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| A warning sign near Danang airport. The sign reads: "Dioxin contamination zone livestock, poultry and fishery operations not permitted." |
“We get very little financial support and it is hard for us to get contracts and compete against other businesses that employ able-bodied workers,” explains Nguyen Thi Hong.
The 54-year-old founder of the centre employs disabled young people. They are, she believes, victims of the Agent Orange dumped on Vietnam’s jungles 40 years ago.
The problem is proving it.
Medical reports have found “compelling evidence” linking a rise in birth defects and miscarriages in Iraqi cities to toxic waste left over from years of fighting. But in this central Vietnamese city the cause-and-effect of modern disabilities and Vietnam War chemicals is not so clear. Or it is not accepted as clear.
Part of the issue is whether the American government and chemical manufacturers owe support and restitution to those suffering from bad health and deformities that appear to be linked to Agent Orange.
“Almost every one of the villages I visited in the six months I was setting up the centre had disabled young people because of Agent Orange,” says Nguyen. “This central area was heavily bombed by the Americans so a lot of children are now disabled, especially in the high mountain areas.”
Nguyen’s own nephew is blind and has severe mental disabilities. “He just lies down all day and screams all of the time.” She felt she needed to do something to help him and others who appear to have been disabled by the war.
For almost a decade starting in the 1960s, approximately 80 million litres of Agent Orange were sprayed over a 78,000-square-kilometre area of southern and central Vietnam.
The chemical defoliant, which contains toxic dioxin, was used to clear vast stretches of forest but had a devastating effect on the health of those caught underneath. Significant quantities ended up in the soil and nearby water supplies. They have been blamed for abnormally high incidences of miscarriages, skin diseases, cancers and birth defects ever since.
“There are millions of young people in central Vietnam alone struggling with the affects of Agent Orange,” says Nguyen Cuong, chairman of Thua Thien Hue Agent Orange Organization in Vietnam. Some international estimates put the total number of those affected in Vietnam today at around 3 million, out of a population of 88 million.
The chemical companies, however, say there is no scientific proof that Agent Orange was responsible for significant health impacts. For years Vietnamese activists have been trying to get recognition and financial support from the U.S. government and the corporations. Their fight has been largely fruitless and overlooked.
The latest attempt to get compensation failed in 2008, after a U.S. court ruled the companies were protected by the “military contractor defence,” which shields independent military contractors from such liability.
Yet, in February this year, another U.S. court approved a settlement for a domestic class-action lawsuit filed by residents who said the chemical manufacturer Monsanto polluted their West Virginia community by burning waste left over from producing Vietnam War-era Agent Orange. The company agreed to create funds worth upwards of $90 million for long-term health monitoring and chemical cleaning near one of its former plants.
“For Vietnamese victims, the U.S. really hasn’t acknowledged culpability at all,” says Marjorie Cohn, a professor at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego and a board member of the Vietnam Agent Orange Relief and Responsibility Campaign.
Cohn is part of a concerted effort to push through a bill in the U.S. that would, for the first time, extend medical support to Vietnamese nationals suffering from illnesses linked to exposure to Agent Orange. Perhaps more importantly, it would offer support for any victim, even if they were born after the war.
Doan Minh Bao, 27, was born with both physical and mental handicaps; he can barely speak or move his hands. He works at the Hope Centre sweeping floors and sorting cloth.
“I’ve been here eight years,” he tells me through a translator. “I have no other place to go.”
Doan’s father was doused with Agent Orange when he was a soldier stationed in the mountains in central Vietnam. His mother and father live nearby but, like so many uneducated Vietnamese, they have been unable to do anything other than offer limited financial support. Little medical help or guidance is available.
“I want to do things — like chores — and have a purpose, but when I arrived all I could do was cleaning. I studied sewing but my hands made it impossible,” he says, stuttering with visible difficulty.
The Hope Centre used to receive help from international NGOs but this has mostly dried up. Now, it relies almost solely on winning business contracts and selling trinkets to visitors. Other similar organizations are finding it equally difficult.
“We are encountering difficulties in fundraising because of the global economic crisis,” says Dang Vu Dung, director of the Vietnam Friendship Village, located in the outskirts of the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi.
The Friendship Village currently looks after 120 children and 60 war veterans. It has helped more than a thousand “victims of Agent Orange” since it was founded in 1988 by an American war veteran.
There are signs the U.S. is starting to take more responsibility for Agent Orange damage. During an official U.S. visit to the country in 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton remarked that the remaining chemicals in the ground were “a legacy of the painful past we share.”
In August, the U.S. and Vietnam jointly began a landmark $43-million cleanup of chemicals left at Danang, a U.S. airbase during the war. The cleanup of the site, one of dozens of chemical hot spots left over from the war, is expected to last four years.
“We are both moving earth and taking the first steps to bury the legacies of our past,” U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam David Shear said during the groundbreaking ceremony.
Professor Cohn believes the recent moves aren’t enough.
“Yes, the U.S. government has appropriated money to clean the hot spot at Danang, which is probably the most contaminated site, but there is no recognition to the harm done to the people and nothing given for the victims.”
According to a July 2011 report by the U.S.-Vietnam Dialogue Group on Agent Orange/Dioxin, the U.S. government donated just $6.4 million for Vietnamese suffering disabilities linked to Agent Orange between 2000 and 2011. This leaves the burden of supporting the millions affected on the families, local communities and NGOs.
“The majority of victims we can’t help — they are too disabled,” says the Hope Centre’s Nguyen.
Her voice drops to a whisper as she explains that her 13-year-old nephew is too disabled to work even in a supportive environment. In all likelihood, he will, like many other young Vietnamese victims, simply be a burden on his parents and siblings for the rest of his life.
Original Article
Source: the star
Author: Kit Gillet
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