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A new history of Iraq
By Christina Asquith
Nov. 25 — Sitting in the teachers’ lounge in Al Huda
high school in the wealthy Al Jadriya district of Baghdad, history teacher
Abstam Jassom says she will tell her students: “Americans are occupiers.
They only want our oil.”
Then, a few minutes later, she changes her mind. “We have seen
what the old regime did - the mass graves, for example. The Americans
have freed us.”
A mile away, at Baghdad University’s College of Education for Women,
Entedher Al Bable, 21, who is studying to be a history teacher, says
she will instruct students that Iraq has a long history of being invaded
by the US. “I will teach my students what I see: that Americans
are the terrorists. Bush entered Iraq to take oil, not to free Iraq.
They just want money and oil from Iraq. This is what I know and this
is definitely what I will teach.” The classmates surrounding Al
Bable nod in agreement.
Since 1973, when Saddam Hussein ordered all school history to be rewritten
from the Ba’ath Party perspective, children have been taught that
the US was the evil invader, that Iraq was triumphant in all wars and
that Saddam Hussein single-handedly defended the Arab world against
greedy Zionism.
But now that Saddam has gone, it’s time for school history texts
to be rewritten, again.
Millions of copies of newly revised textbooks are expected to start
rolling off the presses next month, to be distributed to Iraq’s
5.5 million schoolchildren in 16,000 schools. Some 563 texts were heavily
edited and revised over the summer by a team of US- appointed Iraqi
educators. Every image of Saddam and the Ba’ath party has been
removed.
When it comes to dealing with controversial subjects such as the 1991
Gulf war, the texts won’t be much help. Pressured to have the books
reprinted in time for the new school year, the US-led ministry of education
simply deleted all sections deemed “controversial”, including
references to America, Shias and Sunnis, Kurds, Kuwaitis, Jews and Iranians.
Saddam’s hand was heaviest in history, but his touch was everywhere.
Some books lost sentences or paragraphs. In modern history, half of
the text was deleted.
Revision of Iraqi textbooks is one example of the prickly partnership
between the Iraqis and the consortium of mostly US groups rebuilding
the schools. While US officials don’t want to be seen as meddling
in what Iraqis learn, they don’t want the possible alternative:
funding textbooks that are anti-Semitic, anti-American or radically
religious, particularly given the strict separation of church and state-sponsored
schools in the US.
“We considered anything anti-American to be propaganda,” said
Fuad Hussein, head of textbook revision for the ministry of education.
“When we couldn’t reach an agreement, we just took it out.”
He said teachers will have to decide how to treat controversial issues
like the rise of the Ba’ath party, the bloody crackdown on the
Shias, and accusations that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
Bill Evers, a US Defense Department employee advising the recently formed
Iraqi ministry of education, put it more succinctly, “Entire swaths
of the 20th century have been deleted.” Iraqi history textbooks
have, in a matter of months, gone from one sided to no-sided.
Everyone agrees that Iraqi schools needed an overhaul. Once, Iraq was
considered to have one of the strongest school systems in the Middle
East. Saddam’s endorsement of universal primary education, schooling
for girls and a secular curriculum won his nation a Unesco prize in
1982 for eradicating illiteracy. But the situation deteriorated throughout
the Iran-Iraq and Gulf wars, and by 2002, the US Agency for International
Development (USAID) estimated that school enrolment had fallen to 53%.
School printing presses had long since shut down.
This most recent war is said to have damaged hundreds more schools,
in addition to destroying the ministry of education building and all
its files. While much US attention has focused on physical rebuilding,
curriculum revision was a political hot potato that few groups wanted
to grapple with. US officials recruited Fuad Hussein, a former Iraqi
professor and Middle Eastern scholar who had been teaching in the Netherlands.
In May, Hussein visited Baghdad schools and hand-picked 67 teachers
to make up a textbook revision team. They met twice weekly at the Unesco
and Unicef offices. They were initially tasked with “de-Ba’athifiying”
the textbooks. But they quickly saw that lessons were so intertwined
with Saddam Hussein that in lifting out Ba’ath party ideology,
most of history went with it.
“If you had a paragraph about Babylon, they’d link it to the
Ba’ath party,” Hussein said. “There were many debates.
Teachers would say, ‘Can we delete this word?’ - socialist
- for example, and I would say, ‘Well, it depends.’”
In Saddam’s history books, Iraq won both the Iran-Iraq war, and
the 1991 Gulf war.
