Environmental News 24.7.13, Part I: Yes, American Soldiers Were Affected by Agent Orange, but not Vietnamese Citizens, Says U.S. When the Vietnamese War finished, the Americans blithely headed off to create other battlefields, began using pesticides and poisons on their own crops and started experimenting with transgenics and frankenfoods. Meanwhile, the people of Vietnam continued to suffer the horrible consequences of a war fought, not only with guns and bombs, but with dioxin laced herbicides. The U.S. Air Forces sprayed more than 20 million gallons of Agent Orange (and other herbicides) over parts of Southern Vietnam and along the borders of Laos and Cambodia and, even now, forty years later, people are still experiencing birth defects and high incidences of chemical related cancers. The United States has never accepted responsibility for these victims – it denies that Agent Orange is responsible for diseases among Vietnamese that are accepted as Agent Orange-caused among American veterans – and it’s unclear when this chain of misery will end. The Vietnam Red Cross estimates that Agent Orange has affected 3 million people spanning three generations, including at least 150,000 children born with severe birth defects since the war ended in 1975. The Americans HAVE attempted to make some amends, by starting, last year, to remove dioxins from 47 acres of contaminated soil at Da Nang International Airport – but, this small exercise some 37 years after the war ended is not nearly enough to combat the horrors that these people continue to face. Very little American aid has gone the Vietnamese way either, despite the fact that all 2.8 million Americans who were exposed to Agent Orange qualify for compensation if they become sick from any of the 15 illnesses apparently caused by their exposure. “U.S. officials have long held, however, that there’s no proof that Agent Orange is to blame for the same diseases and birth defects in Vietnam.” Said journalist Chris Hedges, recently. sacbee/2013/07/22/5586305/4-decades-after-war-ended-agent.html
Posted on: Tue, 23 Jul 2013 20:30:06 +0000
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