It was a gray and dreary Friday morning as UT students helped Diane Wilson, a fourth-generation shrimper from Seadrift, Texas, hang equally dismal-looking banners depicting survivors of a chemical disaster in Bhopal, India.
One image, titled "Burial of an Unknown Child," showed a hand covering the face of an almost alien-looking newborn with dirt.
"There's these terrible tragedies and people just say 'Oh I'm sorry,' and I just felt that I couldn't do that," Wilson said.
She has dedicated her life to protesting what she sees as human rights and environmental violations by corporations.
Friday marked the 20th anniversary of a chemical plant leak in Bhopal that killed thousands. Austin's chapter of the Association for India's Development, Amnesty International and the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal hosted a three-day event to raise awareness for the disaster. It started Friday night with a candlelight vigil by the statue of Martin Luther King Jr.
Organizations demanding more compensation from Union Carbide, the company that owned the plant, estimate 5,000 people died in one night and 20,000 people to date. The Dow Chemical Company took over Union Carbide in 2001.
Neither the company nor the Indian government has taken steps to completely clean the land and water of Bhopal, protestors say, or given sufficient compensation to the people who were exposed to the methyl isocyanate gas and are still suffering.
Union Carbide reports a much lower casualty number and said on a Web site addressing the issue that proper cleaning procedures have been enacted, that they have given the Indian government $470 million in an out-of-court settlement to compensate the survivors and even built a hospital to accommodate them in 2000.
AID Austin hopes to start a student-led campaign next semester that will pressure the University not to accept funds from the Dow Chemical Company until they clean up and donate more money.
The University receives donations for scholarships from Dow Chemical.
AID Austin members spent Friday on the West Mall gathering signatures.
Nishant Jain, originally from Delhi, India came to the United States in 1996. He wasn't directly affected by the accident but said the disaster is a national embarrassment.
"Bhopal is something you don't want to talk about," Jain said, "[The corporations] got away with it, and we didn't know what to do."
Jain came to do research at the University of Minnesota, which is near Dow Chemical headquarters in Midland, Minnesota. He considers it coincidence that he found the AID chapter there.
A resolution was passed by the University of Minnesota's Student Assembly "urging the University to reject all donations from Dow Chemical... in excess of that which the corporation spends to clean up the Bhopal site on annual basis."
Jain, not enrolled at UT-Austin, nonetheless hopes to help students pass a similar resolution through the Student Government here. SG President Brent Chaney said he was open to discussing the proposal, but he had not been approached about it yet.
Wilson, who gave a speech after a documentary viewing Saturday, said the main fault of Union Carbide, and now Dow Chemical, is their resistance to release information about the disaster.
Two years ago, she went on a 30-day hunger strike in front of the Dow Chemical tower in her hometown to protest. A few days later she chained herself on top of the tower, armed with a "Dow is responsible" banner.
"Action takes commitment and commitment takes risk," Wilson said. "Sometimes it means putting yourself way out there."
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