Fuad Hussein’s team grappled with revising history textbooks including
passages such as this, on 1991, “On the 16th and 17th of January,
America and its alliance gathered armies from 30 states in its aggression
against Iraq. The war started - ‘the mother of wars’ as his
Excellency Saddam Hussein (God protect Him) called it. All people and
army faced this war strongly and bravely and uniquely.
“The brave Iraqis faced the situation for 43 days despite its ugliness,
until they finally forced the Americans to stop firing. At the beginning
of the war Iraq achieved the hopes of the Arab masses when it fired
missiles against the military installations of the Zionists. Then the
Arab country regained its self-confidence through trusting the historical
leadership of its Excellency Saddam Hussein (God protect Him), the symbol
of dignity and heroism.”
Fuad Hussein acknowledges that deleting controversial history is not
a long-term solution, but there was no way he could have properly rewritten
the curriculum with only a team of high school teachers and three months.
Even the teachers who say they are against the Ba’ath party are
still products of two decades of Ba’ath party schooling. In many
cases, they want to take out Ba’ath party propaganda, but they
don’t know what to replace it with. They know no other version
of history. “We can change the text easily,” Hussein said.
“But the challenge will be to change the culture of the teachers.”
Hussein is planning on putting together a curriculum team that represents
all ethnic groups, religions and sectors of Iraq, to properly debate
history and rewrite each text -- a process, he says, that will take
years.
Even within Iraqi academic society there is tremendous debate over past
and present history. What will they say were the reasons behind the
Iran-Iraq war? And how will Iraqis ever agree on who supported Saddam
and who opposed him? “The fall of Baghdad is very controversial,”
says Sami Al Kaisi, history professor at the Baghdad University Women’s
College of Education. “It’s hard to say who stood against
America at that moment. Who will we say betrayed Saddam? We will need
20 to 30 years to reflect on this before we can teach it properly.”
Furthermore, Fuad Hussein said his team came under pressure from Iraq’s
religious groups hoping to make similar inroads into the school systems
that exist in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
“There was talk that the Americans are trying to westernize the
curriculum and move it far from Islamic values,” Hussein recalled.
“One religious leader asked me, ‘is it not possible to abolish
history class and just teach religion?’”
Sheikh Abdul Settar Jabber, head of the Muslim Awareness Association,
a leading Sunni group, feels the entire role of the schools should be
changed to one that trains students in Islamic law and in how to be
good Muslims. He opposes any American involvement in the schools.
“We are an Islamic society and this is part of the attempt by Americans
to break Iraqi identity,” said Sheikh Jabber.
The US officials say most curriculum decisions will be made after the
civilian government leaves Iraq, and that they will play a limited role-
unless things go in a direction they don’t approve of.
“We will strongly recommend concepts of tolerance, and be against
anything that is anti-semitic or anti-west -- content that would sow
the seeds for future intolerance,” said Gregg Sullivan, spokesman
for the Near Eastern Affairs Bureau of the state department. “We’d
hope it’s only an advisory role, but if something develops that’s
disadvantageous to the Iraqi people, we’d weigh in on a stronger
level.”
When asked, for example, whether future Iraqi history texts should refer
to the US’s presence as an “invasion” or a “liberation,”
Sullivan said: “I haven’t heard that we have a problem with
the word ‘invasion’. It was an invasion - for the liberation
of the Iraqi people. I’d hope the texts would give it some positive
connotations.”
Samer Shehata, assistant professor of Middle Eastern studies at the
Center For Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University, thinks
that the best strategy for the US would be to get as little involved
as possible - even if it means allowing anti-American passages.
“It will backfire if the US, for example, tries to overly secularize
the curriculum. The US has to allow respected, learned Iraqis to solve
the problem themselves. If the Iraqi educators want to write about sanctions
and all the troubles they caused they have to be able to.”
James Loewen, author of the 1995 book, Lies My Teacher Told Me, said
American history textbooks are notorious for massaging events to make
themselves look good. Since students receive information from a variety
of sources, like parents, media and the internet, they know when they’re
being misled, Loewen said. Propaganda is not only wrong, but also ineffective.
“Rather than trying to remove all ‘ideology and propaganda,’
a better approach would be to leave some in, paired with the same events
as written about by US historians, and perhaps by historians in, say,
Turkey, Jordan or Kuwait,” Loewen suggested. “Then, supply
additional information -- accurate dates, facts etc. -- and let students
think about it for themselves.”
