[Vnbiz] Vietnamese take painful Agent Orange battle to heart of old enemy

[Phan, Tai]

Vietnamese take painful Agent Orange battle to heart of old enemy

Frank Zeller 
The Standard -
Monday, June 11, 2007

When Nguyen Van Quy's platoon fought in the Vietnam War battlefields of Kontum in 1972, his soldiers moved through eerie landscapes where the US defoliant Agent Orange had stripped the jungle bare.
"All the big trees were dead, they had no leaves," the 52-year-old veteran remembers. "Only the new undergrowth was green. We saw big chemical drums, but at the time we didn't know what they were."

Finding food was difficult in the denuded mountains, forcing the young soldiers to forage for frogs, cassava and wild plants and drink water from local streams, the former platoon leader said.

Quy was wounded three times as his North Vietnam forces battled the US- backed Saigon regime - but the worst pain, he said, came years after the war ended in communist victory in 1975.

Today Quy has stomach cancer and liver and lung disease. His first child died at birth, he said, his 20-year-old son is paralyzed, and his 18-year-old daughter is deaf and mute and suffers from mental retardation.

Quy blames dioxin, the highly toxic chemical and known carcinogen in the herbicides of which US forces sprayed up to 80 million liters over southern Vietnam between 1961 and 1971. Agent Orange was sprayed from US and South Vietnamese aircraft to defoliate forests and mangroves to deprive the enemy of cover and food supplies.

Quy was Sunday set to arrive in the United States with a delegation of the Vietnamese Association of Victims of Agent Orange/Dioxin, or VAVA, to fight for compensation from 37 US firms that produced Agent Orange. Their case against the companies, including giants Dow Chemical and Monsanto, was thrown out in 2005, but the plaintiffs will launch their appeal June 18 at a federal court in New York.

The court hearing will take place on the same day Vietnam's President Nguyen Minh Triet comes to New York ahead of a June 22 meeting with US President George W Bush, the first US visit by a postwar Vietnamese head of state.

Hanoi says around 4.8 million Vietnamese have been exposed to dioxin with more than three million people eventually becoming victims of Agent Orange.

Washington has denied responsibility and pointed to an absence of universally agreed scientific data on the chemical's effects.

In a sign of closer cooperation, the United States offered Vietnam US$400,000 (HK$3.12 million) to study the cleanup of a "dioxin hotspot," the former US airbase and Agent Orange depot in the central coastal city of Danang.

But VAVA says the amount does not address the disastrous consequences of chemical warfare - millions who have suffered a variety of diseases and birth defects.

VAVA vice president Nguyen Trong Nhan predicted their legal battle would be "extremely difficult."

"Vietnam is a poor country and the American companies are very rich and Vietnamese victims are suing in a US court." But he said the Vietnamese are confident of victory. "We lost some battles against the Americans, but we won the war. It will be the same in this case. We are in a winning position. Many people say that politically we have already won." 

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE