THE PROPOSED RARE EARTH PROJECT IN GEBENG NEAR. …. LOCATED ON THE BANKS OF THE PAHANG RIVER 50 KM SOUTH OF KUANTAN, PEKAN IS THE ROYAL TOWN
It wouldn’t be the first time such an atrocity has occurred. In 1982 the then Mahathir-headed Umno/BN government approved the operation by the Japanese-Malaysian joint venture Misubishi Kasel of the Asian Rare Earth (ARE) plant in Bukit Merah, Perak.
Though it persisted for just 10 years before closure by order of the Perak High Court, this gross misadventure proved incalculably costly to the health of workers, residents and their children, and the Umno/BN regime and its media have done their damndest to dim and diminish it in the public memory.
A typically disgraceful exercise in official obfuscation that brings me to my principal reason for opposing the operation of the Lynas plant in Pahang: Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak’s assurance that it is safe.
Because Najib has shown himself to be such a persistent and indeed pathological liar that only a complete ass would believe a single word he says.
Every time he opens his mouth and sets his lips flapping, he utters such a farrago of falsehoods and asinine attempts to fly in the face of self-evident facts that he’s utterly bereft of any shred of credibility.
Every single one of his pronouncements ranging from “I, for one, believe that the Malaysian media is something that we can all be proud of”, to his global message that he is a “moderate Muslim leader” working towards “the world’s best democracy” is a breathtaking exercise in bare-faced deceit.
The Great Disruption, speaking at the opening session of the annual TED event is an experience and opportunity like no other. Another speaker backstage, feeling similarly hyped about the opportunity, described it to me as being like “the world series of public speaking”! For me the pressure was really on because I was going into …Read more NAJIB’S TOXIC POLITICS GREED IS GOOD.LYNAS TOXIC WASTE IS FOR MASS SLAUGHTER
20 May 2011 – Was Najib Conned Lynas hid info on Kuantan Plant Biggest industrial Disaster in the World in Waiting. Posted by muslimmalaysia786 on May ..
RARE earths miner Lynas will push ahead with a processing plant in Malaysia, as it admits it has not done enough to engage with the community, after a review by the International Atomic Energy Agency identified improvements were needed.
The Australian-listed company has been the focus of heated protests by residents near the plant, in the Gebeng industrial zone in Kuantan in central Malaysia, who are opposed to the operation because of fears of a repeat of the health problems associated with a Mitsubishi refinery, which closed in 1992 after years of protests about its polluting effects.
The review of the $US220 million ($205m) plant, commissioned by the Malaysian government to appease concerned residents, did not find any non-compliance with international safety standards.
But the review did identify 10 areas of improvement that need to be addressed before the next licensing phase of the project, which chairman and chief executive Nick Curtis said he accepted and would address.
“The IAEA report specifically mentioned that Lynas has an obligation to do more for the Kuantan community,” he said.
“We acknowledge that not enough has been done to engage with the community and we will correct that now.”
Rare earths, a group of 17 elements, are not radioactive in themselves. But virtually every rare earth ore deposit around the world contains, in varying concentrations, a slightly radioactive element called thorium.
Residents have held regular protests against the plant’s construction and a report in The New York Times yesterday said engineers involved in the project had raised safety concerns.
Mr Curtis said the company would soon release a response to the US report and said there were no engineering issues that he believed raised any safety concerns.
Malaysia’s ministry of international trade and industry said the government would ensure that Lynas complied with the IAEA recommendations, and until then, it would not allow the company to import raw material from its Mount Weld mine in WA.
But it said the company could continue with construction of the plant, which is about 40 per cent complete.
Lynas still expects to meet its deadline, with the first feed of concentrate into the kiln due in the third quarter of this year.
“Lynas is confident that completion and commissioning of the plant will be achieved before the end of 2011,” Mr Curtis said.
I am sure IAEA would also say Fukushima nuclear power plants comply with their safety standards, before the tsunami that crippled it! The truth is buried somewhere. Profit is number 1 priority.
By M J Akbar
Trust me: if thousands of politicians, or their cousins, the nouveau riche, had died on that apocalyptic night in Bhopal, Anderson would still be in an Indian prison, rather than in America, protected by his company, and the company that his company keeps. But only the poor died in Bhopal. We treat our poor as dispensable chattel whose death is meaningless in the economic calculus, since there is no shortage of supply. Bhopal is class war.
Cynicism is never irrational. The irrational, often wrong, sometimes right, are impelled by instinct, heart or even conscience. Cynics are morality-proof. They prefer data to truth.
Delhi has set the gold standard for cynicism. It operates on four axioms: public memory is a dwarf; anger is effervescent; media can be massaged at the appropriate moment; any public crisis can be assuaged with crumbs, while the promotion of private interests continues off-screen.
Jairam Ramesh’s promise of a Green Tribunal in Bhopal is a classical instance of a crumb dipped in the pickle of hypocrisy. Where was this or any other tribunal in the last 26 years when the dead, the deformed and blind babies and the stillborn fetuses were a reminder that justice must be done? Or is this tribunal meant for the next onslaught by the dogs of chemical war upon the sleeping slums of Bhopal? Who was Veerappa Moily trying to fool when he claimed that the case against Warren Anderson had not been closed? Why doesn’t he keep the case open for a few more years, until God closes the chapter by taking Anderson away to whichever destination has been allotted to the butcher of Bhopal? A Group of Ministers has been appointed — merely to buy time until the return of amnesia.
The true Bhopal verdict was delivered within four days of the tragedy, in December 1984, not on June 7, 2010, when Anderson was smuggled out of Bhopal on a state government aircraft and then put on a plane to America. Since then we have witnessed a pretend-justice farce played out by government, police and the judiciary, including the Supreme Court. The last is most culpable, since we hold a Chief Justice of India like A M Ahmadi to higher standards of probity than we do politicians or policemen. Ahmadi got his proper thank you note after he retired.
Chief judicial magistrate Mohan Tiwari’s judgment served only one useful purpose. The sheer scale of its magnanimity towards the accused lit a fuse under the volcano of collective guilt. The lava is spewing from myriad crevices, scorching and burning many-layered masks that have hidden deceit for a generation. As memories were stoked, officials, some perhaps frustrated by the fact that their silence had not been rewarded, revealed how successive governments had intervened to slow down the judicial process and sabotage any chance of Anderson’s extradition. Union Carbide and its collaborators, including Indians of course, have sustained themselves with a lie, that it was an Indian disaster since the plant was built and run by Indians. The design is an exact replica of an American plant, and an American who was terrified of being tried in India was in charge of management.
The political establishment assumed that June 7 would be just another day in a long calendar, possibly punctuated by an occasional, futile scream. The court was fortified, and entry denied to petitioners, victims and media. My one memory of this courtroom, gleaned from television, shall be of the smug grin of an obese policemen laughing at two old women, their faces contorted by rage and frustration, who knew that the system which had stolen their lives had also cheated their children in death.
Trust me: if thousands of politicians, or their cousins, the nouveau riche, had died on that apocalyptic night in Bhopal, Anderson would still be in an Indian prison, rather than in America, protected by his company, and the company that his company keeps. But only the poor died in Bhopal. We treat our poor as dispensable chattel whose death is meaningless in the economic calculus, since there is no shortage of supply. Bhopal is class war.
Is it surprising — or not? — that while even the Obama administration jumped in with some gratuitous advice, Dr Manmohan Singh had nothing to say? Perhaps the Prime Minister would have been repetitive. In essence, the signal from Washington and Delhi is the same: forget the dead, get on with multinational life.
Barack Obama was not elected to ensure justice for the Indian victim. He is in the White House to protect American business, and defend the two-laws theory that motivates American international relations, whether in war or peace. When 11 American workers were killed in an oil rig blow-up in the Gulf of Mexico, Washington demanded $1.5 billion from BP. Nearly 20,000 dead in Bhopal, half a million affected, and the total compensation is $470 million. Do the math. Obama has promised to penalize BP for the current oil spill to the extent of many billions of dollars. Magistrate Manoj Tiwari wants only Rs 5 lakh as reparation from Carbide for mass slaughter.
When Exxon was fined $5 billion for the Alaska oil spill, nearly $40,000 was spent on the rehabilitation of every affected sea otter. The victims of Bhopal are, so far, entitled to $200 each.
Don’t do the math. It may turn you into a cynic.
By M J Akbar
A nation that cannot uphold its law cannot preserve its order. When Anderson was smuggled out to safety, the authority of state abandoned the responsibility of state. Excuses, evasions and lies have shifted over 26 years; this central truth has not.
It is odd that the government should have chosen law and order as its final alibi after some exhausting self-laceration in its search for a credible explanation for the escape of Union Carbide’s Warren Anderson on December 7, 1984.
Why do we say “law and order” rather than “order and law”? Simple. Law comes before order. Law defines the nature of order. Law is the difference between civilization and chaos. Law is evolutionary: the edicts of tribes, chiefs and dynasties lifted human societies from scattered peril to structured coexistence. The laws of democracy have vaulted us to the acme of social cohesion, for they eliminated arbitrary diktat and introduced collective will. The divine right of kings is dead; it has been reborn as the secular right of an elected Parliament.