Source: Guardian (UK)
How British charity was silenced on Iraq
By Kevin Maguire
Nov. 28 — One of Britain’s most high-profile charities
was ordered to end criticism of military action in Iraq by its powerful
US wing to avoid jeopardizing financial support from Washington and
corporate donors, a Guardian investigation has discovered.
Internal emails reveal how Save the Children UK came under enormous
pressure after it accused coalition forces of breaching the Geneva Convention
by blocking humanitarian aid.
Senior figures at Save the Children US, based in Westport, Connecticut,
demanded the withdrawal of the criticism and an effective veto on any
future statements blaming the invasion for the plight of Iraqi civilians
suffering malnourishment and shortages of medical supplies.
Uncovered documents expose tensions within an alliance that describes
itself as “the world’s largest independent global organization
for children” but which is heavily reliant on governments and big
business for cash.
Save the Children UK, which had an income of $210 million in 2002-03,
boasts the Queen as patron and Princess Anne as president, plus a phalanx
of the great and the good lending their titles and time.
The row over Iraq erupted in April when the London statement said coalition
forces had gone back on an earlier agreement to allow a relief plane,
packed with emergency food and medical supplies for 40,000 people, to
land in northern Iraq.
Rob MacGillivray, the UK wing’s emergency program manager, released
a statement which stated that the “lack of cooperation from the
coalition forces is a breach of the Geneva Conventions and its protocols,
but more importantly the time now being wasted is costing children their
lives.”
Within hours of the statement appearing, the US wing was demanding its
withdrawal. Emails sent to staff in Britain by Dianne Sherman, associate
vice-president for public affairs and communications in Connecticut,
headed “Save/UK criticizes US military,” expressed dismay
and censured the UK operation.
Sherman said the Americans were “really astonished at today’s
release, which went out without our prior knowledge, that attacks the
US military.”
Her email went on: “This is undermining all the great work we’ve
done, much of it in collaboration with you. We’ll have to see the
consequences of how this plays out --including affecting our future
funding from the government.”
A number of less controversial “joint messages” were proposed
by Sherman, none of which criticized any aspect of the invasion or occupation.
She instead wanted the UK and US groups to point out that humanitarian
organizations were still not permitted access to most of Iraq, that
delays harmed children and, on a positive note, that relief work was
under way in Umm Qasr, Masul and northern Iraq.
“Safe, secure conditions must be created immediately to allow humanitarians
to bring in essential supplies and expertise to the people of Iraq,”
was her alternative version.
Accounts published by Save the Children US highlight its vulnerability
to political pressure from a Republican White House with “government
grants and contracts” generating some 60 percent of its operating
support and revenue. The proportion is also high in the UK, where 49
percent of the organization’s income is “grants and gifts
in kind from institutional donors,” including the government.
Sherman copied her broadside to US executives including Ann van Dusen,
the executive vice-president, Rudy von Bernuth, vice-president and managing
director of its children in emergencies section, and Andrea Williamson-Hughes,
corporate secretary.
When she discovered the London statement had been posted on the UK organization’s
website, Sherman also demanded the deletion of US press officer Nicole
Amoroso’s name as a contact, adding in a second email: “I
would also strongly suggest that the press release be removed until
we have agreed upon language of the release.”
A well-placed source in the UK operation said “all hell let loose”
over the US intervention, with telephone calls “flying across the
Atlantic” and a series of high-level meetings called to discuss
the crisis.
The removal of the US press officer’s name was agreed upon to placate
Connecticut, but the source confirmed the Americans were also assured
they would be sent all future UK statements on Iraq before they were
issued.
According to the source, the UK wing toned down later statements to
avoid offending the US side of the operation. A statement issued in
London on April 25, for example, was cleared in advance with the US,
the source said.
Headed “The war is not over for the children of Iraq,” it
made no mention, let alone criticism, of coalition forces. The looting
of some hospitals was highlighted but not the widespread criticism at
the time that troops were standing by and doing nothing.
Save the Children US concentrates on fundraising and is said by London
insiders to be anxious to curb campaigning by the UK arm.
Sherman was unavailable for comment until next week, her office said.
But in a statement to the Guardian, Save the Children UK said it had
not retracted the release at the heart of the row but had removed the
name of Amoroso, saying it had been an error not to consult her.
Subsequent statements, it added, reflected the fact that the situation
“had moved on” as medical supplies had landed in Jordan to
be moved to Baghdad. “We do not agree news releases issued in Save
the Children UK’s name with Save the Children US or any other member
of the International Save the Children Alliance,” the London statement
said. “Wherever possible we do share Save the Children UK news
releases before they are issued with other alliance members working
in the same area. If any changes are suggested by other alliance members
to Save the Children releases, they are made or not at our discretion.”
