Mission & Justice

Frank Walker; 10/8/08

Vietnam veterans who were exposed to Agent Orange are much more likely to get prostate cancer, a new study has found. It is the first time the toxic defoliant sprayed during the Vietnam War has been linked to the most common cancer in men and second-biggest cancer killer. The eight-year study of 13,000 veterans by the University of California’s Davis Centre found twice as many men exposed to Agent Orange developed prostate cancer as veterans who were not exposed. They were also diagnosed at a younger age and their cancer was nearly four times more likely to spread.

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Jeremy Pearcel 7/7/08

Arthur William Galston; Agent Orange Researcher; 1920 — 15-6-2008

Arthur Galston, a Yale plant biologist who did early research that helped lead to the herbicide Agent Orange, and who then helped raise awareness of the US military’s use of it in Vietnam in the 1960s and its devastating effects on river ecosystems, has died of heart failure in Hamden, Connecticut. He was 88. In letters, academic papers, broadcasts and seminars, Galston described the environmental damage wrought by Agent Orange and travelled to South Vietnam to monitor its impact. From 1962 to 1970, US troops released about 76 million litres of the chemical defoliant to destroy crops and expose Vietcong positions and routes of movement. Galston asserted that harm to trees and plant species could continue perhaps for decades. He pointed out that spraying Agent Orange on riverbank mangroves in Vietnam was eliminating “one of the most important ecological niches for the completion of the life cycle of certain shellfish and migratory fish”.

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27/6/08

Whenever a person with leprosy dies here, five men spend several hours finding a place to dig a grave in a 108-year-old cemetery. “Many times we dig up remains of dead people because they have been buried without coffins or headstones,” Bui Van Son told UCA News. Son and the other men, who are children of leprosy patients, provide grave-digging service for patients from the state-run Van Mon Center for People with Leprosy in Thai Binh province’s Vu Thu district, 110 kilometers southeast of Ha Noi.The center, erected by foreign missioners in 1900 and confiscated by the government after northern communists defeated colonial French troops in 1954, sits 500 meters from the cemetery.

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26/6/08

Amid rising prices of food and other basic needs, Catholic women in a northern parish are working hard in quarries to support their children. Five state-run and private companies are mining white rock from hills around a large lake supplying water to Thac Ba Hydroelectric Plant. Those quarries, in Yen Bai province’s Mong Son village, 220 kilometers north of Ha Noi, employ women from Mong Son and other local villages to load rocks for shipment. About 2,500 of Mong Son’s 3,000 residents are Catholics. They form half the membership of the parish based in the village, which covers an area that is home to 150,000 people. One day in June, in 38-degree-Celsius heat under a scorching sun, hundreds of women workers were handing heavy white rocks down a line to one another for loading onto trucks and boats. “We know that carrying rocks is hard physical labor that can damage our health, but we must do it to support our families, because there are no other jobs here,” Maria Dinh Thi Lien told UCA News as she wiped the sweat from her face.

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Peter Cochrane; 4/6/08; Australian Literary Review; Ho Chi Minh: A Biography; Pierre Brocheux; Translated by Claire Duiker; Cambridge University Press, 288pp, $59.95 (HB)

Ho Chi Minh, first president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, was revered in his homeland as Uncle Ho, an endearment Western radicals picked up in the 1960s and turned into the chant: “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, dare to struggle, dare to win.” I marched down streets in Melbourne, many years ago, chanting it myself. And I knew very little about him.

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29/5/08

New Zealand has formally apologised to its Vietnam War veterans for the unfair and harsh treatment they received on their return. Prime Minister Helen Clark, who demonstrated against the war as a student in the 1970s, yesterday told parliament it was time to acknowledge the service and sacrifices made by the soldiers. “The Crown extends to New Zealand Vietnam veterans and their families an apology for the manner in which their loyal service in the name of New Zealand was not recognised as it should have been, when it should have been, and for inadequate support extended to them and their families after their return home from the conflict,” Miss Clark said in a prepared statement, agreed with veterans’ organisations. Miss Clark, who as a student protested against New Zealand troops’ eight-year involvement in the Vietnam War, also acknowledged the failure of successive governments and agencies to accept soldiers’ exposure to chemicals.

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Evan Schwarten; 18/5/08

Reports that the toxic herbicide Agent Orange was secretly tested near the Queensland town of Innisfail more than 40 years ago must not be covered up, local authorities said today. Cassowary Coast Mayor Bill Shannon called for a full investigation after the alleged testing was revealed by researcher Jean Williams who found details of tests at Innisfail in Australian War Memorial archives. The spraying allegedly happened close to the town’s water supply between 1964-1966 and Ms Williams, who found several files on the tests, claims another “too disturbing” file was missing.Concern has grown in the north Queensland area since Queensland Health Department figures showed 76 people had died from cancer in the town of almost 12,000 in 2005, 10 times the state’s average and four times the national average.

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Matthew Benns & Frank Walker; 18/5/08

The Australian Army tested chemical weapons on a town which now has deaths from cancer 10 times the state average. Military scientists sprayed the toxic defoliant Agent Orange in the jungle that is part of the water catchment area for Innisfail in Queensland’s far north at the start of the Vietnam War. The Sun-Herald last week found the site where military scientists tested Agent Orange in 1966. It is on a ridge little more 100 metres above the Johnstone River, which supplies the drinking water for Innisfail. Forty years later the site - which abuts farmer Alan Wakeham’s land - is still bare, covered only in tough Guinea grass, but surrounded by thick jungle. “It’s strange how the jungle comes right up to this site and then just stops. It won’t grow any further,” Mr Wakeham said. Agent Orange was sprayed extensively in Vietnam to defoliate the jungle and remove cover for North Vietnamese troops. It contains chemicals including the dioxin TCDD, which causes forms of cancer, birth defects and other health problems

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Thomas Bell; 27/4/08

Vietnamese babies are being bought or stolen from parents to be sold for adoption in the West, according to a US Embassy investigation. In some cases hospitals sent babies to orphanages after their parents were unable to pay medical bills. In another, a grandmother sent a girl for adoption without telling the parents. The report by the US Embassy in Hanoi said: “In five provinces, we discovered unlicensed, unregulated facilities that provide free room and board to pregnant women in return for their commitment to relinquish their children upon birth.”

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