NEWS ANALYSIS, JANUARY 5, 2002.

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Agent Orange, an ingredient in the chemical used by South Vietnamese and the US militaries in the Vietnam War for defoliating jungle areas where Communist forces were hiding, has been a well known topic for boisterous debates and protests in the last four decades. The very truth of the issue however, is still undetermined.

Last week, a new research of general pollution in Vietnam done by the two scientists from the overseas Vietnamese community in southern California was released. This is the first study of the matter ever completed by the anti-Communist South Vietnamese side. In its issue on January 3, 2002, the Orange County Register published the research, that might help bring a closer look and a wider view on the matter. The research could even prove that Agent Orange or "dioxin" contributes only a smaller part compared with the other hazardous farm chemicals used in Vietnam.

The two men, Nguyen M. Quang , a civil engineer, and Mai Truyet, an organic chemist, have conducted an independent research in the last many years. According to the Register, the two men examined satellite photos and scientific literature, and the most important, smuggled water samples from the targeted areas to America to study the use of various chemicals in Vietnam. They concluded that "Farm chemicals - not Agent Orange - pose the biggest threat to Vietnam," reported the Register.

The two researchers are not political activists. They only hope that their efforts will help prevent further destruction of their homeland. Both stayed in Saigon after South Vietnam fell to the Communists on April 30, 1975. They fled Vietnam, Nguyen M. Quang in 1979 and Mai Truyet in 1983.

They concentrate on Vietnam's ailing environment: Tigers and elephants face extinction, choking air in cities, sewage breeding anopheles and intestinal parasites. They said the pollution even threatens Americans in food products imported from Vietnam , some of which laced with banned chemicals such as the DDT.

The two men also have explored Mekong Delta floods, arsenic poisoning in drinking water. They blame the disaster on dikes and roads built since 1975 without concerning on environmental impact. Mai Truyet has collected water samples in 12 provinces and smuggled them to the USA. The water has a level of arsenic that is not very high, but will increase to become dangerous in 5 or 10 years, similar to arsenic poisoning epidemic that had occurred in Bangladesh.

The Register article reports that DDT is the most controversial theory which alleges that chemicals used by farmers present a more serious health threat than Agent Orange. The chemicals - pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers - particularly DDT, banned by more than 50 countries, are still used by Vietnamese farmers in mass doses just days before food goes to the market. The chemicals have permeated water, animals and people in Vietnam, and some of them were 890,000 times California drinking level allowed.

In the last 40 years, the Communist government has blamed the Americans and the South Vietnamese for the defoliant spraying, alleging that dioxin has caused birth defects and still kills people. However, Hanoi only launched a larger scale propaganda campaign to directly call for compensation by the U.S. government, or in short, Washington's dollars, since the mid-1990.

However, the studies of many scientists and their conferences have not confirmed the allegation. They disagree on levels of hazard posed by the chemicals. An argument by Chris Portier, director of the environmental toxicology program for the U.S. National Institute of Environmental Health Science might be reasonable. He is co-hosting the first U.S. - Vietnam government level seminar on Agent Orange in Hanoi in March. He said that the misuse of farm chemicals is still less hazardous than malaria-breeding water and untreated sewage. "We need to go beyond health care to environmental care," Portier was quoted by the Register as saying.

Nguyen M . Quang and Mai Truyet assert in the Register report that lack of education is the most critical problem. They said farmers should be taught how to spray their fields, dig wells, treat water or build irrigation system instead of getting paid to clean up dioxins.

While some scientists disagree with their conclusions, others say their controversial research deserves attention. *

The article on the Register is dealing with a highly controversial matter that, in another aspect, could be classified as the most effective Communist propaganda subject against South Vietnam and its American ally.

The propaganda campaign conducted by Hanoi was launched in 1962, right after the South Vietnamese military started the operation with its Air Force planes spraying the US-made defoliant on Communist secret base areas. Initially, Hanoi claimed only that Saigon and the Americans were spraying poisonous substances in order to kill innocent peasants - at several hundreds hamlets killing thousands of people. Hanoi had not specified the types of sickness or killing agents in its protest submitted to the International Commission for Control and Supervision (ICCS) and in its of worldwide propaganda materials.

The propaganda was so effective that some very respectable scholars and international personages took it for granted that Saigon and Washington did the massacres. They even set up the so-called international tribunal to try South Vietnamese and American leaders for what Hanoi referred to as "the (South) Vietnamese people were being systematically exterminated by chemical means."

Beijing provided all out support to Hanoi's allegation, whereas the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies were actually acting with discretion. Meanwhile the Polish ambassador to the ICCS who had been closely related to the issue was reluctant to advocate Hanoi accusation. He is Dr. Mieczyslaw Maneli.

From 1954 to 1967, Maneli was twice serving the Polish delegation in the International Commission for Control and Supervision in Vietnam (1954-55 as a legal and political advisor to the delegation, and 1963-64 as the chief of it). ICCS was established by the 1954 Geneva Accords that divided Vietnam into two parts. The ICCS included two other delegations of India and Canada.

Ambassador Maneli published his memoirs after he fled Poland for the U.S. when the Polish Communist leaders ousted him from the university chair and put him under investigation in 1968. The book is "War of the Vanquished," published by Harper & Row, New York, 1971.