The tensions over potential donor influence are not limited to the Iraq
crisis. Other internal emails and documents disclose how Save the Children
UK was nervous about the reaction of a major donor company, Serco, which
makes huge profits from outsourcing, when the charity prepared to criticise
the impact of privatization on children.
A number of staff were aghast in the summer of 2002 when a chapter critical
of private finance initiatives, written for a report published ahead
of the Johannesburg sustainable development summit, was deleted by senior
figures in the charity just before it was printed.
There is nothing in the documents to suggest that Serco exerted any
pressure, but according to the emails, the charity’s staff were
anxious not to upset it. One email copied widely in the organization
admitted “underlying tensions” existed between the corporate
fundraising unit and campaigners arguing that PFIs in basic services
did not benefit children.
Another warned that criticism of PFIs by the charity was “naturally
making some of our corporate sponsors edgy,” and the director general,
Mike Aaronson, wanted a full briefing ahead of a meeting with a big
private donor.
As the internal debate raged, fundraiser Helen Barnes warned she was
in a “tricky position” with Serco, which ran hospitals, prisons
and schools for the government. Although about to cease being a corporate
member, the firm, she said, “is still keen to support us”
as she argued against portraying it as a company operating solely for
profit.
“Serco takes its social responsibilities very seriously and invests
in the communities in which it operates,” Barnes said.
Serco, which is heavily involved in the defense sector, raised a total
of £626,500 for the charity, as well as naming its yacht Save
the Children in the BT Global Challenge race three years ago.
The charity’s statement yesterday said: “At no point [in]
the relationship did Serco attempt to influence Save the Children UK
policy on any issue.”
It continued: “We were able to edit most of the report to meet
the required standard but one chapter required further work before it
could be approved for publication. Because time was short we decided
to drop this chapter to allow the rest of the report to be published
in time for the conference.”
Source: Guardian (UK)
Canadian missing after release from
US camp
By Michelle Shephard
Nov. 25 — A 21-year-old Canadian citizen who has been held
by American authorities for two years is unaccounted for since his release
from Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay prison.
The grandparents of Abdul Rahman Khadr say Canadian authorities refused
to let him return to Toronto last month after being notified by American
authorities that he would be released. They say he was taken instead
to Afghanistan and left without identification or money.
A spokesperson for the Department of Foreign Affairs disputed the claim
last night, saying Canadian officials would never refuse to accept a
citizen. Khadr is facing no criminal charges and has no record either
in the United States or Canada.
“Canadian government officials were made aware a few weeks ago
that Mr. Khadr would be released,” said Reynald Doiron. “He
went to a country of his choosing. As a Canadian citizen he has the
undisputable right to come back to Canada.”
But Toronto lawyer Rocco Galati, who represents Khadr’s maternal
grandparents, said Khadr called his Toronto relatives asking for help
after leaving Afghanistan.
“He told them he wanted to be brought to Canada, but they wouldn’t
let him come.”
Khadr told his grandmother Fatmah Elsamnah he traveled from Afghanistan
to Pakistan and went to the Canadian Embassy in Islamabad but was denied
travel documents. From Pakistan he went to Turkey and again found the
Canadian consulate, according to Elsamnah, but again, he was refused
help.
“That is not the case,” countered Doiron last night. “We
have no record of Mr. Khadr approaching any Canadian mission requesting
assistance.”
Galati snorted derisively when told Foreign Affairs had no record of
Khadr asking for help.
“It’s very convenient. They had no information on Arar either,”
Galati said, referring to the case of Maher Arar, an Ottawa man deported
from the United States to Syria.
Khadr’s family does not know if he is still in Turkey and are concerned
for his “physical and mental” condition.
Doiron said he could not comment on the whereabouts of Khadr due to
“privacy concerns.”
Khadr was taken into American custody just two months after the Sept.
11, 2001, attacks when he was reportedly fighting with the Taliban in
Afghanistan.
He was transferred earlier this year to the US military stockade in
Cuba, joining his younger brother Omar, who had been in custody since
July, 2002. Omar is thought to be the youngest detainee in Guantanamo
Bay, having turned 16 behind bars.
American authorities continue their search for their father, Ahmed Said
Khadr, known to intelligence officials as “Al Kanadi” —
the Canadian.
