Fourteen agrochemical groups, including the giant Bayer-Monsanto, are being sued in Paris by a Franco-Vietnamese woman for having supplied the United States with “Agent Orange”, a defoliant used as a chemical weapon during the Vietnam War, will be fixed on their fate on August 22.
Trần Tố Nga, 82 years old, “suffers from repeated tuberculosis, cancer and type II diabetes”, denounces the Vietnam Dioxin association, praising a trial which represents “the only hope for the most three million victims of Agent Orange” dumped on Vietnam by American planes during the war, which ended in 1975.
In 2021, Mme Nga was dismissed by the Evry court, in the Paris region. The latter declared himself incompetent to handle his complaint against the agrochemical giants, including Bayer-Monsanto, Dow Chemical and Hercules, believing that the companies had “acted on the orders and on behalf of the American state” and that they could, therefore, claim “immunity from jurisdiction”.
For companies that responded to orders from the American state, “the room for maneuver was non-existent and the contract was a straitjacket”, pleaded Tuesday Me Jean-Daniel Bretzner, lawyer for Bayer-Monsanto.
“The thesis of the subservience of companies to the army is a fable,” argued on the contrary Me Bertrand Répolt, counsel to Mme Nga. His other lawyer, Me William Bourdon said he was “confident” after the hearing.
The decision will be made on August 22.
“Slimy liquid”
According to the collective, the defoliant, used massively by the American army between 1961 and 1971, would have had long-term consequences on the life of Trần Tố Nga, exposed to the chemical substance when she was 24 years old. She wrote a book from her experience, My poisoned landpublished in 2016.
Born in 1942 in French Indochina, she had been exposed to “Agent Orange” – which takes its name from the color of the band painted on the barrels containing this defoliant – released by the American army.
“The plane passed with a white cloud behind it. It falls very quickly and that’s how I found myself enveloped in a sticky liquid and, immediately, I started coughing, choking,” she recently recounted during a press conference.
His daughter, born in 1969, died of a heart defect after 17 months, specifies the collective, adding that his two other daughters and his grandchildren would be suffering from “serious pathologies”.
In 2005, an appeal by the Vietnamese Association of Victims in the United States against eleven herbicide manufacturers, including Dow Chemical and Monsanto, for crimes against humanity and war crimes was dismissed on the grounds that Agent Orange was a herbicide and not a chemical weapon.
A decision that the collective denounces, in particular because of the high level of dioxin contained in the “80 million” liters of product dumped on Vietnamese forests causing, according to it, health concerns of “2.1 to 4 .1 million people.