On French President Jacques Chirac on 15 February ordered the decommissioned
French aircraft carrier Clemenceau back home, after the country’s
top administrative body ruled that the warship contained too much
asbestos to legally be sent to India for dismantling. The Clemenceau,
which had already been moored outside Indian territorial waters
as courts in India deliberated over whether to let it in, will now
be towed back to the French naval base in Brest, where it will remain
until a solution is found for its disposal.
Chirac announced the recall moments after the French Conseil d’Etat,
the supreme arbiter of the legality of government decisions, cancelled
the ship’s export documents on the grounds that the vessel contained
more asbestos than previously thought, and that it therefore fell
afoul of EU laws on industrial waste. He has also ordered an inquiry
into how much asbestos the vessel contained — one of the main areas
of contention between the French government and environmental groups.
Asbestos trade is regulated by the Basel Convention on the Control
of Transboun-dary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal.
The ship was halted en route to India in January, after an Indian
Supreme Court committee (SCMC) made an interim report recommending
that the ship not be allowed to enter Indian waters. After the committee
returned a split final decision, with seven members in favour of
accepting the ship under strict conditions and three recommending
its return to France, the Supreme Court decided on 13 February to
create a new panel of technical experts that would determine whether
the Clemenceau should be allowed to enter the country. French gov-ernment
officials had suggested that France would take the ship back if
the Supreme Court denied it permission to enter India.
The 27,300 tonne ship was headed towards India after Europe had
turned it back. The former flagship of the French Navy had come
into service in 1961 and had participated in most of the French
Naval operations. It spent 3,125 days in a total of seven seas which,
it had sailed almost 50 times. More than 20,000 sailors had served
on board of this ship. The French Navy placed the ship in special
reserve after it completed 36 years of service and later the French
ministry of defence decommissioned it. Since that time in 1997,
the ship’s voyage has been mired in controversy and it has been
looking for a shipyard for dismantling. Failing to find a shipyard
in Europe willing to take the decommissioned aircraft-carrier for
dismantling, the French authorities chose Alang on the Gujarat coast.
Countries such as India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have developed
massive shipbreaking industries in which low-wage workers, poorly
equipped to prevent both damage to themselves and the environment,
dismantle ships for scrap metal. The Clemenceau had been purchased
by an Indian company, Shri Ram Vessels Scrap Pvt Ltd. from the SDIC
( Ship Decommissioning Industry Corporation), the Panama-registered
private company retained by the French state to dispose of the ship.
Controversy over amount of toxin on board
The controversy surrounding the Clemenceau, which left France on
31 December 2005, stems from the presence on board of undetermined
quantities of hazardous materials, in particular asbestos, that
were not removed before its departure.
French authorities say that their assessment had indicated that
160 tonnes of brittle asbestos were originally present on the ship.
The vessel was sent to French scrap firm Technopure, which, according
to the French government that it had removed 115 tonnes of asbestos,
leaving 45 tonnes on board. However, the French Defence Ministry
subsequently announced that the landfill charged with disposal of
the removed waste had only provided documentation accounting for
85 tonnes of asbestos. This threw into question whether the full
115 tonnes were taken out of the ship, or whether 30 tonnes remained
in the Clemenceau over and above the 45 tonnes that were supposed
to be on board. It is important to take note of another fact—Technopure
had initially made a proposal to the SDIC for decontaminating the
ship for 6.3 million Euros but subsequently at the request of the
SDIC, a less expensive proposal valued at 3 million Euros was submitted,
accepted by the SDIC and executed. Under the revised proposal only
certain parts of the ship were covered for decontamination. The
same company, Technopure, told the Supreme Court Monitoring Committee
(SCMC) in January, that a minimum of 500 tonnes of asbestos contaminated
materials were still on board and much of this could and should
have been removed in France before sending it to be broken in India.
Technopure also said that it had removed 70 tonnes of the material
from the ship for which it has proof from the landfill but a lot
more than 115 tonnes could have been removed without damaging the
structure or the seaworthiness of the ship. Furthermore, environmental
group Green-peace and several scientists suggest that there may
be more asbestos on board than the 160 tonnes identified during
the prelimi-nary assessment. They say that the true amount of asbestos
on the ship could have been as high as 500 tonnes.