US authorities have been quoted as saying that Khadr is a trusted and
important associate of Osama bin Laden and is in hiding with his oldest
son Abdullah. Before moving the family to Peshawar, Pakistan, the Khadr
family of nine (five sons and two daughters) grew up in Scarborough.
Source: Toronto Star
Lula under pressure for land reform
By Mario Osava
Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, Nov. 21 (IPS)-- Brazilian President
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva promised to settle 400,000 landless
families on small farms of their own over the next three years.
The government announced its National Plan for Agrarian Reform Friday,
under pressure from more than 3,000 protesters camping out in Brasilia
this week, demanding the redistribution of land to one million families
of landless peasant farmers by late 2006.
The Landless Workers Movement (MST) and National Confederation of Agricultural
Workers (CONTAG) demonstrators marched 131 miles along highways to reach
the Brazilian capital Wednesday after setting out Nov. 10 from Goiania,
the capital of the central state of Goiás.
“Patience,” urged Lula, addressing the landless activists
in their camp. He said land reform would move forward without abuses
and “within the country’s possibilities.”
He said that in order to avoid committing errors of the past, his government
would not merely settle families on their own parcels of land, but would
stimulate the creation of cooperatives and set in place mechanisms to
offer new farmers the necessary technology, technical advice and loans
to get started.
The plan announced by the Ministry of Agrarian Development foresees
the distribution of land to 35,000 families this year and to larger
numbers of families over the next three years, to reach a total of 400,000
by the end of Lula’s four-year term, which began in January.
The plan will also entail the granting of legal title to land already
being farmed by some 500,000 families, while another 127,500 families
will be able to purchase small farms through a special system of soft
loans.
The land redistribution process and the expansion of agribusiness will
generate some 2.75 million new jobs in rural areas, according to the
Ministry of Agrarian Development’s plan.
CONTAG president Manuel José dos Santos said the plan was an
improvement over the agrarian reform programme carried out under the
administration of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2003), and
that the task now was to help the government meet its goals.
The leaders of the MST, however, argue that granting legal title to
land that has already been occupied and financing purchases of land
do not form part of agrarian reform efforts, and that what counts towards
that end are new settlements on fallow or unproductive land that has
been expropriated.
The MST will wait until next June for the government to live up to its
promises, but will continue to mobilise, to press for “true”
land reform, said Joao Paulo Rodrigues, one of the coordinators of the
landless movement.
Another MST leader, Joao Pedro Stédile, welcomed Lula’s
visit to the camp set up by the landless demonstrators in a park in
Brasilia, where he spoke directly to the protesters Friday. The president’s
gesture indicates that agrarian reform “is now on its way forward,”
said the activist.
On Thursday, Stédile said that only popular pressure, in the
form of protest marches and occupations of land left fallow by large
landowners, will ensure that land redistribution is carried out in Brazil,
where rural property is concentrated in the hands of just a few thousand
owners of “latifundia.” The government can do little on its
own, he argued.
As in much of Latin America, the latifundium -- defined by Webster’s
as “a great landed estate with primitive agriculture, and labour
often in a state of partial servitude” -- dominates the Brazilian
countryside.
According to Isabel Cristina Diniz with the Catholic Church’s Pastoral
Land Commission, “the concentration of land ownership in Brazil
has increased in recent years,” and just 50,000 people own half
of the farmland in this country of 177 million.
The MST, CONTAG and the Pastoral Land Commission were demanding approval
of a program proposed by a group of experts headed by Plinio de Arruda
Sampaio, which would have entailed the settlement of one million families
during the Lula administration: 200,000 a year from 2003 to 2005, and
400,000 in 2006.
But that goal is “not feasible due to financial and operational
reasons,” Antonio Buainain, a professor of agricultural economics
at the University of Campinas, said in an interview with IPS.
The government does not have the funds to distribute land to so many
people while it is making a huge effort to balance the budget by slashing
spending, he said.
Moreover, that goal would require modifications in the model followed
by agrarian reform efforts in Brazil and the institutions in charge
of carrying it out, which under the current conditions are incapable
of accelerating the redistribution process.
Expropriating land for redistribution is carried out according to “rules
and timeframes that impose a slow pace,” said Buainain, who added
that the government “has already lost almost a year.” In his
view, it will even be difficult for the Lula administration to meet
the goals it has set for itself.
The president of the governing leftist Workers’ Party (PT), José
Genoino, said it is not just a question of convincing the executive
branch of speeding up the transformation of rural land ownership patterns,
because the process also faces heavy resistance in parliament, as well
as obstacles in the courts.
