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June 5th, 2006 - U.S. won’t
Compensate Vietnam’s Agent Orange Victims: Official |
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U.S. won’t Compensate
Vietnam’s Agent Orange Victims: Official Agence
France Presse June
5, 2006, 3:23 PM ET Hanoi - The United States
won't compensate Vietnam's Agent Orange victims but will offer advice on
dealing with the wartime defoliant, a US official said, during a visit by
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. When Rumsfeld met Defence
Minister Pham Van Tra and military officials, the Vietnamese side had raised
the issue of dioxin exposure and contamination from Agent Orange, the senior
official said on the sidelines of the visit. "What we can do is make
scientific information available, historical archival information we might
have, ... technical advice on how to deal with the situation," the
official said. "We're ready to do more.
We agreed to sit down at the expert level and see what we can do," he
said. US forces widely sprayed
Agent Orange, which contained the lethal chemical dioxin, in southern Vietnam
during the conflict to deprive enemy guerrillas of forest cover and destroy
food crops. Vietnam says millions of its
people have suffered a range of illnesses and birth defects as a result of
the use of the chemical. A New York court last year
rejected a Vietnamese lawsuit against US chemical giants Monsanto and Dow
Chemical, who manufactured the herbicide during the war. The Vietnamese side
has appealed. In April, visiting US
Secretary of Veterans Affairs James Nicholson was pressed by Vietnamese
journalists on why the United States compensates its own veterans for health
defects linked to the chemical, but not Vietnam's. External link:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060605/hl_afp/usvietnamrumsfeld_060605192324 |