He was an adequate student, but thrived
on football, cricket and body building.

"Sometimes he used to get physical with me," Musharraf recalled. "I
remember him as a disciplinarian. He used to impose his will on me. He made
me study and participate in sports, and if I didn't, he'd get angry with
me."

After attending a Christian college in Lahore, Pervez Musharraf joined
the army. He did stints as an artillery gunner and commando and rose
through the ranks, serving with distinction in the 1965 and 1971 wars with
India. His son, Bilal, was named for a close friend who died in the 1971
war.

Just a year ago, it seemed that Gen. Musharraf's career had reached its
highest pinnacle, as army chief of staff. His predecessor as army chief had
quit after proposing a greater role for the military in civilian affairs
-- an approach Sharif rejected.

But the seeds of mistrust between the general and the prime minister
were sown at the start. Sharif gave him only a one-year appointment instead
of the usual three, a probationary period that the general found demeaning,
said his friend Jabbar.

Musharraf's patience was further strained when Sharif had the army take
the blame for the country's disastrous military venture in Kashmir last
summer, which led to a dangerous, 10-week conflict with India and then an
ignominious pullout of Pakistan-backed forces.

When India's defense minister, George Fernandes, said Sharif had been
kept in the dark about the army's activities in Kashmir, Sharif did not
challenge the statement -- outraging military leaders.

"He was not a babe in the woods," Jabbar said. "He was very much part of
the decision-making process."

Then Sharif abruptly went to Washington and agreed to call for the
pullout without the blessing of the military, turning what the generals had
seen as a military triumph into a bitter humiliation.

"He went off and signed the Washington accord without developing a
minimum level of consensus," said Shireen Mazari, a defense expert who has
known the general since early in his career. "You can't do things like
that."

But it was Sharif's decision to fire Musharraf while the army chief was
on a commercial flight, cut off from his troops, that pushed the general
and his top commanders to seize power, army officials say.

Musharraf has now set out an extraordinarily ambitious program for
himself, one that critics warn could prove difficult if not impossible to
carry out -- and that could lead to a very long period of military rule
if the general insists on staying in power until he succeeds.

As the months go by, he is likely to start feeling more pressure for the
restoration of democracy. In past military coups, the euphoria and
passivity that initially greeted the generals eventually faded, said Samina
Ahmed, a political scientist.

"Military rulers believed that they had been accorded domestic
legitimacy only to be faced with popular demands for representative rule
from the Pakistani people, who are basically democratic at heart, bless
them," she said. "And then the fur started flying. Why should it be
different this time?"

Even the general's brother worries about his holding on to power too
long. He figures that it will take two to three years for his brother to do
what he needs to do. He said he plans to advise him: "Look, don't overstay
and end up like previous martial law governments. They were thrown out by
the people."

"If he carries out the promises he's given, I'll be happy," Dr.
Musharraf said. "If he becomes corrupted by power, I'll be uncomfortable. I
hope he does his job, holds elections and gets out."
____________________________________________
SOUTH ASIA CITIZENS WEB DISPATCH is an informal, independent &
non-profit citizens wire service run by South Asia Citizens Web
(http://www.mnet.fr/aiindex) since1996.