February 11, 2007
US donates paltry sum to "study" Agent Orange use in Vietnam.
Guardian
article, "US to help fund Agent Orange clean-up". After decades of refusing to acknowledge the long-term effects of the massive use of Agent Orange by Americans during the Vietnam war, the US has finally agreed to donate an incredibly paltry $400,000 to help research ways to remove soil still highly toxic after nearly 40 years. Note that while the article title says the US will help "fund" the clean-up, in actuality it is only helping fund research, not any actual clean-up. And $400,000, in an age where millions and billions are routinely squandered, is less than nothing. It'll probably end up going to some contractors too.
It is beyond scandalous that the US has been refusing for so many decades to acknowledge the long-term effects of its indiscriminate use of Agent Orange (and other chemicals), or to help clean up the toxic soil or help those with birth defects caused by it. The Vietnamese have continue to try to obtain legal redress for this war crime, but have had no luck so far, since the legal systems are controlled by the Americans. They continue to try however. Note that new victims are being born all of the time, this is not ancient history, but an on-going problem.
Two of the approximately four million Vietnamese people
with birth defects caused by American use of Agent Orange.
(Photograph: Richard Vogel/AP)
The US is to help fund efforts in Vietnam to clean up soil contaminated by the defoliant Agent Orange in a move hailed today as the first step in healing a long-running rift between the two former enemies.
Washington's ambassador to Vietnam said that the US would contribute $400,000 (£210,000) to a $1m study to find ways to removed the highly toxic chemical, dioxin, from earth at the war-era air force base at Danang.
It is one of three hotspots at air bases identified by US scientists, though 70m litres of the chemicals were dropped on southern Vietnam between 1961 and 1975 to strip trees of foliage and expose enemy positions and supply routes.
The move, announced at a joint media conference in Hanoi, is symbolically significant as the US has always rejected Vietnam's claims that Agent Orange — so-called because it was stored in orange barrels — caused birth defects and diseases in four million people.
The US always refused to pay compensation to the millions of Vietnamese said to have suffered from Agent Orange's effects, maintaining there was no proven scientific link. A court action brought against 37 American chemical companies by a group of Vietnamese was dismissed by US courts in 2005, but an appeal has been launched.
If the Vietnamese ever do win any court cases and obtain damages, the payments could be enormous. The wheels of justice grind slowly, but sooner or later the American people will have to pay reparations to the many peoples they've illegally attacked, and they could be in the trillions. Iraq alone will be in the trillions.
