Home ›› 13 Jun 2023 ›› Asia Biz
As a young woman, Tran To Nga was a war correspondent, a prisoner and an activist. Now, at 81, she is waging a court battle against US chemical firms to win justice for the Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange.
Nga is the first and only civilian to bring a lawsuit against the 14 multinational chemical firms, including Dow Chemical and Monsanto, that produced and sold the toxic herbicide sprayed over Vietnam by US forces during the war.
According to the World Health Organization, some batches of Agent Orange were contaminated with a dioxin -- a highly toxic environmental pollutant -- that is being investigated for its link to certain types of cancer and to diabetes. In May 2021, a French court threw Nga’s case out. But she refuses to give up.
“I will not stop. I will be on the side of the victims until my last breath,” Nga, visiting Hanoi from her home in Paris, told AFP.
“This will be my last fight, and the most difficult of all,” said Nga, herself a victim of Agent Orange who spent nine months behind bars, imprisoned by the South Vietnamese regime for her suspected connections to high-ranking communist leaders. The activist gave birth to her youngest daughter in prison, before being freed when the communists defeated US-backed South Vietnam on April 30, 1975.
Like many other first-generation victims, Nga was at first unaware she had been exposed.
In her mid-20s, she was stationed at a Viet Cong military base near Saigon -- now known as Ho Chi Minh City -- as a trainee journalist working for Hanoi’s Liberation News Agency.
Coming out of an underground shelter one day, Nga was “covered with a wet powder from a US aircraft”.
“I took a shower only when I was told that it was herbicide all over my body. But then forgot all about it,” she said.
Between early 1962 and 1971, US warplanes dropped about 19 million gallons (68 million litres) of Agent Orange -- so-called because it was stored in drums with orange bands -- to defoliate jungles and destroy Viet Cong crops.
At that time, no-one knew they had been exposed to a substance that many believe destroyed not only their lives, but also their children’s and grandchildren’s.
A year after the exposure, in 1968, Nga gave birth to her first baby, a girl born with a congenital heart defect who survived for just 17 months.
“For so long, I blamed myself for being a bad mother, giving birth to a sick baby and not being able to save her,” Nga told AFP. Nga only suspected her child was a victim of Agent Orange decades later when she encountered veterans and their disabled children in a similar situation.
Vietnam’s Association of Victims of Agent Orange says 4.8 million people were directly exposed, and more than three million have developed health problems.
The US Department of Veterans Affairs has said it assumes -- although there is no official scientifically proven link -- that some cancers, diabetes and birth defects are associated with Agent Orange exposure.
