When news of the disastrous BP oil well explosion reached the residents of Jean Lafitte, Louisiana last April, Mayor Tim Kerner did the only thing he could think of to stop the oil from destroying his community. He encouraged everyone in his town to join him on the water, working day and night throughout the disaster to clean-up the spill.

Now, one year after BP managed to cap the runaway well that fouled the Gulf of Mexico with an estimated five million barrels of oil, most of those people are ill.

“I’m afraid my neighbors will come to me and say, I wouldn’t have listened to you and kept my job if I knew it would kill me,” Kerner said.

Kerner’s story was one of many shared by Kerry Kennedy, president of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, at a briefing Wednesday evening, the day after she led a delegation to the Gulf Coast to assess the scope of the emerging healthcare crisis in the wake of the BP drilling disaster.

“The residents are sick,” Kennedy told IPS. “They don’t know what the exact cause of their illness is, but because they never suffered this way before the spill and they were all out on their fishing boats throughout the clean-up, they suspect this has something to do with the toxins.”

“Coughing, respiratory irritation, and eye irritation were the most common,” Rolfes told IPS. “[Respondents] described that the symptoms came on suddenly and they left suddenly and that would be consistent with getting some sort of wave of chemical exposure, even when we took things like allergies into account.”

But Kennedy told IPS that local physicians are hesitant to link their patients’ symptoms to the oil.

“They don’t have the expertise to make a diagnosis in toxicology, they don’t know how to treat that diagnosis, and if they do attempt to treat it, they risk losing their medical licenses,” she said.

And in a predominately rural region where a majority of patients are self-employed and uninsured, the health care facilities are too far away and access to toxicology experts is near impossible,” Kennedy added.

“Even where that expertise is available, few can afford the expensive tests and medicines needed to treat toxic poisoning,” she continued.

At the briefing, Kennedy’s colleagues expressed hope that Congress would preserve funding for an expanding network of healthcare “centres of excellence”, including a low-cost model site soon to be established in honour of Robert Kennedy in Jean Lafitte.

“They don’t have the medical staff able to understand the effects of these toxins…so [patient’s complaints] sound very fanciful and are quite often written off,” said Steven Bradberry, executive director of the New Orleans-based Alliance Institute, which hosted the delegation.

“This is what we’re going for with these centers of excellence, where we can have people who are familiar with the various toxins and the effects of toxins…so that patients can have somewhere in the region where they can get information on [the symptoms] they are observing,” Bradberry said.

Their appeal has critical timing, as the explosive budget debate currently rocking Capitol Hill has been rife with calls to slash funds for programmes like Medicare, that are crucial to the livelihoods of low-income oil spill victims with new health concerns.

“We think it’s a serious crisis and the federal government needs to grab hold of this in a more aggressive way and provide the wherewithal to make sure that the hundreds of thousands of people who were impacted by the spill have their health care protected,” Phil Johnston, a member of the RFK Center’s board, emphasised.

Little mention was made of BP and its partners who, already facing possible legal ramifications for the disaster, pledged a 20-billion- dollar compensation fund to protect those impacted by the spill.

Earlier this month, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder informed Ken Feinberg, the man appointed to administer BP-related claims after his highly esteemed work with the September 11 Compensation Fund, that the Justice Department would initiate an independent audit based on complaints about the transparency of Feinberg’s claims process.

A brief filed Monday called the process an “abject failure,” and cited that the fund has so far paid only 16 percent of interim claims filed.

A recent study carried out by Advocates for Environmental Rights (AEHR) reported a discrepancy in the way Feinberg administered claims from previous disaster funds that were paid out with tax payer dollars – like 9/11 – with claims for the BP Oil Spill Compensation Fund, whose payments are siphoned from BP’s own piggy bank.

“We found that in past disasters, the folks who were filing claims did not have to show proof of causation. All they had to do was say they were ill, they were at this place or in this location, and so it was. Their claims were taken care of,” Michele Roberts, campaign and policy coordinator for AEHR, told IPS.

However, in the case of the BP Oil Spill Compensation Fund, Gulf residents have learned that their claims are denied if they cannot provide proof that BP and its dispersant are the exact cause of their illness, Roberts said, calling the inconsistency “a direct human rights violation.”

Rolfes is equally unimpressed with BP’s compensation efforts.

