Strategic US clean-up in
Vietnam By Richard S Ehrlich
BANGKOK - 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
fetuses that show birth defects such as two heads
on one body, limbs sticking out of torsos, and
other mutations.
Hanoi's communist regime,
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 is a
Bangkok-based journalist. He has reported news
from Asia since 1978 and is co-author of the
non-fiction book of investigative journalism,
"Hello My Big Big Honey!" Love Letters to
Bangkok Bar Girls and Their Revealing
Interviews. His websites are
http://www.asia-correspondent.110mb.com and
http://www.flickr.com/photos/animists/sets
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road,
Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