It is also possible that other carcinogenic hazardous wastes, including
polychloric biphenyls (PCBs), are present on the ship. An NGO Basel
Action Network (BAN) used a comparable US vessel to argue that the
Clemenceau likely contained a high amount of material contaminated
with PCBs. It also suggested that the transfer of the ship to India
violated the Basel Convention’s stipula-tion forbidding signatories
to undertake transboundary shipments of hazardous waste without
assurances that the destination facility meets its definition of
environmentally sound management.
Further proof that Clemenceau is and has been a toxic ship was given
by sailors and mechanics who served on it. They now suffer from
asbestois and various respiratory diseases. Several people have
died. The story of asbestos in France is a scandal. By 2015 there
will be 100,000 deaths due to asbestos poisoning.
Despite the fact that the dangers posed by asbestos were well known
in the late 1970s, it was only in 1997 that France banned the substance
after an intense pressure. There have been several high-profile
anti-asbestos trials in France and a recent Senate report rapped
the government for deliberately ignoring, under pressure from the
asbestos lobby in the country, the dangers posed by the substance.
The National Association for the Victims of Asbestos Poisoning in
France and the shipyard workers unions have been calling for a full
decontamination and dismantling of Clemenceau in France. For long,
the workers’ unions have called for the creation of a specific site
within a naval base where end-of-life warships could be disman-tled
safely without damage to human lives or the environment. But the
money interests took precedence over the lives of the workers.
Indian workers in the dock as well
Whether it is France or India, The lives of the workers have always
been subservient to the greed for the profits. Alang yards have
a long history of accidents, some of them fatal. Many of them have
been caused by the presence of flammable materials on ships that
are being dismantled, chemicals that should have been removed before
the ship was sent there, according to both the Basel Convention
and domestic law. Prior to the SCMC regulations, safety gear was
practi-cally unheard of at the yards. Even now the safety equipments
are minimal. The story of the workers is more or less the same—horror
stories of disability and death among the Alang labourers who dismantle
ships with their bare hands to earn a living. Predictably, many
of them are not even aware that the old ships they are breaking
were constructed using toxic substances. A study estimates that
one in every four labourers in Alang is likely to contract cancer
owing to workplace poisons. A common saying amongst the workers
is, “Alang se Palang” which tragically conveys the fact that anyone
who works in Alang will sooner or later end up in the hospital.
On top of this the job opportunities have also been continuously
shrinking in Alang. The industry has been slipping into dol-drums
for over a year. Up to December 2005, there were only 73 ships in
Alang and about 4000 workers—a far cry from the yard’s record peak
during 1997-98 when Alang employed over 40,000 workers. Business
used to be good not just for the shipyard owners and their workers,
but also for the number of ancilliary industries that were dependent
on shipbreaking like oil re-processing units, steel re-rolling mills
and number of shops which had sprung up along the coast to trade
the items from the ships. But now the yard wears a gloomy look.
Often the rules imposed by SCMC are made the whipping boy by the
ship breakers for the killing of the trade at Alang. But the truth
of the matter is that the policies of the state and central governments
are to blame, mainly, the unfavourable duty structures, additional
tax burdens etc. Also the tax concessions being given to the steel
industry in Kutch mean that Alang steel cannot compete with Kutch
steel in the market. It is not the SCMC regulations that are killing
the industry but the policies of the government coupled with the
unwillingness of the ship-breakers to spend from their profits and
purchase the necessary decontamination equipment.
VOYAGE NOT OVER YET
Clemenceau might have gone back for the time being but the issues
involved are here to stay. Inspite of Chirac’s decision to bring
the warship back to French waters for the duration of the legal
processes in both countries, it could, in the foreseeable future,
be sent back overseas for dismantling. Unless the workers and the
citizens arise together, the interests of profits would always try
and hold the lives and safety of the workers at ransom.
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