Fight continues to combat Agent Orange

The U.S. war against the Vietnamese people continues, though it officially ended 35 years ago. The poisonous legacy of the war — the contamination of the land with chemicals like dioxin in Agent Orange — continues to maim millions of Vietnamese, now into the third generation.

But the effects of the 82 million liters of dioxin-containing Agent Orange that the U.S. sprayed in Vietnam are not limited to that population. U.S. GIs were also poisoned and are now dealing with myriad disabilities, as are their offspring.

The Vietnam Agent Orange Relief and Responsibility Campaign, which sponsored the Fifth Agent Orange Justice Tour from April 14 to May 16, is continuing its international fight to rectify this situation, said coordinator Merle Ratner at a May 8 meeting in New York City. Though its legal suit charging chemical companies like Monsanto and Dow with war crimes was denied in federal court in 2009, the campaign has a new strategy.

Susan Schnall, a leading anti-Vietnam War activist with Veterans for Peace who has seen the horrific effects of Agent Orange first-hand, announced that Rep. John Conyers of Michigan is writing a bill to expand disability benefits to U.S. veterans and their children, clean up hot spots like Danang in Vietnam and provide public health benefits to disabled Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans.

Nguyen Thi Hien, a dynamic leader of the Vietnam Association for Victims of Agent Orange/Dioxin and president of the Danang chapter of VAVA, spoke movingly about the 4.8 million people who are exposed daily to the poison. A U.N. study estimates dioxin contaminates 15 percent of the countryside.

Hien noted that 61 chapters of VAVA deal with 3 million people living with devastating physical and mental disabilities traced to the toxic chemicals. She explained that though the U.S. government has donated $3 million to help the disabled, that money, distributed by nongovernmental organizations, never reached those in desperate need.

Pham The Minh is one of them. He traced the abnormalities in his heart and lungs, as well as the deformity in his legs, to his parents who fought in a heavily sprayed province. Minh’s father died of cancer in 2005, and his younger sister just gave birth to a third-generation son with severe physical problems.

“Many babies with no limbs or eyes die very young,” he said, while others are forced to live with severe mental and physical conditions. Noting that many disabled now receive small allowances from private charities, Minh stressed, “We need the U.S. to cooperate with our government to improve the living conditions of the victims.”

“There are consequences to wars,” summed up Ratner. “We must make the U.S. pay for the war in Vietnam.”