“You look around, you don’t see health clinics, all you see are BP- sponsored ads around town and in newspapers that say everything is fine,” Rolfes told IPS. “It’s not fine. Until I see health centres being built in every parish where there was an impact, I haven’t seen an adequate response.”

“What we need is healthcare now and that should be funded by BP,” Rolfes added. “It’s not right for the tax payer to pick up the tab for BP’s oil disaster.”

By Lily Hough and Naseema Noor
WASHINGTON, Jul 14 2011 (IPS)

As South Sudan was admitted as the 193rd member of the United Nations on Thursday, officials in Washington said the hard work in the fragile new country has just begun.

“[The U.S.] has stood with the peoples of Sudan throughout these struggles…and we must remain involved until there is lasting peace in the region,” U.S. Senator John Kerry said at a special Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing here Thursday.

“We should recognise that while only one country is joining the community of nations, the reality is that two nations emerged on Jan. 9: the newly independent south and a greatly changed north,” he added. “Both of these nations are fragile, and they will remain that way until they reach an agreement that allows them to live separately but work together.”

Ambassador Princeton Lyman, U.S. Special Envoy to Sudan, said at the hearing that the U.S. is prepared to help the newly separated Sudan face its uncertain economic future, as it will be forced to adjust to a significant loss of oil revenue and will need debt relief, access to resources and a sustainable climate for private investment – but only on the condition that it fulfills its obligations under the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA).

“It depends on their behaviour and what happens these next weeks and months in terms of accountability,” Lyman added, pointing out that the U.S. has already taken initial steps to normalise bilateral relations but will not move forward without a demonstrated commitment from the north.

“It’s not a matter of dictation,” Lyman said. “It’s a matter of living up to international standards and [Sudan’s] own promises. So this is going to be a critical component of their own ability to succeed.”

President Omar al-Bashir raised hopes for such an agreement earlier this week by indicating that Sudan would stabilise and develop the Blue Nile and Southern Kordofan states.

But some human rights groups contend that the reality on the ground paints a less hopeful picture.

The hearing, called to address the most pressing challenges facing South Sudan, fell on the same day that the Satellite Sentinel Project (SSP), a United States-based satellite monitoring group, released a report with images alleged to be evidence of mass graves in Sudan’s Southern Kordofan state.

The advocacy group claims that photographs of three dug-up sites are consistent with mass graves and thus evidence of systematic murder, which may support accusations by human rights groups that the North’s military has targeted the ethnic Nuba peoples in the border region.

“The three excavated areas positively identified by imagery analysis, independent of eye-witness reports, corroborate allegations by two eyewitnesses of potential mass graves south of the Tilo School in Kadugli,” stated the report.

Concerns from international human rights groups over a potential humanitarian crisis unfolding in the region – where some 100,000 civilians have been displaced from their homes, according to the U.N. – have delayed negotiations over the contentious status of Abyei, which sits at the heart of the conflict.

The international community fixed an eye on the region as a breeding ground for human rights atrocities after the north’s Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) forcefully annexed the oil-rich area in May and violence intensified when the south’s Sudan People Liberation’s Army (SPLA) deployed retaliatory troops in June.

“Our timetable got derailed by the military takeover of Abyei. [Now], we need to make sure that Abyei is demilitarised and the people feel safe and then we can deal with this issue, so it has been delayed and I’m bothered by it, “Lyman said.

“I think we ought to have a very firm timetable for addressing [the status of Abyei] because otherwise it just lingers as a source of conflict,” he added.

To date, as the vicious border conflicts in the area proceed, with the U.N. humanitarian office reporting SAF-launched aerial bombardments of SPLA areas this week, they threaten to unravel any semblance of stability accorded by the CPA.

In the wake of celebrations over South Sudan’s successful January referendum and transition toward independence, the U.S. has urged both al-Bashir and Salva Kiir, President of South Sudan, to quickly return to the negotiating table and settle unfinished business in the completion of the CPA.

Along with Abyei’s uncertain status, several other critical issues – namely, the establishment of mutually-beneficial arrangements regarding oil revenues, citizenship status and a method for securing peace along their shared border – were, according to the CPA, to be negotiated by Jul. 9, but today remain unresolved.

“How these outstanding issues are managed over the near term will define the future relationship between Sudan and South Sudan,” Lyman said. “Allowing these issues to linger without resolution for too long could destabilise the future relationships between [the two nations].”

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