Deutsche Presse-Agentur

March 28, 2006, Tuesday

08:48:41 Central European Time

SECTION: Politics

LENGTH: 650 words

HEADLINE: Vietnam conference urges compensation for Agent Orange victims

DATELINE: Hanoi

BODY:

An international conference of activists and war veterans called Tuesday for compensation and an apology from the US for spraying toxic Agent Orange defoliant over Vietnam more than 30 years ago.

Activists from at least six countries spoke at the opening of a two-day conference held in Hanoi, adding support to a Vietnamese lawsuit against the US companies that manufactured Agent Orange.

They also accused the US of war crimes for spraying the chemical that wreaked devastation on civilian populations.

"Agent Orange is not a conventional weapon. It is, instead, a weapon of mass destruction," said Joan A. Duffy Newberry, a former US Air Force nurse who was stationed at Cam Ranh Bay in central Vietnam during the war.

Vietnam estimates that hundreds of thousands of birth defects and cancers are caused by the more than 70 million litres of chemical defoliants sprayed over Vietnam during the war, in an attempt to deny communist North Vietnamese troops of jungle cover.

"Agent Orange is precisely the kind of weapon prohibited by international law for more than a century because of its unconfined, death-dealing effects," Newberry said in her conference speech.

Vietnamese activist Dang Vu Hiep, president of the Vietnam Association for the Victims of Agent Orange, said the spraying of the defoliant represented "the greatest chemical warfare ever known in the history of human beings."

Agent Orange - so called because orange strips on the barrels that contained it during the war - contained varying levels of dioxin, which is believed to cause blood disorders, leukemia and birth defects such as spina bifida. Dioxin is also suspected of causing genetic changes that can be passed down through generations.

A lawsuit brought by Vietnamese war veterans and their children against chemical companies including Dow Chemical and Monsanto was dismissed last year by a district judge in New York. The Vietnamese are appealing.

The US Veterans Administration now pays disability and compensation to more than 8,000 of its own veterans exposed to Agent Orange. The US Congress ordered payments after the chemical manufacturers settled a veterans' lawsuit in 1984 for 180 million dollars, without admitting any wrongdoing.

No US officials spoke at the conference, but the US ambassador, Michael Marine, told reporters in a recent press briefing that the Vietnamese press and government are playing politics rather than presenting sound scientific links between the chemical and disease among Vietnamese.

"I hear this constant refrain - the term 'victims of Agent Orange,'" Marin said. "What they're actually describing is every person who's disabled.

And that is simply inaccurate."

In a rare bit of good news at the conference, scientist Thomas Boivin presented results of a study that he said showed the lingering effects of dioxin are not as widespread as previously believed, but instead contained in several "hot spots" where former US bases stored the chemicals and where spills occurred.

He said research indicates that "areas aerially sprayed with Agent Orange during the war are no longer contaminated with high levels of dioxin today. These areas do not, in general, pose a human health threat."

However, thousands of Vietnamese are still at risk from lingering dioxin from around former US bases, he said. Hatfield Consultants, a research company that Boivin heads, conducted extensive research in the A Luoi district of Vietnam near the Laos border and found dioxin in the environment and in the bodies of local residents.

"The levels of dioxin we found in blood samples was as high or higher than in areas where there had been industrial accidents," Boivin said.

Boivin estimated it would take more than 20 million dollars to clean up the sites, which include former bases at Danang, A Luoi, Bien Hoa and Phu Cat. dpa kj tl