Vietnam urges US aid for Agent Orange victims
Date: 22-Apr-03
Country: VIETNAM
Author: Christina Toh-Pantin
Vietnam estimates more than one million of its people have been exposed to Agent Orange, used from 1962 to 1971 to strip trees and plants and deny communist fighters forest cover and food.
It says the product caused tens of thousands of birth defects and other diseases.
"In our opinion the most urgent task now is to bring in aid, in parallel to the ongoing research, to help Agent Orange victims overcome the consequences," Vietnamese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Phan Thuy Thanh told Reuters.
"The U.S. has a moral responsibility for this."
The study by researchers at Columbia University in New York who reanalysed military records said the amount of Agent Orange used was underestimated by seven million litres.
It said the estimates of how much chemical U.S. forces sprayed were greater by about 10 percent than previous estimates.
Washington provides no compensation to Vietnam victims of Agent Orange and says the communist country dropped claims for war reparations when ties were normalised in 1995.
The war ended in 1975.
Last year the United States and Vietnam agreed to investigate the effects of the chemical. Exposure to it has been linked to a higher risk of leukaemia and other types of cancer.
"NO EVIDENCE"
A U.S. embassy spokesman in Hanoi, asked to respond to the study, noted that Washington funds "multi-million dollar health programmes" which from the 1990s have targeted a number of diseases and conditions "including some the Vietnamese attribute without medical evidence to Agent Orange".
Agent Orange was also sprayed in Cambodia and Laos. The chemical got its name because of the coloured stripes on the containers.
The use of the herbicide was stopped in 1971 after it was discovered to contain dioxin.
An Agent Orange expert in Vietnam said he did not believe the latest assessments were significant.
"I don't think it changes the dynamics of the relationship between the U.S. and Vietnam," said Craig Leisher, who worked for four years with the U.N. Development Programme as an environmental adviser on cleaning up Agent Orange.
"The sticking point is over humanitarian assistance, and the U.S. says 'no'."