But the rural workers’ movements and experts who drew up the land
reform proposal backed by the MST argue that unless one million families
are settled on small farms of their own, the structure of the Brazilian
countryside will not be altered to the extent needed to expand the domestic
market and stem the exodus of rural families to the slums surrounding
the cities.
Lula’s triumph in the October 2002 presidential elections gave
rise to hopes that agrarian reform would move ahead at a faster pace,
because that was one of the longstanding demands set forth by the PT,
which is allied with the MST and CONTAG.
But the government’s delay in drawing up its National Plan for
Agrarian Reform spurred an intensification of occupations of unproductive
land and protests by the MST in recent months, which culminated in the
march from Goiania and the camps set up by peasant farmers in Brasilia
this week.
Investors fault Dow Chemical for ‘Hiroshima
of chemical industry’
By Jeffrey Allen
Washington, DC, Nov. 26 — Nearly 20 years after what is
considered by many to have been the worst industrial disaster in history,
investors are calling on the US corporation they hold responsible to
do more to address the considerable remaining environmental, social,
and health concerns of survivors.
A shareholder resolution was filed Tuesday with the Dow Chemical Company
on behalf of the Brethren Benefit Trust (the financial arm of the Church
of the Brethren), which owns $179,000 worth of stock in the company,
asking Dow to describe what it has done to address the lingering concerns
of the estimated 120,000 to 150,000 people left chronically ill by a
gas leak at the Union Carbide pesticide factory in India in 1984.
Dow, which now owns Union Carbide, has been admonished by activists
for doing little to clean up the contaminated site, failing to release
information about the gas that doctors need to better treat patients,
and inadequately compensating survivors and their families.
“When Dow Chemical bought Union Carbide two years ago, it inherited
not only its assets but the liability and karma attached to Carbide’s
lack of accountability for the Bhopal chemical disaster,” said
Gary Cohen of the Environmental Health Fund, in a statement about the
shareholder resolution released by the International Campaign for Justice
in Bhopal.
About 8,000 people are believe to have died, mainly from cardiac and
respiratory arrest, in the first three days after 40 tons of toxic gas
leaked from the Union Carbide plant in the central Indian city of Bhopal
early in the morning of December 3, 1984.
“With safety systems either malfunctioning or turned off, an area
of 40 square kilometers, with a resident population of over half a million,
was soon covered with a dense cloud of gas,” explains Greenpeace,
which advocates on behalf of the victims and survivors of the incident.
“People woke in their homes to fits of coughing, their lungs filling
with fluid.”
20,000 are believed to have died from diseases related to the gas leak,
and of as many as 150,000 who remain chronically ill, 50,000 are too
sick to earn a living, says the International Campaign for Justice in
Bhopal. Additionally, toxins from the contaminated site continue to
leak into the groundwater used by local residents, say activists.
A $470 million compensation package provided by Union Carbide amounts
to approximately nine cents per day per person over the nineteen years
since the incident occurred, “a pathetically inadequate amount,
given the economic and health needs of the survivors,” according
to the Campaign’s Tim Edwards.
The package does not include money to clean up the contaminated site
nor does it include compensation for the tens of thousands of “second
generation victims” who were born after the disaster but suffer
from severe birth defects and other developmental and psychological
problems caused by exposure to the gas.
Brethren Benefit Trust also filed a shareholder resolution in April
with Proctor & Gamble, the largest retailer of coffee in the United
States, pressing the company to address the crisis among coffee farmers
in poor countries caused by a steep decline in coffee prices. By September,
the company had agreed to introduce a new line of “Fair Trade Certified”
coffee.
“We’re both concerned about the social and environmental impact
as well as the financial return of our investments,” said Lauren
Compere of Boston Common Asset Management, which filed Tuesday’s
resolution with Dow on behalf of Brethren Benefit Trust. “We take
a long-term view in terms of our investments and we’re very concerned
that Dow has not taken what we consider a leadership role in proactively
addressing the Bhopal issue, both on environmental remediation and also
the survivors’ needs.”
In addition to the calls of its investors, survivors, and victims’
rights groups, Dow has been under pressure recently to do more to address
the Bhopal situation from members of the British and European Parliaments,
the US chemical workers’ union PACE, students and professors’
campaigns, and members of the US Congress, including Democratic presidential
candidate Dennis Kucinich.
Source: OneWorld.net
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