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 Editorials | Environmental | May 2005 
Vietnam: The Unpunished Crimes of Agent Orange
 Renι Backmann - Le Nouvel Observateur
| | The Legacy of Agent Orange Exposure |
Thirty years after the return of peace, while American veterans who were poisoned by the defoliants the US Air Force spread obtained reparations twenty years ago, Vietnamese civilians have just had their suit dismissed.
At the same moment that commemorates the 1975 entry of the Vietcong resistance and their North Vietnamese allies into Saigon, catastrophically evacuated by American soldiers, that war continues to kill. In a construction site of a country that had only rediscovered peace after three decades of combat and more than two million deaths, the war is now a veterans' legacy, and the only dangers that come from the sky today are monsoon deluges. But a silent, invisible weapon continues to threaten the population of certain regions, even though less than half that population has ever known the clamor of mortars and bombs.
Agent Orange, which was one of the principal defoliants used by the American army over ten years, continues to ravage the people and the environment.[1] One of the by-products of the use of this herbicide, sometimes contained in very high concentrations in the "clouds" sprayed over the forests of central and south Vietnam, is, in fact, dioxin, a chemical product the very high toxicity of which has been indisputably established. A particularly stable chemical compound, resistant to heat up to 1000°C, not very soluble in water, but quite soluble in fats - that is to say liable to accumulate in the tissues and bodily fluids of human and animal organisms - dioxin, even in infinitesimal doses, is dangerous to the health of living beings. It can cause skin lesions, alterations in liver function and immune system response, glandular dysfunction in the endocrine and reproductive systems of those exposed to it. It can also cause birth defects as well as physical and mental handicaps.
In the absence of definitive epidemiological studies, the cause-and-effect relationship between dioxin's presence in the environment and the development of cancers is debated by scientists. However, studies in the United States conducted on veterans exposed to defoliants have allowed it to be established that there exist, at the very least, correlations between dioxin and the occurrence of several types of pathology, including several cancers. In Vietnam, statistical studies have demonstrated that the families in which a parent or grandparent had been exposed to the defoliant clouds have a more frequent occurrence than others of spontaneous abortions and congenital malformations.
In 1961, John Kennedy gave the green light for the launch of Operation Ranch Hand, code name for the dispersion of defoliants that continued for ten years. The objective of Ranch Hand was to eradicate vegetation along the main thoroughfares and around military bases, to eliminate forest leaf cover in order to detect the Vietcong's supply lines and to destroy crops in the areas controlled by the resistance. In a single pass, a Provider bi-plane could treat an area 150 meters wide and 8.7 kilometers long. Specialists estimate that more than 75 million liters of herbicides - of which at least 61% was Agent Orange - were poured over Vietnam in ten years: which represents close to 400 kilos [880 lbs.] of dioxin. According to the sources, between 1.5 and 2.5 million acres were "sprayed." The number of people directly affected by this spraying varies according to the sources from 1 to 4.8 million.
It took six years, after the protests of the scientific community against the use of this true "chemical weapon," before Washington decided to stop Operation Ranch Hand in 1971. And thirteen more years before American veterans who were victims of Agent Orange were able to get the seven companies that made the product - including Monsanto and Dow Chemical - to implicitly acknowledge their responsibility by agreeing to pay close to 200 million dollars into a compensation fund. It is true that the veterans received a heavy corroboration in the person of Admiral Elmo Zumwalt. Leader of American naval forces in Vietnam form 1968 to 1970, then head of naval operations until 1974, Admiral Zumwalt, who had been in favor of the use of defoliants to protect soldiers' security, took the measure of their harmfulness when his son, Elmo III, Captain of a patrol boat in the Mekong Delta, was killed by a cancer of the lymphatic system at age 48 and when his grandson, Elmo IV, was born with a mental handicap.
Today, twenty years after the suit of American veterans, it's the Vietnamese victims who hope to obtain reparations. The association that has represented them since 2004 filed a suit in a New York court for violations of international law, war crimes, manufacture of dangerous products ... against the companies that produced Agent Orange. However, the arguments advanced by the veterans did not play in favor of Vietnamese civilians. When he had to reach a verdict on this case on March 10, Federal Judge Jack Weinstein took the side of the representatives of the Departments of State and Justice. He declared that the plaintiff's case had no merit and denied their suit.
Translation: t r u t h o u t French language correspondent Leslie Thatcher. |
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