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| Friday 21st June
2002 | Issue 360 WAKE UP! IT'S YER SERIOUSLY PARCHED SchNEWS
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CHOKER-COLAAs all SchNEWS readers will no doubt know the Coca-Cola Company
“exists to benefit and refresh everyone it touches.” Which
will come as great news to the villagers in the Kerala State of
India who, thanks to one of Coca-Cola’s ‘refreshing’
factories, are suffering water contamination and shortages. Coca Cola’s bottling plant at Plachimada was set up three
years ago in the middle of fertile agricultural land and has sucked
the local aquifers dry. Worst hit are the indigenous and Dalit (oppressed
castes) communities who live near the factory. They have seen their
wells dry up while they wave goodbye to truck loads of soft drinks
that are making their way from the factory to distant markets. Barely
six months after the factory set up, villagers and farmers living
nearby began noticing changes in the quantity and quality of well
water. Water from a well in Plachimada became unfit for drinking,
cooking and bathing. Complaints and requests to the company and
the Government repeatedly fell on deaf ears so on the 22nd April
locals began an indefinite picket outside the factory gates demanding
its closure. For 49 days the peaceful protests continued until police
violently arrested 130 people including nine children and infants. As Nityanand Jayaraman from CorpWatch India said “As the summer
and the water crisis intensifies, the hardships of the local people
have worsened. But Coca Cola has continued its production and groundwater
extraction uninterrupted with police protection.” The water scarcity has now even hit Coke. Until recently, the company
was drawing 1.5 million litres a day from the common groundwater
resource – now it is only able to extract 800,000 litres. The
remainder is brought in by truck from borewells in neighbouring
villages. According to local estimates, Coke’s water mining
has now parched the lands of more than 2,000 people living within
1.2 miles of the factory. Dr. S. Janakarajan, an economist working on groundwater issues
said, “The trouble with Coke [in Plachimada] cannot be seen
in isolation. In this case, a community may have lost its access
to water for drinking or agricultural purposes for the sake of supplying
Coca Cola. The same has happened in other places where industries
have privatised common groundwater resources or polluted them…
In this race, those who have the resources are the winners; the
poor are the losers.” Or as one famous French woman might once
have said ‘Let them drink Coke.’ For more on this story www.corpwatchindia.org/action/PAA.jsp?articleid=1703
The United Steelworkers of America have filed a law suit against Coca Cola accusing the company of failing to ensure that workers at the plants were protected against persecution of trade unionists. “This case involves the systematic intimidation, kidnapping, detention and murder of trade unionists in Colombia, South America, at the hands of paramilitaries working as agents of corporations doing business in that country,” the lawsuit said. “With respect to their business operations in Colombia, the Defendants hired, contracted with or otherwise directed paramilitary security forces that utilized extreme violence and murdered, tortured, unlawfully detained or otherwise silenced trade union leaders of the union representing workers at Defendants’ facilities”. Colombia Solidarity Campaign 07950 923448 colombia_sc@hotmail.com
Four villagers from the Narmada Valley in India who had been fasting
for 29 days in a suburb of Bhopal, ended their protest on Wednesday.
All four, who have been directly affected by the huge Narmada Dam
Project, began their fast to demand the fair resettlement of the
6,000 people who are going to be displaced when the Maan reservoir
fills up during the monsoon season. All four were willing to die
unless their demands were met. The Maan dam is one of the dams in the Narmada Dam Project, a massive
irrigation scheme that will according to the development crazy Indian
government ‘provide large amounts of water and electricity
which are desperately required for the purposes of development’.
In reality the project is sucking money from truly long term sustainable
water solutions in this drought prone region, and will leave the
majority of the people waterless, as big agricultural projects suck
up the lion’s share. As the Maan reservoir fills up during the monsoon season 17 villages
will be submerged, displacing 6,000 people. The villagers had been
promised that they would be resettled land-for-land by December
last year, but in reality as has happened with other villages in
the Narmada valley, there is no resettlement package. Those affected
by the Maan Dam have already identified land that would be suitable
for the resettlement of the villages. The local government though
had refused to consider the option, which they thought would set
a precedent. Instead of being resettled, the villages were forcibly evicted in May when police and bulldozers moved in and sealed hand pumps, demolished school buildings and clear felled trees. The hunger strike began on the 21st May as part of a wider protest against these evictions. Finally on the 29th day the fast was called off after the Chairman of the Grievance Redressal Authority agreed to ensure that the rehabilitation of the Maan dam oustees would be completed no later than July 31st this year. Thousands of people face submergence over the coming monsoon, which will start next month and many have vowed to drown rather than leave their homes. Keep and eye out for solidarity actions happening around the globe. www.narmada.org “Since the mine started taking the water, the Mound Springs
have gone right down and they don’t function like they used
to. Our traditional story is that if the water dries up, then so
do the people.” - Kevin Buzzacott, of the Arabunna people. The Western Mining Corporation’s Beverley Uranium mine in
central Australia is sucking the life juice out of an area the size
of Texas. Slurping a whopping 42 million litres of water a day from
the Lake Eyre Basin, the mine affects hundreds of river systems,
tributaries and creeks, and threatens the livelihoods of the aboriginal
peoples in the vast desert area. A protest camp of local traditional people, and others has been held since the mine started in 1999, though it has been trashed several times by the mining company security. Earthdream are throwing a solstice party this weekend (20-21st) on mine land next to Lake Eyre, in support of local Arabunna people. For details contact: www.active.org.au/sydney
CRAP
ARREST OF THE WEEK
GRIZZLY GOINGS ONThe G8 summit, the annual meeting of the seven major industrialised
nations plus Russia, is taking place next week in Kananaskis, Canada.
As usual they will be plotting and scheming on how to take more
from the world’s poor by promoting slave labour and environmental
destruction (AKA ‘globalisation’ and ‘development’)
and claiming that they’re good for us by branding them ‘sustainable’.
Devised by the big three, the WTO, IMF and World Bank, this year’s
lucky theme is Africa – lucky because the unholy trinity will
focus all of their manipulative money making scams on it. After last years massive protests in Genoa (see SchNEWS 314/5)
it was decided to move to the remoteness of the Rockies for the
summit and put up a security fence stretching 6 ½ kilometres.
There will also be hundreds of police and soldiers, with a top-level
military commander commenting, “we are very serious …
we have lethal weapons and we will use force if we think there is
a serious threat,” warning that protesters and “limelight
seekers” who intend to test summit security in Kananaskis will
be risking their lives. Potential terrorist threats – such as the native grizzly bears
– are being used as an excuse to bring in these new hardcore
security measures. Apparently the bears pose such a threat in the
rockies that the cops will be kitted out in some very fetching outfits
(check out www.onf.ca/grizly/suit.html
and drool). Activists are still urged to go to Kananaskis, to disrupt
as much as possible using roadblocks and “Ewok” tactics
such as tree climbing. Masses of demos will also be going on around
the country and thousands of people will head to the capital. Unfortunately
Canadian cops are known to respond to anti-capitalist demos with
the subtlety we’d expect, at the last one in Ottawa. protestors
at the G20 summit, were zapped with stun guns, mauled by badly trained
police dogs and threatened with rubber bullets as riot cops held
loaded MP5 machine guns with their fingers on the triggers. For more info on the various actions, different coloured blocs and tactics see www.takethecapital.net and http://g8.activist.ca/event/ |
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