Impersonation as Protest: How a Group of Performance Artists Shed Light on an Environmental Catastrophe

Impersonation as Protest: How a Group of Performance Artists Shed Light on an Environmental Catastrophe


8 minute read

"Written by Bennett Kirschner"

At first, the night of December 2nd, 1984 in Bhopal, India was just like any other. A chilly calm draped itself over the city’s residents, and the bustling streets quieted to a faint drone. Yet between 12:30 and 1am that night, people throughout the city started waking up to the smell of a strange, yellow gas floating through the air, and the sound of coughing. Their eyes burned “as if chili powder had been flung into them,” and thousands started vomiting uncontrollably as they tried to escape the all-encompassing cloud. By 3AM that night, a mass exodus of about 200,000 people – approximately a quarter of the city’s population – had begun, leaving behind animals and children who did not have the strength to help themselves. The city streets were jammed with scooters carrying entire families and trucks that overflowed with dozens of suffocating people.

 

About one hour before all of this began, around 11:30PM, a pesticide manufacturing plant owned by the Texas-based Union Carbide Corporation had started leaking methyl isocyanate, a toxic gas commonly known as MIC that was used to produce Sevin, the brand name for Union Carbide’s version of the insecticide carbaryl. Small chemical spills were a common occurrence in the city, which perhaps explains why the reactions of the local government and Union Carbide, both that night and the morning after, were slow and optimistic. Early the next morning, Bhopal residents were told it was safe to return to their homes, and that the city streets, now coated with human vomit and flanked by trees that had died overnight, were safe to walk.

 

In spite of these calls for calm, it was almost immediately obvious to residents of Bhopal that this spill was unlike any the city had ever seen. By 4AM that morning, over 40 tons of MIC, along with a cocktail of other noxious, still largely undisclosed chemicals, had poured out from one of the plant’s gas tanks and into Bhopal’s atmosphere, exposing over 600,000 residents and reaching as far as 5 miles downwind.

 

Today, the devastating effects of the spill are well-documented, though still disputed by legal representatives of Union Carbide. Official estimates of the death toll, which account both for the thousands who died within two weeks of the spill and those who died over the coming years from diseases directly connected to MIC exposure, exceed 15,000, and continue to climb with each passing year. The extensive list of the spill’s health impacts explains why many characterize it as the world’s most devastating industrial disaster: cancer rates among victims are ten times higher than the national average; children of victims are disproportionately born with birth defects; and groundwater, relied upon by many of Bhopal’s poorer residents, is still contaminated with a slew of toxins, including heavy metals and pesticide concentrations that are “561 times [higher] than the Indian standard.”

 

While the residents of Bhopal continue to struggle with the spill’s aftermath, its perpetrators have met hardly any legal or financial backlash. Union Carbide committed to a $470 million settlement mediated by the Indian Supreme Court in 1989, a number based on outrageous underestimations of the death toll and the number of people who suffered permanent disabilities because of the spill. Families of the dead were awarded an average sum of $2,200, and the chemical plant, now abandoned, continues to leak toxic chemicals and heavy metals into the earth.

 

Though the Supreme Court settlement mandated that Union Carbide clean up the spill site decades ago, the sale of the company to Dow Chemical in 2001 made a complete environmental remediation seem even more doubtful than it already was: today, the Bhopal plant still contains over 8,000 tons of carcinogenic chemicals, but Dow Chemical remains steadfast in its refusal to clean up the site. The company claims that the matter is out of their hands, since they are merely the inheritors of the spill’s legacy, not its perpetrators. Union Carbide, which remains a thriving subsidiary of Dow, has found a way to hide from culpability, and the people of Bhopal, having no culprit to point to, have been forsaken by the international community.

 

That all changed for one fleeting instant in December of 2004, on the 20th anniversary of the disaster, when the residents of Bhopal received an unexpected glimmer of hope. A spokesman for Dow named Jude Finisterra appeared on the BBC World during the primetime news hour in the United Kingdom to commemorate the disaster and to make a major announcement on behalf of the world’s third-largest chemical producer.

 

The host, Stephen Sackur, introduced his guest, and turned to him. “Do you now accept responsibility for what happened?” he asked over video conference.

 

Against a manicured backdrop of the Eiffel Tower on a clear summer day, Finisterra tentatively pivoted on his swivel chair and took a deep breath in.

 

“Steve, yes.” Finisterra’s eyelids closed for a second. “Today is a great day for all of us at Dow, and I think for millions of people around the world as well. It’s 20 years since the disaster, and today I’m very happy to announce that for the first time, Dow is accepting full responsibility for the Bhopal catastrophe. We have a $12 billion plan to finally, at long last, fully compensate the victims, including the 120,000 who may need medical care for their entire lives, and to fully and swiftly remediate the Bhopal plant site.”

 

The interview went on for five minutes, and offered a stunning reversal of Dow’s refusal to assume any responsibility for the disaster. Finisterra promised that Dow would “provide more than $500 per victim, which is all that they’ve seen – [there’s been a] maximum of $500 per victim, [up until now which is] not ‘plenty good for an Indian,’ as one of our spokespersons unfortunately said a couple of years ago…Furthermore, we will perform a full and complete remediation of the Bhopal site…which has not been cleaned up. When Union Carbide abandoned the site 16 years ago, they left tons of toxic waste, and the site continues to be used as a playground by children. Water continues to be drunk from the groundwater underneath,” he lamented.

 

Finisterra promised that Dow would gather the money for these long overdue reparations by liquidating Union Carbide, “this nightmare for the world and this headache for Dow,” and devoting its $12 billion value to the residents of Bhopal who had been suffering for two decades. “This is the first time in history that a publicly owned company…has performed an action which is significantly against its bottom line simply because it’s the right thing to do,” he exclaimed at the end of the five-minute long interview.

 

Yet Jude Finisterra was not a representative for Dow Chemical – in fact, he wasn’t even Jude Finisterra. His real name is Jacques Servin, and he is a member of a small collective of activists called the Yes Men who masquerade as corporate representatives to shed light on their deceptive PR campaigns. Later that night, in an interview as himself, Jacques admitted that he hoped to use the announcement “to show that [Dow Chemical] could…easily accept responsibility [for the disaster] and that there was something very concrete they could do about it.”

 

Mr. Servin’s audacious act of protest sent shockwaves across the world. Within minutes of its first airing, the interview received international media coverage, and Dow Chemical’s stock on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange plummeted over 4 percent, costing the company over $2 billion. Instead of offering a tailored declaration of solidarity with the victims of Bhopal to commemorate the spill’s 20th anniversary, as they had originally planned, Dow’s spokespeople were forced to issue multiple statements which reiterated the company’s obstinate refusal to do anything about the spill.

 

Servin’s stunt was criticized by many as heartless, as it had falsely convinced thousands of victims in Bhopal that the years of anguish they’d endured might soon come to a close. While Jacques lamented the disappointment they must have felt when the interview was revealed to be a hoax, he remained steadfast in his conviction. “Let’s put this in contrast,” he said in a subsequent interview. “I mean, we might have given people two hours of false hope; Dow has given them 20 years of suffering.”

 

Instead of watching it recede into the periphery of the public political consciousness, Servin and the Yes Men had reignited the conversation surrounding the Bhopal disaster. Jude Finisterra’s statements had forced viewers around the world to wonder why Dow Chemical had done virtually nothing to remediate the site, and to see its failure to act as a conscious choice, rather than inevitability. As strange as it may sound, the Yes Men had shed light on Dow’s  lack of compassion by humanizing the corporation, and showing that it was capable of practicing kindness towards people other than its shareholders.

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