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03/19/2006:

"Agent Orange Leaves Stigma Trail"

HANOI - Nguyen Thi Thuy was 22 when she left her village to help build roads for the North Vietnamese army during the war. She remembers crawling into tunnels during the day and covering her mouth with a wet rag when the United States military sprayed the landscape with defoliant.

"I didn't know what it was then, but it was white," she recalled. "The sky and earth were scorched. The earth had lost all its greenery. We didn't know it was Agent Orange at that time."

And now, more than three decades later, an international conference here on Thursday and Friday, will examine the social impacts of the notorious wartime herbicide. Until now, research on the effects of the chemical has focused primarily on science that proves a link between dioxin exposure and numerous diseases.

Coming, as it does, ahead of April's appeal proceedings in New York on a lawsuit brought by Vietnamese victims against the manufacturers of the defoliant, the conference has added relevance.
antiwar.com