Agence France Presse -- English

March 28, 2006 Tuesday 8:54 AM GMT

LENGTH: 652 words

HEADLINE: Agent Orange victims demand justice for toxic damage

DATELINE: HANOI, March 28 2006

BODY:

Vietnam War veterans and activists from six countries urged the US government Tuesday to compensate millions of people they say are victims of toxins in the military defoliant Agent Orange.

Three decades after the war ended, Washington has yet to admit that the lethal chemical dioxin had harmed Vietnamese villagers and foreign soldiers through illness and birth defects, speakers told a Hanoi conference.

"This toxic chemical has destroyed the environment... and the lives of millions of Vietnamese people," said Professor Nguyen Trong Nhan of the Vietnam Dioxin/Agent Orange Victims Association.

>From 1961 to 1971, US "Operation Ranch Hand" dropped more than 80

>million

litres of defoliants, half of it Agent Orange, on southern Vietnam, exposing between 2.1 million to 4.8 million people to harm, he said.

No figures on human health defects have been universally accepted.

The two-day meeting drew veterans from Vietnam, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea to discuss the effects of the chemical that was used to strip away jungle cover and destroy enemy food crops.

Dioxin has been linked to leukemia, immune deficiencies and nervous system damage as well as birth defects. It accumulates in human tissue and can be passed on to babies through breast milk.

"It's bad when you're not just killing the enemy soldier but you're also killing his grandchildren and you're poisoning his environment," said Joan Anne Duffy Newberry, a former US Air Force nurse in Vietnam.

"Agent Orange was designed as a herbicide, but in actuality it was a weapon, a chemical weapon."

US herbicides destroyed two million hectares (4.9 million acres) of forest, half of Vietnam's mangrove areas, and animal species in many areas, said Canadian researcher Thomas Boivin of Hatfield Consultants.

Dioxin was still poisoning thousands of people near three "hot spots" -- former large US bases. They consume it through the organs of ducks and fish raised in ponds some of which are bomb craters, he said.

The US government, which sent no representatives to the meeting Tuesday, has denied liability for Vietnamese health defects caused by Agent Orange.

US ambassador Michael Marine earlier this month said the two countries had had some recent "cooperative exchanges" toward jointly studying the problem but also criticised Vietnam for blaming too many disability cases on the toxin.

"I hear this constant refrain: the term 'victims of Agent Orange'," he told a press briefing. "What they're describing is every person who's disabled. And that's, as I'm sure you know, simply inaccurate."

New Zealand Green Party legislator Sue Kedgley said it was "scandalous"

that Washington still denied having created a "toxic environment in Vietnam," something her government had now accepted.

"The US government offers free medical treatment to American veterans who fought in Vietnam for a range of illnesses," she said. "Yet it refuses to give assistance to hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese who suffer from exactly the same illnesses caused by exactly the same agents."

Monsanto Corp, Dow Chemical and other former producers of Agent Orange in

1984 paid 180 million dollars to US veterans without admitting liability.

Last year a New York court dismissed a Vietnamese lawsuit, but in January a South Korean court ordered chemical companies to compensate 6,800 veterans. The companies have appealed.

Nhan said that "to fight and defeat the Americans in the war was difficult. Winning in court is even more difficult."

Activists said a victory in the Agent Orange battle may help limit the future use of other toxic weapons.

"They poisoned the land of Vietnam and people are suffering 30 years later," said Daniel Shea, a Vietnam War Marine turned peace activist.

"Now we see depleted uranium used in Iraq, Bosnia, Afghanistan. These things are lying around, children are picking them up. We don't know what's going to happen to them."