It tells many stories about things he knew in North and South Vietnam, particularly the true images of top leaders in Saigon and Hanoi. He devoted the 27-page chapter 5 of his book to the account of the so-called "poisonous chemicals sprayed in South Vietnam."

Since 1962, Hanoi and Beijing were pressing Maneli to place the matter on the ICCS agenda. He felt reluctant to act on Hanoi's request because the lack of concrete evidence. He demanded Hanoi to provide living witnesses, or at least some victims' identities, names and addresses, in order to bring the matter to the table of the ICCS. Hanoi and even Beijing, failed to provide such evidence.

Also feeling reluctant to support Hanoi in this issue were the ambassadors of the Soviet Union, Tovmassian, and of Poland, Spasowski. At last, the "chemical warfare" had never been placed on ICCS agenda . ICCS was dismissed after the 1973 Paris Agreement.

In the first many letters sent to the ICCS, Hanoi said that the chemical substances were causing many poisonings and deaths in South Vietnam, many children were going blind, cattle, swine, domestic fowl were destroyed. The Hanoi's allegations were modified largely after the first reports made in the USA in 1969 determining possible impacts on human by dioxin (birth defects, diabetes, cancer) that were far different from those previously claimed by Hanoi.

Washington and Saigon stopped their use of all defoliants in 1971. But the scandal is going on, while the scientists have not reached any accurate and definite.

The research by the two scientists Quang and Truyet are well appraised by the Orange County Register.

"I found them to be level-headed, scientifically credible and nonpolitical," the Register quoted Aviva Imhof, director of Southeast Asian programs for the International Rivers Network, a Berkeley-based environmental group.

Hanoi as usual, angrily denied the blame. Its officials assert that their government are doing everything appropriate to protect the environment particularly those related to pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers. Hanoi central government did enact some orders prohibiting certain types of pesticides, but whether local authorities abide by the orders is another issue.

There are some other aspects that should be noticed and responsibilities that can't be denied. And there are facts that foreigners researchers might be unable to perceive.

The Vietnamese who left North Vietnam in 1954 now coming back to visit their relatives in the country-side found that after 50 years under Communist regime, bird population everywhere has diminished to a surprising proportion. According to North Vietnamese old farmers, under the government directives, pesticides especially quicklime has been used intensively since 1955. After decades, all kinds of insects have been nearly exterminated. Without insects, most birds couldn't survive and by the same reason, planting soil were not softened, the situation that led to lower land productivity.

Water from rice fields drained into rivers carries the same polluting substances into streams. They in turn, make fish schools dwindle away. In certain sections of many rivers, fish population drop down to less than 30 percent, compared to pre-1954 era, while human population has increased three times.

After April 1975, South Vietnamese began to suffer from what had been imposed on their northern compatriots. Beside careless use of chemicals, so many canals for irrigation were dug without proper scientific consideration. The new canals lower fresh water level from main rivers, yielding ground to brackish water farther inland, thus large farming areas are lost.

There are many Vietnamese who had served maternity hospitals in South Vietnam witnessed a fraudulent scheme to back up Hanoi demand for compensation to the so-called Agent Orange victims. When a mother gives birth to a fetal monster or a stillborn baby with birth defect, its body will be preserved in a glass jar for studies as done in many hospitals in the world. But the case dossiers are doctored to fit the authorities' purposes.

Disregarding the actual address of the mother, her residence in her dossier is changed into another village which is located in an area that had been defoliated by South Vietnam military and its American ally. This is also applied to cases of living deformed children. All of those cases are reported in medical statistics of Agent Orange victims.

Such witnesses now living in Western countries wouldn't be willing to stand witnesses at any inquiry or hearing. They said the usual procedures of investigation conducted in Western countries could pose danger to their relatives still living in Vietnam.

Due to ineffective safety control, poisonous chemicals are used in a wide range of products. Home-made rice wine sometimes is made crystal clear by stirring a tiny drop of pesticide into each bottle. Fruits, one of them is the water-melon, are sprayed with some substance that made the fruit absorb more water to gain some additional weight not long before being harvested and sent to markets. A few years ago, the use of a chemical containing formol in food processing were frightening the public. The authorities launched a raid to prevent further abuse of the substance, but people don't believe that it's prohibition is effectively enforced. Food poisoning that kill hundreds of people in several thousand cases were reported regularly on state-controlled newspapers every year, as recently as last week.

As humanity is concerned, other could-be victims of Agent Orange are former South Vietnamese military servicemen who had been exposed to dioxins while living or operating in the infected areas. None of them has ever been helped. Many of them still live in Vietnam, but tens of thousand of them are in the United States and other Western countries. They have been ignored and almost forgotten even by their once close ally. They should have been the best participants to any study relating to the Agent Orange effects.

Then there is one more question. If any western scientists are allowed to study the ground where it is said one of the sites contaminated by dioxins, how can they be certain that the place has not been deliberately polluted with the chemical recently? The Communist authorities could always prepare the sites with highest level of dioxins before the soil and water samples are taken by investigators. Could those foreigners be free to secretly select the sites and to get access to them without prior notification to the accompanying Communist authorities and scientists?

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