Vol. 71/No. 15      April 16, 2007

“Dioxin has long effects,” said Vu. “In some cases soldiers’ children will be normal but their grandchildren will be born with deformities. Because Agent Orange effects the gene system, we don’t know at what generation it will stop.”

Veterans’ and other mass organizations here launched an international campaign in 2004 to win compensation for the estimated 4 million Vietnamese victims of dioxin poisoning. Washington acknowledges having sprayed 20 million gallons of the deadly herbicide between 1962 and 1971, but claims there is little proof of its effects.

Washington maintains it used Agent Orange, a defoliant containing the chemical family dioxin, to clear jungles providing fighters of the National Liberation Front (NLF) cover and food. As the war intensified, fields used extensively by civilians to cultivate crops, and not just those suspected of supplying food to the NLF, were frequent targets.

Dioxin causes organ dysfunction, cancer, deformities, and mental retardation. Washington’s massive use of the chemical during its decade-long assault on Vietnam and surrounding countries poisoned water supplies and soil that impact people in Southeast Asia to this day. As of 2004, the Vietnamese Red Cross reported that 150,000 children there have birth defects that can be directly traced to their parents’ exposure to Agent Orange or the consumption of contaminated food and water.

The Vietnamese government, veterans’ organizations from six countries, including the United States, and the International Red Cross established a number of Friendship Villages throughout Vietnam in 1998. But the Hanoi facility is different, says Nguyen Ngoc Ha, a secretary here, because it focuses primarily on children. It currently treats 120 children aged 6 to 16, plus 40 veterans.

“Because so many people were affected by dioxin poisoning and we have limited finances, we give priority to those from poor families with many children,” explained Nguyen. Most of the children here come from Guang Nam and Da Nong provinces in central Vietnam.

While patients suffer from a range of conditions, the most common are brain deformities, legal blindness, speech disorders, abnormal limb development, and disorders of the cardiovascular and gastrointestinal systems.

“We train the children so that they can have a sense of achievement,” said Vu. “We teach them a daily routine like feeding and bathing themselves, to ease the burden on their families when they return. But many will continue to require assistance for even the simplest tasks,” because their conditions are so severe.

In addition to special education, patients take vocational training classes. According to Nguyen, 20 graduates from the sewing class have gone on to work in state-owned garment compounds. Many are too severely disabled to hold a job.

“Our main goal is to help them get a job and lead a normal life,” said Nguyen. “But for most of the children it is too difficult, so we see the training as a way to get them active, to aid their therapy.”

The facilities here include several buildings for housing, classes, and medical care, as well as a garden planted by volunteers and tended by patients. Most of the fruits and vegetables grown in the garden are used in the village kitchen to feed the patients, and the excess is sold at markets to help cover operating costs.

“Because most children come from the countryside, learning to catch fish helps their families make a living when they return,” Nguyen said, as she showed us an on-site fishing pond.

Volunteers from 28 countries come for two-week stints to work on construction and maintenance projects. While Militant reporters were here, two young volunteers, Megan Hanifan from Alaska and Kei Kurihara from Japan, were putting the finishing touches of a new coat of paint in a patient’s room.

In February, the U.S. government agreed to pay $400,000 toward a $1 million study to remove dioxin residues in Da Nang, Vietnam. But that’s the closest it has come to acknowledging the impact of its massive poisoning of the Vietnamese people.

Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange are currently appealing the 2005 dismissal of a lawsuit against U.S. chemical companies that manufactured Agent Orange. U.S. veterans of the Vietnam War won the right to $180 million in compensation in a 1984 lawsuit against the same companies.

Meeting in Hanoi March 10-13, the General Assembly of the World Federation of Democratic Youth adopted a resolution supporting the campaign for compensation. The document noted that “the legal struggle of the Vietnamese victims is not just for financial compensation, but … for peace and justice.”

Referring to U.S. imperialism, the statement continued, “those who are abusing the pretext of preventing weapons of mass destruction in order to threaten and invade other countries are those who have used these kinds of weapons the most deliberately, systematically and extensively in the history of humankind and who are now trying in different ways to elude their responsibilities.”

Ross Hogan and Jacob Perasso contributed to this article.  
 
 
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