Monday, Aug 09, 2004
Agent Orange refuses to be history
By William Glaberson and Doan Bao Chau
NEW YORK, AUG. 8. In 1984, after years of battles over science and damage tabulations, seven American chemical companies settled a huge class-action suit by Vietnam veterans who claimed that the defoliant Agent Orange caused cancer, birth defects and a nightmarish brew of other health problems.
The companies paid out $180 million. By 1997, after the last payments had been made, 2,91,000 people had received benefits. The settlement was reached after a federal judge persuaded the companies to buy themselves out of protracted litigation. It was called a landmark legal peace on a brutally contentious issue and it was supposed to be the final word from the courts on Agent Orange, a defoliant containing the deadly substance dioxin.
But today, a new cast of plaintiffs, this time Vietnamese as well as American, has returned to the same U.S. court seeking justice and dollars. One suit filed on behalf of as many as four million Vietnamese says their land and people were so poisoned by Agent Orange that supplying it to the military amounted to war crimes by the chemical companies.
In other suits, U.S. veterans say they have only now come to learn of their devastating health problems, with the money gone.
The claims are more than empty reminders of an old fight. Judge Jack B. Weinstein, whose aggressive handling of the Agent Orange case in the U.S. District Court in Brooklyn in the 1980s brought him wide attention and considerable anger, has said that the Vietnamese suit raises serious issues. The U.S. Supreme Court has said that the new cases by American veterans cannot be automatically barred.
The chemical companies say fairness dictates that the time for the legal battle they thought they had ended a generation ago has come and gone. They claim the science still does not prove that Agent Orange was responsible for any of the medical horrors its name has long brought to mind.
Whatever the fate of the suits, the revival of the Agent Orange battle means that, these days, there are ghosts in the Brooklyn federal courthouse - of a divisive war, of modern battle tools, of hard feelings by people in two countries who were caught up in combat long ago.
"Doesn't it ever end? When will Agent Orange become history," asked Kenneth R. Feinberg, a Washington lawyer who was a special master in the Agent Orange case 20 years ago and recently ran the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund.
Lawyers for Dow Chemical, Monsanto, Hercules and more than a dozen other chemical companies named in the legal battle say that the claims of war crimes by the companies are unsupportable. They note that the companies were ordered by the Pentagon to make Agent Orange and say that if there is to be any compensation to Vietnam, it should be a result of negotiations between the two governments.
But in recent interviews in Vietnam and the U.S., people who say they are victims of Agent Orange echoed one another in the strength of their conviction that a wrong is yet to be fully righted.
In a sparsely furnished Hanoi apartment, one of the Vietnamese plaintiffs, a doctor, described working since the war with people she believed were victims of Agent Orange. Many were spurned for years, said the doctor, Phan Thi Phi Phi, because of a belief in Vietnam that people who had malformed children were paying the price of their ancestors' immoral lives.
Dr. Phi Phi, a small woman who spoke softly, said she was a victim herself. During the war she worked in a mobile hospital in an area of South Vietnam that was a target of U.S. spraying. She had four miscarriages, she said, and nearly died. Agent Orange, she said, "destroys human life for many generations."
Joe Isaacson, a school administrator and Vietnam veteran from Toms River, New Jersey, has been fighting cancer since the 1990s. His simmering anger about Agent Orange sounded much like Dr. Phi Phi's. "We didn't know," he said, "that it was more dangerous than the enemy." -- New York Times News Service.
Copyright © 2004, The Hindu.