Extract from "An Urgent Appeal to Friends" written on 10 July 2002 when three friends from Bhopal were on hunger strike outside the Indian parliament in New Delhi.

"Terrorism" is much in the news. But there is another, less well-known species of terror: that caused by the greed, negligence and ruthlessness of huge corporations. Why did Carbide, ignoring the advice of its own experts, build its toxic factory in the middle of densely populated neighbourhoods? Why, in contravention of its own US safety standards, was such a huge quantity of methyl-isocyanate, a chemical known to be lethal, stored on site? Why was the tank that ruptured not being kept, as the safety manual required, at zero degrees C? Why, on "that night" were the plant's back-up safety systems, such as the "scrubber", semi-dismantled and not working? Why did the alarm siren not immediately sound, offering a small chance to those who heard it?

We know the answers to some of these questions from talking to people who worked in the plant. The tank had not been refrigerated for some months, in order to save 500 rupees a day on freon gas. 500 rupees is about £7, or $11. The "scrubber" was in bits because parts of it had become badly corroded and needed replacing, but the work had not been done. The alarm siren stayed silent because it had been switched off. There had been so many leaks of gas at the plant that the constant hooting had become a nuisance. To other questions we have as yet no answer. These are the questions that Carbide would have had to answer in court - if it had ever showed up.

Carbide isn’t charged with terrorism. But it might be if more people knew what the terror in Bhopal was like. Indeed, what happened on "that night" redefines the word.

Let me tell you about the night of December 2nd/3rd 1984. It happened just after midnight, the unthinkable thing that had been coming, that journalists and plant workers alike had predicted. A rumbling in the pipes, the realisation that something had gone terribly wrong. Panic, then, and the discovery that all the safety systems were down. Water had got into the giant tank (the thing is the size of a large locomotive) containing the methyl-isocyanate (MIC). A violent heat-producing reaction began and as more water poured into the tank the fiercer grew the reaction. At high temperatures MIC breaks down into other highly toxic chemicals, including cyanides. The tank was buried in the ground, sealed under concrete, yet so intolerable was its chemical indigestion that it burst out of the earth and stood shuddering on end, emitting a stream of gas into the night. Another stream poured from the half-dismantled "scrubber", and was caught by the wind and flung towards the crowded neighbourhoods nearby.

In J.P.Nagar, Oriya Basti, Kainchi Chola, Kazi Camp, most people were at home sleeping. The gases came into their houses without warning. They woke choking, with their eyes and mouths burning. Nobody knew what had happened. Then came shouts of "gas!" and "run away!" and doors began opening, people tumbling out of their houses. The gas was waiting for them, rolling in thick clouds along the narrow lanes, which in some places were no more than four feet wide. The streetlamps were shedding a tobacco-brown light. No insects whirled about them, they were all already dead. As families picked up their toddlers and babies and fled, the alleys became narrow stampedes of people and animals - cows and dogs ran along with their owners - people fell and were trampled, children were wrenched out of their mothers' arms and lost, never found again. 8,000 people died very horribly, with piss and shit running down their legs, their eyeballs white slits where the gases had bleached them. The gases stripped the linings from their lungs, and they drowned in their own fluids. Others had sudden convulsions and dropped in the street. The city was full of dead bodies. Nobody knows exactly how many died, but we can form an idea because 7,000 burial shrouds were bought over the next three days. This does not take into consideration the hundreds of people who were unaccounted for, or the families who had no-one left to bury or cremate them. In the railway station, a whole tribe of gypsies camped on one of the further platforms perished to the last soul. Not one of their names is known.

By morning the hospitals were full of desperately ill people, coughing up their lungs, many unable to see. The doctors did not know how to treat them, since nobody knew what exactly what had poisoned them, and Carbide was not saying. It is a fair certainty that cyanide was involved, the antidote to which, sodium thiosulphate, was available. Lives which could have been saved were lost. But the survivors were soon to regard those who had died as the lucky ones. Though none of them knew it, their immediate suffering was only the beginning. Half a million people were injured by breathing the gases, many were left so badly disabled that they would never work again. Their families became destitute, reduced to beggary - some of the worlds poorest people destituted by one of the world's richest corporations. Surely there'd be hell to pay. Someone's head would surely roll. The compensation, and the responsibility of caring, for the rest of their lives, for the injured would surely empty even Carbide's huge coffers. You'd think so, wouldn't you?

On "that night" in Bhopal, three times as many people died as were killed in New York on September 11th. The Bhopalis were just as innocent and unsuspecting as the office workers whose lives ended so brutally in the Twin Towers. They too had done nothing to deserve such a terrible fate. But no crusade was launched, no rock concert was staged for their benefit, no ageing rock stars queued on stage to sing songs about "freedom". After September 11, there was a massive appeal for donations, leading to compensation payments of over $1,000,000 to relatives of the victims in recognition of the stress they had suffered. The families of Bhopal's dead were paid $1250 per corpse. Of the injured, those who have received anything at all, got on average just $500. During the Exxon Valdez disaster, Alaskan sea-otters were kept glossy by feeding them fresh lobster at the cost of $500 per day per otter. "The life of an Indian citizen in Bhopal," commented the Times of India, "is clearly much cheaper than that of a sea otter in America".

Read the original letter which was sent as an email to the author's friends with a request to relay it onward. It had travelled twice round the world within a week.

You can also read it as published in the New Internationalist, ZNet, Just Response (Italy), Outlook India, LabourNet, UK Indymedia, Safe2Use.com and elsewhere.