A nation that cannot uphold its law cannot preserve its order. When Anderson was smuggled out to safety, the authority of state abandoned the responsibility of state. Excuses, evasions and lies have shifted over 26 years; this central truth has not.
Unsurprisingly, Anderson sneered at the establishment that knelt before him; contempt is the umbilical chord of the colonial, or neo-colonial, relationship. The crux of the Bhopal tragedy is summed up in a few sentences uttered by Anderson as he was escorted out of India on December 7, 1984: “House arrest or no house arrest, or bail or no bail, I am free to go home…There is a law of the United States… India, bye bye, thank you.”
‘House or no house arrest’: he could not care a damn about those funny-looking policemen (in lathis and khaki shorts?) who had dared to arrest a pillar of the American corporate establishment. ‘Bail or no bail’: what was a rotten piece of paper signed in an Indian court worth to a lord of Wall Street? Not even the decency of silence. Anderson was publicly, even proudly, contemptuous of those who did not have the courage to interrupt his freedom for a mere industrial disaster in which a few thousand semi-slave Indians had been gassed to death within hours and thousands more would die over years.
‘There is a law in the United States’: Anderson had twigged on to a basic truth that the law is a malleable reality for those who are “well-connected” in India. How could Anderson have respect for India’s law when those entrusted with its sanctity had defiled it? Anderson laughed at Indian law, and jeered at the Indian state. Compare this with the fact that his company was scared witless at the prospect of an American trial. Carbide fought hard, and successfully, with predictable help from a comprador Indian establishment, to shift the trial from America to India. Their subsequent collusion with Indian courts touched Supreme heights.
British Petroleum knew the perils of entanglement with American justice and shelled out within six weeks of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Big Oil (which is far bigger than Big Chemical) has been forced to put aside $20 billion for the repair of the environment after an ecological disaster that has not killed a single innocent human being. Technically, BP need not have paid more than $75 million. The first demand on Carbide, 26 years ago was for $15 billion. It has paid the equivalent of just one billion dollars (at today’s prices) for the death of nearly 20,000 people and the horrific maiming of over 100,000.
Barack Obama slipped on a bit of oil himself when the spill began. He thought playing to the gallery would subdue the clamour, while BP contained the damage. He upped the ante (it became an environmental 9/11) even while his National Guard helped BP by hiding affected bird-life from media cameras. Obama began to taunt the British in British Petroleum, perhaps because he found it easier to attack a nation than a multinational; but public opinion was not to be mollified by rhetoric.
BP paid America out of fear, not because of a demand order from its conscience. Carbide had nothing to fear, and never possessed a conscience. QED. BP will not pay a dividend this year. Carbide paid a dividend even after Bhopal.
‘India, bye bye, thank you’: those famous last Anderson words. Bye bye; this is a divorce, not a separation. There might be some alimony in it, but don’t start shopping until the cheque is in the bank.
Accusation is the easy exit route from Bhopal. Introspection will take us back to the beginning. Betrayal is impossible without trust. We did not trust Carbide to be honest. We trusted our political class, and it continues to search for new and inventive ways to betray us again.
Respected sir
I am Mahesh R from Chennai.I am a std 12 student in PSBB KK Nagar. I am enclosing a poem (which I have written) regarding the recent furore over the Bhopal gas tragedy. Pls give your comments.
Darkness At Daylight
I am Mahesh R from Chennai.I am a std 12 student in PSBB KK Nagar. I am enclosing a poem (which I have written) regarding the recent furore over the Bhopal gas tragedy. Pls give your comments.
Darkness At Daylight
The region is murky dark & deep
But the authorities tend to sleep
People’s complaints are piled in a heap
They are treated like sheep
And throughout the day the people weep
And throughout the day the people weep
But the authorities tend to sleep
People’s complaints are piled in a heap
They are treated like sheep
And throughout the day the people weep
And throughout the day the people weep
Their money they are not able to reap
In trouble they have sunk knee deep
They are not able to sleep , And
They have no option but to weep.
In trouble they have sunk knee deep
They are not able to sleep , And
They have no option but to weep.
Compensation though paid is not much
For people’s lives authorities don’t care much
And the toll is underestimated as such.
Though the proprietors had been arrested
Against them charges haven’t been pressed
Through the gates they were guided
This has left the country distressed , And
The voice of the people has been suppressed.
For people’s lives authorities don’t care much
And the toll is underestimated as such.
Though the proprietors had been arrested
Against them charges haven’t been pressed
Through the gates they were guided
This has left the country distressed , And
The voice of the people has been suppressed.
The region is murky dark & deep
But the authorities tend to sleep
And throughout the day the people weep
And throughout the day the people weep
_by Mahesh R std XII
But the authorities tend to sleep
And throughout the day the people weep
And throughout the day the people weep
_by Mahesh R std XII
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