The Paris Court of Appeal is due to deliver its decision on Thursday on the liability of 14 agrochemical companies, including Bayer-Monsanto, which supplied the toxic product to the US army.
This is the “last fight of [sa] life”. Franco-Vietnamese Tran To Nga, 82, has asked the French courts for compensation for herself and all those affected by “Agent Orange”, an ultra-toxic defoliant used during the Vietnam War. She will find out on Thursday, August 22, whether the Paris Court of Appeal will open the way to recognizing the responsibility of 14 agrochemical giants, including Bayer-Monsanto, who supplied this product to the American army.
Tran To Nga was exposed to Agent Orange, so-called because of the color of the drums in which it was stored, sixty years ago. As a 22-year-old journalist, she was covering the fighting in the Vietnam War for the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF) news agency. While she was At the Cu Chi military base, she ventures out of the underground shelter of the resistance fighters. “I heard a plane fly over us and drop a product, a cloud enveloped me. I started to scratch myselfshe tells franceinfo. My mother shouted at me, ‘You’re crazy, go wash yourself, it’s a defoliant!'”
Between 1961 and 1971, the US military dropped 80 million liters of chemicals from the air over the forests of former French Indochina, as documented in the Stellman Report, published in 2003. Agent Orange accounted for almost two-thirds of these herbicides. By doing so, the United States intended to eliminate the dense vegetation where the Viet Cong fighters, the nationalist and communist armed force, were hiding.
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Ignoring the deleterious effects of Agent Orange on human health, Tran To Nga has “quickly forgot the incident”. Unknowingly, she continued, like thousands of her compatriots, to be exposed to the product by walking in the swamps and consuming contaminated local water and vegetables. In 1968, she gave birth to a baby girl, who died at the age of 17 months from a “congenital heart defect”.
The only explanation Tran To Nga is told is that she had to “being a bad mother in past lives to deserve this punishment”It was only forty years later that she made the connection with Agent Orange. “In 2008, I visited victims of the agent and met with cases that were similar to mine. I realized that maybe I had been a victim of it too.”she testifies.
“That wound never healed. Now I know that the criminal who killed my daughter and caused this tragedy in my life was Agent Orange.”
Tran To Ngato franceinfo
Like Tran To Nga, between 2.1 and 4.8 million people were exposed to Agent Orange – mostly Vietnamese, but also Cambodians and Laotians – the Stellman report states. Several organizations and scientists have since demonstrated the danger to the human body of this defoliant, because of its high dioxin content. This pollutant can “cause reproductive and developmental problems, damage the immune system, interfere with the endocrine system and cause cancer”pointed out the World Health Organization in 2010.
Tran To Nga gained a better understanding of his health problems when blood tests in 2011 revealed “a high dioxin level”. She suffered “two tuberculosis, one cancer” and has type 2 diabetes. Her two daughters, born in the 1970s, also have “health problems”such as chloracne, one of the typical Agent Orange diseases listed by the United States Department of Veterans Affairs. “LThese aftereffects are passed down from generation to generation”points out the octogenarian.
Because Agent Orange has also ravaged wildlife. “By the end of the war, one-fifth of South Vietnam’s forests had been chemically destroyed, and more than a third of the mangroves had disappeared.”argued science journalist Fred Pearce in 2000 in The UNESCO Courier. The term “ecocide” was first used in 1970 to describe this operation by American troops. Decontamination operations on dioxin-rich land in central Vietnam only began in 2012, as recalled The World. This is a period when more people may have been affected.
In 1984, 15,000 American veterans were awarded $180 million (equivalent to €225 million at the time) in compensation to be shared between them after an out-of-court settlement with the chemical companies that were sued, including Monsanto and Dow Chemical, the report said. The WorldThey said they had suffered from cancer, liver disease and nervous disorders since returning from Vietnam, where they were exposed to Agent Orange.
But the Vietnamese victims have never received compensation. In 2005, the association representing them was dismissed by the American courts, then by the Supreme Court five years later, on the grounds that the defoliant dumped was a herbicide, and not a chemical weapon.
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In 2014, Tran To Nga was encouraged by the Vietnam Dioxine collective, created ten years earlier, to sue the manufacturers of the herbicide. A French speaker since childhood, the former journalist was decorated with the Legion of Honor and obtained French nationality in the early 2000s for her work with the National Association of Former Interned Prisoners Deported from Indochina (Anapi). Becoming Franco-Vietnamese gave her the opportunity to initiate proceedings in France as a victim of Agent Orange. “At first she refused”reports Micheline Pham, from the Vietnam Dioxin Collective, to franceinfo. “But eShe finally accepted for all those victims who have not managed to obtain legal recognition. This fight is in her blood.”she insists.
“If I didn’t do it, no one else could do it and the crime of Agent Orange would be buried forever in the dust of history.”confirms Tran To Nga. In 2021, she was dismissed by the court of Evry (Essonne). Reason, according to the judges: the companies have “acted on orders and on behalf of the American state”. They can therefore claim: “immunity from jurisdiction”, which allows them to escape prosecution by another State.
“A fable”had opposed during the hearing Bertrand Repolt and William Bourdon, Tran To Nga’s lawyers. “We have provided several dozen internal correspondence exchanges demonstrating that the companies were aware very early on of the dangerousness of the product, which resulted from the manufacturing process generating dioxin”explains to franceinfo Bertrand Repolt.
“The manufacturing process was in the exclusive hands of the companies. They had room to make the product less dangerous. They did not do so, in the name of commercial logic.”
Bertrand Repolt, lawyer for Tran To Ngato franceinfo
If the Paris Court of Appeal rejects the principle of immunity from jurisdiction, the case will be re-judged on the merits before the Evry court. If this principle is upheld, “We will go to the Court of Cassation”warn the lawyers, aware that the procedure could last several more years. “Tran To Nga is very determined, full of energy, it’s a cause she has been supporting for a very long time,” observes Bertrand Repolt. His client agrees: “I carry the hope of all the victims of Vietnam. I have no right to stop, to be discouraged, so I am determined to go all the way.”
If Tran To Nga dies before the end of the legal battle, she knows that the next generation is assured. “She calls us ‘her young army’smiles Micheline Pham, from the Vietnam Dioxine collective. His fight also has a transmission objective: it has allowed the Vietnamese population to be mobilized around this subject and has allowed a much wider breach to be opened for other trials, such as that of glyphosate for example. We are behind the victims of all pesticides.”