A US$49 million US government effort begins this week to cleanse deadly Agent Orange herbicide from a former air base in Danang, central Vietnam, where Americans stored, loaded and washed chemical weapons while using the toxic defoliant during the Vietnam War.
The project will be launched on
Thursday and is headed by Vietnam’s Defense Ministry and the US Agency for
International Development (USAID).
"It's a ground-breaking
effort between the governments of the US and Vietnam for a project which will
clean up all the dioxin at the [Danang] airport remaining from the use of Agent
Orange," said Charles Bailey, director of the Washington-based Aspen Institute's
Agent Orange in Vietnam Program, in an interview on July 31 during a Bangkok
stopover. He referred to the trip as a "historic opportunity".
"At Danang, there are some
70,000 cubic meters [2.5 million cubic feet] of contaminated soil that, over
the next three years, will be cleaned up," Bailey said. "This is the
first of several major hot-spots."
The cooperative effort comes amid
a US policy "pivot" towards Asia where Washington bids to shore up
and build new alliances to counterbalance China's rising influence in the
region. China and Vietnam are locked in a diplomatic disagreement over
contested territories in the South China Sea and Vietnam is known to be keen to
expand strategic relations with the US, including greater access to sophisticated
US weapons and military equipment. In recent years, Hanoi has allowed US
warships to dock at its ports, including at Danang.
Some see the joint clean-up as a
step towards closer bilateral strategic ties. From 2007 to 2012, the US
Congress appropriated $48.7 million - including $20 million in 2012 - to
decontaminate topsoil, lakes and silt at former US bases in Vietnam. An
additional $13.7 million will come from the Ford Foundation and other private
organizations, plus the United Nations, Vietnam and other countries. Danang
will cost at least $43 million to clean. The full list of sites requires an
additional $107 million, Bailey said.
Americans, Vietnamese and others
are believed to have suffered deformities, diseases or death from dioxin and
other herbicides, which the Pentagon used to clear jungles so Vietnamese
communist soldiers could more easily be spotted, bombed, or deprived of crops
and territory. [1]
Danang, America's biggest air
base during the Vietnam War, is one of the worst cases. Agent Orange was stored
there in steel barrels, loaded onto warplanes, and washed out of the returning
planes' spray tanks. USAID awarded the clean-up contract to Massachusetts-based
TerraTherm Inc, Bailey said.
Vietnamese officials have long
sought to internationalize the issue and condemn the defoliant's main producer,
Dow Chemical, including at the ongoing 2012 London Olympic Games.
"The Dow Chemical Company is
one of the major producers of the Agent Orange, which has been used by the US
Army," wrote Hoang Tuan Anh, Vietnam's Minister of Culture, Sports and
Tourism, in a letter to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) on May 2.
"Eighty-million liters were
sprayed over villages in the south of Vietnam over 10 years, from 1961 to 1971,
destroying the environment, claiming the lives of millions of Vietnamese people
- and leaving terrible effects on millions of others who are now suffering from
incurable diseases - and some hundreds of thousands of children of the fourth
generation were born with severe congenital deformities," he wrote.
"We think that the
acceptance of IOC for Dow sponsorship was a hasty decision," the minister
said.
In 2009, the US Supreme Court
rejected an appeal by the Vietnamese to hold Dow Chemical and Monsanto liable
for birth defects allegedly linked to Agent Orange. The US Veterans
Administration, however, paid billions of dollars to Americans involved in the
Vietnam War who later suffered illnesses suspected of being caused by dioxin.
In 1994, retired US Admiral Elmo
Zumwalt Jr said in an interview he ordered millions of gallons of Agent Orange
to be sprayed in Vietnam and would do so again, even though he later believed
the dioxin caused his son to die from cancer. Zumwalt's son was a patrol boat
commander in the Mekong River delta near Saigon when Agent Orange was being
sprayed in the area.
"At the time we didn't know
it was carcinogenic. The chemical companies that made it knew. But they told
the Pentagon it was not," Zumwalt said. "Even knowing it was
carcinogenic, I would use it again. We took 58,000 dead. My hunch is it would
have been double that if we did not" spray, Zumwalt said, referring to the
war's toll on Americans.
Today, Vietnam's hospitals and
museums display jars stuffed with large foetuses that show birth defects such
as two heads on one body, limbs sticking out of torsos, and other mutations.
Hanoi's communist regimes, and
some US scientists, blame Agent Orange.
"The Vietnam Red Cross has
said about 4.5 million [Vietnamese] people were affected, including 150,000
children," but estimates vary, Bailey said.
The US sprayed land where an
estimated five million Vietnamese lived, and also poisoned Laos along its border
with Vietnam, and around US bases in the Philippines and Thailand. The war
ended in 1975 when the US and its collaborators in South Vietnam lost, allowing
North Vietnam to reunite the Southeast Asian nation.
Richard S Ehrlich
Asia Times
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