Ln May 7, a trial worthy of a fight of David against Goliath will take place: Tran To Nga, aged 82, is suing fourteen agrochemical multinationals, including the famous Monsanto, for having produced and marketed “Agent Orange”, a herbicide used as a chemical weapon by the United States army during the Vietnam War.
This historic trial is the last chance to obtain justice and allow victims to consider individual and collective reconstruction, almost fifty years after the end of the conflict.
Toxicity of the product known since 1957
Tran To Nga filed a complaint in 2014 at the Evry judicial court, where she lives, accompanied by her lawyers Me William Bourdon, Me Bertrand Repolt, and Me Amélie Lefebvre. Taking up the arguments of the incriminated companies, the prosecution rendered its decision in 2021: it declared itself incompetent to judge the merits of the case. His lawyers then appealed this decision.
The case was brought back before the Paris Court of Appeal three years later. If the incriminated companies plead “immunity from jurisdiction” because they only responded to a State’s call for tenders, this call for tenders in no way required the presence of dioxin.
Furthermore, the toxicity of the product was known to manufacturers as early as 1957. The spraying of herbicides began in 1961, including “Agent Orange”, massively released in 1965. Although there were requisitions by the United States , they only took place from 1967, six years after the start of the spraying.
Tran To Nga was a resistance fighter and journalist for the National Liberation Front (FNL). It was in Cu Chi, a center of resistance, that at the age of 24 she suffered the spraying of “Agent Orange”, a defoliant released by United States army planes. The objective was to flush out and starve the resistance fighters hidden in the forest by knocking the leaves off the trees and destroying agricultural land.
The fourth generation affected
“Agent Orange” takes its name from the color of the banner painted on the barrels signaling its “exceptional toxicity”, in the words of Dow Chemical. The concentration of dioxin, its carcinogenic and teratogenic component, was deliberately overdosed for deadly and lucrative purposes.
This poison “insidious, silent, invisible” and its effects have destroyed and still destroy lands and bodies today. Near‘around twenty illnesses related to dioxin have been recognized by the United States, including lung cancer, chloracne, type 2 diabetes, etc. The curse of “Agent Orange” continues and now affects the fourth generation.
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